Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 03/27/2019 with Kate Johnson

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

The Rubin Museum of Art presents a weekly meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area, with each session focusing on a specific work of art. This podcast is recorded in front of a live audience, and includes an opening talk, a 20-minute sitting session, and a closing discussion. The guided meditation begins at 15:00. If you would like to attend Mindfulness Meditation sessions in person or learn more, please visit our website at RubinMuseum.org/meditation. This program is presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. Kate Johnson led this meditation session on March 27, 2019. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/kate-johnson-03-27-2019

Welcome to the Mindfulness Meditation Podcast. I'm your host, Dawn Eshelman. Every Wednesday at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea, we present a meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area. This podcast is a recording of our weekly practice. If you would like to join us in person, please visit our website at rubinmuseum.org meditation. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center. In the description for each episode, you will find information about the theme for that week's session,

including an image of a related artwork chosen from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection. And now, please enjoy your practice. Hello, hello. I feel the energy of spring in the air here. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and to our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. It's great to have you all here. And how many of you are here for the first time? Welcome. Be welcome here. We love having you.

How many come just about every week? Welcome. Welcome. In between. Welcome. Welcome, podcast listeners. I think there are a lot of teachers in the room. Are there, are there people who teach meditation here? Yeah. Are there other teachers in the room? Yeah. I just had a feeling, just was curious. Are there other folks who work in wellness and healing? Yeah. Therapists. Yeah. Cool.

I'm just curious about you all we have a wonderful teacher and healer bodhisattva right behind me here this is avalokiteshvara bodhisattva of compassion and we're looking at him today through the lens of this theme we've been talking about all month, reflection or reflective practice. And we kind of started out a couple of months ago talking about setting intention and looking ahead with a sense of awareness and intentionality. And then we talked about what it is to take action and the true nature of power, really putting those intentions into the world in a sense is power. And now we're also kind of looking at the other side of that coin, reflective practice, and not looking back with a kind of

grasping energy or obsessing over how we should have done this that and the other thing but really reflecting with intentionality and awareness and this piece here today that you're looking at behind me is a great tool that is used sometimes for particularly Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. It is Avalokiteshvara in the center. It is also a mandala. This is something that is used by practitioners as a kind of memory map, a way of remembering particular tools and practices

that they can guide themselves through using in their meditation. And you can see on the outside, there's a very large circle, and then there are four gates, four different entry points. And in fact, mandalas are bird's eye views of palaces. So if you imagine you're looking at a kind of layout of a palace, and the practitioner would typically work their way from the outside in as a part of their practice. And at the center there is, of course, Avalokiteshvara, who we see in different emanations sometimes and often see Avalokiteshvara with many, many, many arms, sometimes thousand arms. This is, of course, testament to his power, his ability to take action in many ways.

Here we see four arms. That's a lot, too. You know, it's more than two. Two is even a lot, right? We could take action with two arms. And Avalokiteshvara emanates in the Buddha forms also surrounding his form there. There are these six Buddhas of the six realms. And he emanates through those forms to bring enlightenment and benefit to six different realms and different types of living beings. And then above his head is Buddha Shakyamuni, responsible for the human realm, helping us out. So we are going to hear a little bit more about Avalokiteshvara from our teacher today, Kate Johnson, who is back with us. So nice to have you back here in this room, in this practice. Kate works at the intersections of spiritual practice, social action, and creativity.

She's a practicing Buddhist practitioner, meditating in the Western insight Theravada tradition, and is empowered to teach through Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She has a BFA in dance from the Alvin Ailey School at Fordham University and MA in performance studies from NYU. She's a core faculty member of MIT's Presencing Institute, helping people in organizations make change, and has trained hundreds of leaders and change makers in using social presencing theater, a mindfulness and dance improvisation methodology

used to inform strategic planning and systems change in our complex world. Please welcome her back, Kate Johnson. Thank you, Kate. Hi, good afternoon. Yeah, it's good to be back in this room. And I'm excited to have the opportunity to talk about this theme of reflection today. With this theme of reflection, I remembered teaching from a Brazilian educational theorist named Paulo Freire.

Some of the educators in the house might know him. He wrote a book in the 70s that was really influential for many of us who like popular education methods. And it was called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And in it, he said that all learning requires both action and reflection, action and reflection. And so I love that, you know, following this month of investigating intention that we can actually engage this other part of learning, which has to do with, you know, we put this intention out there, how did it go, you know, what was the result, and that through that reflection we can sense into what our next right move might be.

And for Avalokiteshvara, you know, the first story I heard about this figure who I relate to as this archetypal energy of bodhisattva of compassion. Bodhisattva is a being who has made a vow. And usually it's a vow to not rest, not transcend the earthly realm until not only oneself but all other beings are free. So bodhisattvas take this vow to always return to earth and to help people and serve people until every single person is liberated, every being, every worm, every roach, everybody. everybody. And Avalokiteshvara has different

emanations within Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Also has kind of cousins or siblings and other spiritual traditions often associated with Mother Mary in Christianity or Kuan Yin in the Chinese Buddhist traditions. And the first story I heard about Avalokiteshvara really spoke to my heart. It was told by two teachers that I love, Tanisara and Kintasaro.

