Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 10/3/2018 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

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 14:30. 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 supported in part by the Hemera Foundation with thanks to our presenting partners Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. Sharon Salzberg led this meditation session on October 3, 2018. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/sharon-salzberg-10-03-2018

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. The series is supported in part by the Hemera Foundation.

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. And now, please enjoy your practice. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and to our mindfulness meditation practice. Great to see you, be with you here today. My name is Dawn Eshelman, and we are having this year-long conversation all about the future. And so I'm wondering, when you think about the future, do you feel hopeful? Do you feel anxious? Or maybe somewhere in between, or kind of back and forth, or something different entirely?

Those are two words that come up a lot when we talk to people about how they feel about the future. And in fact, they're the basis for an exhibition, an installation by Candy Chang and writer James A. Reeves, which you probably could not help but seeing as you came into the museum. It's located in our spiral lobby there. And on it are hundreds and hundreds of cards that visitors have filled out expressing their hopes and their anxieties about the future. I'm here to tell you that the hopes outweigh the anxieties, just, you know, in case you were curious. And today we're looking at a little sample of these that kind of evoke this theme of uncertainty. And that is certainly something that we think

about when we're thinking about the future or something that is commonly experienced, this element of uncertainty, something we also work with in our meditation practice, just making friends with uncertainty. So we'll talk a little bit more about that with our fabulous teacher today, Sharon Salzberg. And yeah, great to have you back, Sharon. Sharon is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry, Massachusetts, and the author of many fabulous books, including Real Love. Please welcome her back, Sharon Salzberg. Thank you. Isn't this like absolutely fantastic? It's just amazing. And just as a side note, Dawn, there are three personality types in early Buddhist literature.

It gets a little more elaborated later on. And they don't have nice names, but they refer to kind of what you tend to notice, like they call the greedy type. It's not really a greedy person, but it's a person who would walk into a room and tend to see what they liked. And they might overlook certain flaws or faults. And the aversive type, of course, is the opposite, walks in and notices, oh, there's like a crumb on the floor. And the deluded type is just spaced out. So I'm a total classic deluded type. So when you said, you must have noticed coming into the lobby,

and I thought, well, actually, I didn't. I asked somebody when I got down here. I said, where's that exhibit? I want to go look at it. I did come in through the cafe, so there's some excuse, you know. But really, it's just because I'm in a world of my own. But it's not just me. It's a certain type. And you can work through it through mindfulness. But it was just very funny, that moment in time. So welcome. Welcome to me, too. Checking my watch because I got off a plane last night. And so I decided I'm going to make Rubin time like official time. Because, you know, when you change time zones, you always get a

little bit off, usually. At least I do, being as deluded as I am. So impermanence, what's the time zone anyway? It's such a fabulous topic, I think, because we experience it, we see it from lots of different angles. There's, you know, there are times, certainly in our life, we're like so grateful things are changing and have the possibility of change. We don't have to feel so stuck or limited by present moment circumstance. And there are times in our life when it's just like the saddest thing, the things are changing and moving and can't be stopped. I know there are times in my own mind where I thought, I could just put the pause button on for like three minutes, you know, and kind of settle. And then you realize that doesn't happen. We have to settle anyway, settle within,

not settle for something in the sense of compromise, but settle our energy, be very present, feel whole, even as there are all these immense changes going on. So the Buddha used a lot of images to kind of convey that sense of really both things, the beauty and the poignancy of the truth of change. She said life is like an echo, like a rainbow, like a dream, like a drop of dew on a blade of grass, like a flash of lightning in a summer sky. Anyone see the flash of lightning in last night's sky? Right? Everything happens and it's kind of amazing, like a rainbow. And yet, there's nothing we can hold on to like a rainbow. It's ephemeral. It exists. It has its own beauty or quality or lack of beauty for us,

and it passes. It disappears. And it's the nature of everything we experience. It's said to be the nature of we who experience whatever is going on. And that's really the heart of meditation practice in terms of mindfulness practice we talk about mindfulness quite a lot and i've talked about it quite a lot here as a quality that lets us experience our lives much more fully you know for example not always multitasking and sometimes, you know,

tasting the tea when you're drinking the tea and not also being on a conference call. I was just on a Zoom call a few weeks ago and all these many people started saying, oh, I'm going to have much better Wi-Fi quality if I turn the video off. And I thought, oh, that, you know, that's, that's really good. That's happened many times before when I've talked to people in Europe or something like that. And then I thought, well, none of them are in Europe, actually. Maybe they want to be checking their email while they're on this call doing work and nobody has to see, right, if you don't have the video on. So that's what we're used to.

