Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 05/29/2019 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: May 30, 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 18:30. 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. Sharon Salzberg led this meditation session on May 29, 2019. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: https://rubinmuseum.org/mediacenter/sharon-salzberg-05-29-2019-podcast

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. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and to our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. I'm happy to be here with you today. And this year at the Rubin Museum, we're having a year-long conversation all about power, the power within us, the power between us. And I think often when that word comes up, we imagine this connotation of power over someone,

right? But we're kind of exploring this theme in all of its meanings, but really kind of trying to get at this sense of power with, this kind of sense that power can really be used to connect us all or when we are connected, then we are powerful. And I think that compassion, which is our theme this month, is kind of at the heart of that and a way towards true power. So we're talking about compassion and what that has to do with our practice as well. And our fabulous teacher, Sharon Salzberg, is back, and she will talk to us a little bit about that. But of course, we have an artwork from our collection up here

that we will kind of look at through that lens of compassion. And this is the beautiful deity Tara. And Tara is one of the most kind of beloved figures in Tibetan Buddhism in particular. And this one that we're looking at here, this Tanka is from central Tibet, 18th century, pigments on cloth. And Tara is also known as the female Buddha. And I know this is a little bit dim, but hopefully you got to take a look at some of the detail as you were coming in and getting settled. And of course, the best way to look at this is to actually go up into the galleries and see it yourself. And so if you'd like to do that, Jeremy will be meeting

folks outside afterwards to bring you on a free gallery tour for just a couple of moments if you'd like to learn more and take a look at Tara in person. But I just want us to kind of look at the central figure here together. And you'll notice that Tara is seated in the position that we often see her seated in, and where she has one leg kind of crossed underneath her in a kind of meditation seat. And the other leg is kind of jutting out just a little bit. And they say that she's ready to jump out and help at any moment, she's there to help you. And she's also known as the protector of the great eight fears. And I think it's interesting that the way the language describes this is that she is protecting of the fears. Not necessarily the dangers, but the fear associated with the danger. And those eight great fears, they're so interesting.

And I think we can think about them literally, but also metaphorically. Drowning, lions, fire, snakes, elephants, thieves, imprisonment, and gods. So also just want to point out that her right hand is extended kind of on her knee there, but her palm is out, and that is the mudra of supreme generosity. Of course, representing that symbolism of rising up from the muck and blossoming in that pure expression of enlightenment at the top of the water. And that those fingers that are holding the stem of the lotus right there at her heart are in the blessing mudra. So lots of compassion here from Tara. And she's often turned to in times of need. So Sharon Salzberg is here with us to talk to us a little bit more about compassion. And she is, of course, the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry, Massachusetts, and such a beloved and renowned teacher and author of incredible, useful, really helpful, approachable books,

which you can find up in our shop and many other locations as well. And her most recent is Real Love. So nice to have her back here with us. Please welcome her, Sharon Salzberg. Hello. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty also has a leg going forward like that? No, she does. I happen to be writing about her. She's like my favorite icon after Tara. And maybe the Buddha, but Shemaya should be number one.

She's not just sort of passively waiting to welcome people to our shores. She's sort of got this leg ready to take action. So that's a good symbol for compassion, because compassion in the Buddhist tradition is sometimes defined as the trembling or the quivering of the heart in response to seeing pain or suffering. So it's a movement of the heart and it's a movement toward to see if we can be of help, right? So the first part of that definition, the trembling or the quivering of the heart, is like the empathy part. We resonate, we feel into

someone's situation. The second part is kind of the sheer or the pure compassion. It's a movement toward to see if we can be of help. Right? So that's that leg. But it's a really profound and often mysterious state. Like it's a movement toward, not a movement into, to burn up ourselves. Because if we get depleted or overwhelmed, exhausted, frightened, we can't really go forward to see if we can be of help. If we lose the if, we're also in some other state. Equality, like compassion, is considered a practice of generosity.