They're Buddhist teachers, so I'm actually going to go spend a month in meditation with on Saturday I'm leaving. And the way that they told this story really spoke to my heart and my experience. So I wanted to share it with you. They said that Avalokiteshvara, as we mentioned, had made this vow to liberate all beings. We can think of this also as a vow to love all beings. And so took this vow and then kind of put his head down and started working, you know, pulling beings out from all kinds of painful situations, saving one, saving two, grabbing them by the handful, and got to work for eons and eons and eons, just saving and loving

beings one by one. And at some point the thought comes, you know, in this process of attending to the suffering of vast beings, gosh, I've been doing this for a really long time. I bet I'm getting close to fulfilling my vow. You know, I'm getting close to the, you know, having saved all beings, right? So he decides to look up and just see kind of how he's doing and discovers that as he's been saving beings one by one, beings have actually multiplied. So that now there's even more beings who are suffering and need help than when he took the original vow. when he took the original vow. And at this point, the teacher said,

his body basically exploded. Like, he had this moment of, like, looking back and being like, gah, you know? Into, you know, thousands and thousands of pieces that were strewn all over this great field. And then one of these pieces, Avalokiteshvaraara is said to have called out for Amitabha Buddha, who is kind of like the teacher of this version of Avalokiteshvara and says, you know, please, can you help me? Can you help us? And so Avalokiteshvara comes and slowly starts

to put, sorry, Amitabha Buddha comes and slowly starts to put Avalokiteshvara back together piece by piece by piece. And it's said that that's how one version of a story of how he received all, you know, got all these arms that actually had been exploded into so many pieces that when he put him back, he had these thousand arms now. I was in arms now. And that story was so helpful to me because the reason why I started meditating, I think, is that I just couldn't handle the suffering in my own life and the suffering in the world. And, you know, meditators were talking about suffering and I was like, I know what you're talking about. You know, I know what you're talking about. I get it.

And I need to find a way to work with this so that I can not be so overwhelmed. And then I can actually see what's happening and feel what's happening and still have something left to respond. And so as we go into practice today, I'll just invite you to think about your own vows that you've made. My mom was a doctor and she made vows about being a healer, right? No matter what, no matter where, on the clock, off the hawk, if someone needed help, she was made this vow to help them. Maybe you've made a formal professional vow like that, or maybe you have a vow that you haven't even thought of as a vow, but a mission, a reason for doing what you do, a strong intention for how you choose your work and your activity in the world. And so just taking a moment to reflect on if there's anything

like that for you. And the cool thing about vows, you know, from the perspective of compassion is that, you know, whether it's towards ourselves or towards all beings, it's kind of the same vow. And so, you know, in our meditation practice today, we'll spend the bulk of the time as we usually do gathering and unifying the mind in a practice called Samatha or Shamatha in Sanskrit. It's a peaceful abiding practice. And so we use an anchor for the attention, in this case the feeling of the breath to rest our awareness. And of course from time to time the mind does what it does. It's kind of a thought machine. It starts planning or remembering or rehearsing. And then we just notice that and invite the mind to

come back to feeling the breath as a way to, as a place, a landing place or a home base to collect. And it said that, you know, as we do this over and over in the course of a practice, we can start to have some sense of ground, some sense of gathering in the mind. And then from time to time, you know, if something that could be called suffering arises for you, maybe it's clinging to a thought that hurts you. Maybe it's a way of treating your mind when it goes away that's kind of a harsh pullback rather than a gentle gathering. Remember your vow and see if you can apply it in that moment. You can think about this as an intention. And then towards the end of practice, we'll have more opportunity to reflect and follow that up with some questions or insights if you have them.

Does that sound okay? We practiced today? Okay. So go ahead and find your comfortable seat. You can let your feet relax on the floor if you can. Sometimes it's nice to kind of sit up away from the back of the chair and feel energized in that way, or sometimes relaxing in the back of the chair is what's most supportive,

so kind of feeling where your back needs to be for you to have the energy and stamina to pay attention for about 20 minutes. And eyes can close or just softly focus at the space in front of you. And perhaps bring to mind again your vow, your guiding intention for your life and work may be articulated in a phrase, or maybe it's a feeling, a vision of the future that you'd like to create. And allowing that sense of the vow, the strong intention to create a mood or an environment in the mind

in which the mind can kind of rest. Bring me into the foreground, the feeling of breathing. noticing where you feel your breath most vividly, where the sensation is really available to you, maybe the nostrils, maybe in the chest or the belly. and allow your awareness to gather and hover around this geographic location where you can feel your breath and to notice the feeling of your breath change. As you feel the sensations of the in-breath come, you might say to yourself, As you feel the sensations of the in-breath come, you might say to yourself, breathing in.

And as the sensations of the out-breath arrive, you can say to yourself, breathing out. Takk for ating med. Thank you. So And every so often you might just notice what the mind is noticing. And if needed, gather the awareness back to feeling the breathing in, breathing out. And relating to your own mind and heart with the flavor of your vow, whether it be with compassion, love, healing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So taking the attitude that we can always come back to the feeling of breathing and that that journey is always worth it to arrive again in the felt experience of this moment by connecting with this one breath. And that we can always begin again and recommit to our vow to the quality of awareness that we're bringing to this

good mind, good heart, good body. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And so as we start to move towards the last minute or so of the practice, just offering some questions for reflection. minute or so of the practice just offering some questions for reflection. Inviting you to look back over the span of your practice and reflect on the state of your mind and heart right now to see what was the effect of that practice. And as you look back over the course of the 20 minutes, were there any moments where you came apart, where the mind and body felt disconnected, or where you became overwhelmed or self-critical? And then after that, what were the qualities of heart or mind that brought you back together again?

What inner resources or energy showed up? what helped you to keep going and then go ahead and ease up on that reflection and just take the last minute moment of the practice to connect with your body again feeling where you're sitting and the space that we're in the temperature of the air, time of day, this group of people, you, this moment, and maybe a sense of appreciation for being able to sit together in this way. have a wonderful rest of your day rest of your week see you again sometime soon time soon. That concludes this week's practice. If you'd like to attend in person, please check out our website, rubinmuseum.org slash meditation to learn more. Sessions are free to Rubin Museum members, just one of the many benefits of membership. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day.