Welcome to Untangle, the podcast from Muse, the brain-sensing headband that helps you meditate and sleep, and meditation studio, the five-star app.

I'm Patricia Carpus.

Today's encore is actually from 2016 and is an interview with the delightfully zany Zen monks, Koshin, and Shoto. They're quite silly, as you'll see.

We've since interviewed them individually, but this is their classic couple interview. This was also

in celebration of Cotian's first book, Awake at the Bedside, and they share why intimacy with

others is at the heart of contemplative care.

They founded and continued to run the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care.

For more info on the work they do, check out Zencare.org.

I want to welcome Cotian and Chodo today.

I am so excited to be here in New York, interviewing them.

So I want to start by getting a little background on each of you so people can get to know you and love you the way that we all do.

So Cotian, why don't you tell us a little bit about your, and I want to know how you got into meditation in the first place.

Well, it's so sweet to be with you.

And how did I get into meditation in the first place?

Well, the story goes that when I was eight years old, I told my mother I wanted to grow up

to be a Zen Buddhist monk.

Was that random?

An eight-year-old wants to be a Zen Buddhist monk.

Well, my grandfather used to save all these national geographics and would look through them

with me and to show me

the world in a way. And one of them had to do with Tokyo. And so there was this photograph of this

monk in Tokyo. And he was totally still. And in the photograph, all the people in the photograph were blurred.

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