It's generosity of the spirit. It may not be material generosity at all, though of course it might be. But it's that giving gesture of moving toward. And if we don't have any energy, it's not going to happen. Or the giving becomes something quite different than a freely given gift. You know, it's like, get better by Tuesday.

Because I am in charge of everything. And, you know, in order to satisfy my wish to be in control and be a savior, you must, you know, maybe Tuesday morning. That would feel even better. And, you know, as with any, and sometimes we just go to material generosity as an example and kind of play with it because it's so much more concrete and we can feel into different states and different more nuanced states. So we know there are lots of different ways of giving a gift, right? We might give a gift and it is a freely given gift. Like, may you be happy, may you enjoy this, may this

be something that brings you some joy. And there are lots of ways of giving a gift that have whole other agendas and expectations and kind of quiet or silent demands also attached, like, tell me it's the best book you've ever read, or give me that in exchange. Or often a mistake we make with compassion is a sense of it being hierarchical, like I, whose life is so together way over here, and it could never, ever change from being so perfectly together, and bestowing this kindness as a gift on you way down there, because your life has fallen apart,

which mine never, ever could. Well, guess what? You know, the idea of compassion is not that, well, first of all, it's not that we believe we all share the same measure of pain or suffering, because clearly we don't. But the sort of division is also untrue. You know, there's a kind of equality in our vulnerability that we might have a lot in place, we have a lot intact, and we all know it's true. Life can change on a dime. It doesn't take much.

And so it's in reference to that kind of vulnerability which we all share. It's just the nature of life, that compassion is much more of a kind of equal state. It's an offering. In an ideal sense, it's a freely given gift because that's how it's sustainable. I said, I think, last time I was here when I was talking mostly about self-compassion that I'm told that when you Google a word, Google itself will offer a lot of suggestions right away because it thinks that's what you're likely searching for since so many people have searched for that very thing.

So if you put in compassion, very quickly you get fatigue. You know, you get compassion fatigue because it's a very prevalent state. Interestingly enough, in research circles and in some Buddhist circles, like around the Dalai Lama, they prefer not to use the term compassion fatigue. They prefer to actually say empathy fatigue because there is a difference. Apparently, there's a different brain region between feeling empathy, that kind of resonance, and having the particular response that is compassion. And I do see it as something sequential, because we know, you know, you might

feel into someone's situation. And that in itself is not meant to be like an imposition, like I know exactly what you feel. But we kind of resonate like, oh, I was once in a situation where people were avoiding telling me the truth. And I can recall the kind of loneliness or sense of alienation that I felt. And likely you feel something like that too in your situation, something like that. We actually feel it in our bodies. We resonate. But we might have that kind of resonance and then get frightened

and we want to run away, or we are exhausted. We just feel, I have nothing in me that's going to let me step forward. I'm just spent. Or we feel that kind of strange savior thing, like I'm going to be the one to fix it right away. And none of those responses are considered compassion, which is the moving forward to see if we can be of help, which implies a kind of balance.

Sometimes it's a very particular balance of compassion for ourselves and compassion for others. Often it's a balance between, we would say, compassion and wisdom. Like, we step forward to see if we can be of help, and the if is the wisdom part. Because in truth, we're not in control of the universe. Too bad, right? If we could just say, poof. And I once went to a teacher, a Tibetan teacher of mine, Sonny Rinpoche, and I said, I don't think it's fair. You know, why don't we get one person in life where we can just look at them and say,

poof, your suffering's gone. And of course, that's a complex proposition, too, like which person and how do you choose them and when do you do it. But anyway, I said that to him him and he just laughed, you know, because we don't get one. That's not how life is. And he said, that's why we call it samsara,

this world of birth and death and change and conditionality. We can't say poof. And we can't even, you know, sometimes we have a pretty big sense of what someone needs to do in order to be happier. And we can't make it happen. And it's not just because we're nosy or we're intrusive. It's like we're right, you know. But you can't make it so because we don't have that kind of control over others,

which doesn't mean, interestingly enough, that we do nothing. I think if any of us were to look at the situations in our lives where we tended to pull back or withdraw, it's not from an excess of balance. It's because there are those sneaky expectations, or we are so tired, or something like that. We feel responsible for something we could never control. That's really why we give up. And so bringing more balance, more clarity into the situation is not going to make the compassion go away. It's going to make it sustainable over time because some of the extra stuff can start to fall away. So we can move toward to see if we can be of help.

And that's, I think, as good a definition of compassion as one can have. And maybe I'll just close by telling my often-told story about when the Dalai Lama came to visit the center I co-founded, the Insight Meditation Society. Because that, it was a long time ago, and it still remains in many ways my foundational experience and definition of compassion. It was 1979. We'd started the Center in 1976, so we were very young. I was 23, I think, when we started the Center. And we had heard that Bob Thurman at the time,

before he became a professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia, was at Amherst College, which is up there in Massachusetts, pretty close to Barry Mass, where the Insight Meditation Society is. So we heard that the Dalai Lama was coming to visit Amherst College. And so in our naivete, we wrote a letter to the private office and we said, well, we're a Buddhist center too. Maybe he wants to come visit us.

And to our complete shock, we got a letter back saying, OK, he'll come. So the center is about 2 and 1 half miles outside of the town of Barry on this little street called Pleasant Street, which we had a blockade with state troopers, and we had state troopers patrolling the roof with guns, and it was this totally zooey scene. And just a little bit before he'd come, I'd been in a car accident, and I had a broken bone in my foot, and I was using crutches, which I was really a klutz with. So the day came when he was going to arrive,

and I was standing in the back outside behind about 100 people waiting for him to come. And I kept thinking, oh, you know, I hope Stortz is placed. I should really be in the front. But if I were in the front, I'd probably fall on my face. That would really be terrible. So I better stay in the back. Oh, but I'm in the back. And then his car pulled up, and he just got out, and he somehow has a kind of radar for who in a crowd is suffering the most, and that was me. So he just like, he got out of the car, and he cut through 100 people, and he came up to me, and he took my hands, and he looked me in the eye, and he said, what happened? And that was the moment I realized, oh, he couldn't make the injury not have happened. He couldn't make my use of the crutches any more skillful or graceful. But that horrible, corrosive feeling of being so in the back, so of no account, so unseen, so unacknowledged,

it was gone. And that is really like my foundational sense of compassion. We try to apply wisdom and discernment and act in as skillful a way as we can, and we get different kinds of results and different timetables, but it's that movement to acknowledge, to be present with, that I think is really the bottom line. So why don't we sit together? And if you like, we can just do that kind of foundational exercise of being aware of the breath

and at some point I'm to encourage a specific compassion reflection. Okay? So you can just sit comfortably. Let your attention settle on the feeling of the breath, wherever it's most predominant for you, nostrils, chest, or abdomen. And let your attention rest on those sensations. for you, nostrils, chest, or abdomen. And let your attention rest on those sensations. If you find your attention wandering,

see if you can let go with some compassion for yourself, and begin again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.... and see if you can call to mind a friend who seems to be struggling right now in some way, just one, and perhaps get an image of them or say their name to yourself to get a feeling of their presence. See what it's like as you begin offering them phrases that express the heart space of compassion. Three or four phrases, things like, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be free of suffering.

The may you is in the sense of gift giving, your offering. It's like a blessing. Just keep repeating the phrases over and over again. You don't have to try to force a certain emotion or feeling. See if you can gather all your attention behind one phrase at a time. And then the next. And here too, when you find your attention wandering, it's alright. See if you can gently let go and come back to the phrases. Thank you. And then everybody here, including yourself. So the phrase has become something like,

may we be happy, be peaceful, be free of suffering. Thank you. I'm going to show you how to make a Thank you. And then all beings everywhere, all people, all creatures, all those in existence, may all beings be happy, be peaceful, be free from suffering. Thank you. Thank you. Be happy. Be happy. 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.