So we talk about mindfulness a lot as actually centering, being more present, fully experiencing whatever is actually happening. But classically, the heart essence of mindfulness, the purpose of mindfulness, is wisdom or insight. I think if you read the commentaries, there's a certain amount of joy, you could say, at people drinking that cup of tea more fully or experiencing life more completely. But absolutely, the purpose of all that is insight. So as I like to say, it's not just inhabiting your life, it's understanding your life, looking deeply at anything, whatever comes our way. That's really the nature of mindfulness. It's not

bound by what we're looking at. It's the way of looking. And that allows us to learn from anything that might arise. That's why we say as we start, usually practice with, as we will, settling our attention on the feeling of the breath, helping our attention be more stabilized and more concentrated. And as we pursue a practice, it becomes broader so that we're with the breath. But when something arises very strongly, not like a little dwippy thing, but strong emotion,

strong sensation, that becomes the new meditation object for a few moments. And we're just fully with that. And only then do we come back to the feeling of the breath. It's not very, you're not hastening back to the breath because that's not the goal. So how are we with that sensation? How are we with that emotion? That's the training. To be balanced, to be interested, to be present with it, not to be adding, you know, a very common thing to add. For example, if we're observing something painful in our bodies or in our minds, a very common thing to add is a future.

What's it going to feel like in five minutes? What's it going to feel like in 10 minutes? What's it going to feel like tomorrow? Oh, no, it's always going to feel this way. I'm overwhelmed. I feel just defeated, right? But we actually don't know. And so if we can learn to loosen the grip, say, of that add-on of the future, we can be with the sensation, we can be with the emotion as it actually is. And we find ourselves going deeper into it. We see, let's say, it's anger that's arisen. And we're just watching it, right? We're not judging it. We're not judging ourselves. We're not blaming ourselves. Almost like asking ourselves, what is anger? We feel it in our

bodies. We feel the changing sensations. We kind of watch the anger movie and we have all kinds of insights. Like maybe it's, ooh, look how much sadness there is in there. Look at how much fear there is in there. And as we keep looking, and I don't mean like 18 hours, you know, but over and over again, we see, look at how that's changing. Look at how it's arising and passing away. You know, I had that flash of anger and I completely identified with it and I solidified it like I'm such an angry person and I will be forever compared to watching it within itself even coming and going and moving and changing, even if it lasts, you know, a considerable period when it arises, within itself, it's inevitably doing that.

Changes in intensity, moments we're not that angry, and then it comes back, you know? That's learning. That's learning about some of the universal characteristics of life. Whatever we're looking at, it's constantly changing because we're constantly changing. Life is change. And the imputation of permanence is really, it's a construct that's useful. You know,

like you don't really want to approach a table you're about to put your water on and consider it just these teeming molecules coming and going full of space, because it would be really hard to have confidence in putting down your water. But at the same time, we say, hey, there's a table. Good, I have a bottle of water put on it. We also know it's moving, it's changing. Nothing is forever. And we can relate very differently to the table, to our emotions,

to our sensations, to our bodies, to our lives. And the way I frame it to myself, and I really do believe that nothing is lost by wisdom. It's not always maybe totally comfortable, like everything's changing all the time, can't hold on to anything. But if it's true, aligning our lives with it will only make us happier. Because it's actually not a doleful, depressing,

morose consideration. If it's true, then that's life itself. And the more in touch we are with it and the more our choices reflect that, actually the happier we are. Because one of our fundamental sources of suffering is just the struggle, trying to make things the way they're not. And often we're taught that. If you only had an apartment in New York City, you'd be completely happy. Nothing will ever go wrong.

You know, there it is, right? The idea of permanence. That water tank is going to stay forever. You're never going to have to leave and go to a hotel because you have no water, to leave and go to a hotel because you have no water, right? My current situation. So, you know, we believe so much, but when we really look, it's not that way. And so we're kind of perpetually at odds with things and disconnected and resentful, frustrated. But what about if we got more and more in touch with how things actually are? And then we find, oh, I have the resources to deal with this, or I have choice, or, you know, look at that. That door actually opened, even as that one closed, and so on. So it's very, very helpful to really gear our practice

toward the development of understanding, especially about things like change. Okay, so let's sit together. And you can close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease. Let your attention, your energy settle into your body. See if you can find the place where the breath is clearest or strongest for you. The nostrils, the chest, or the abdomen. Find that place. This is just the normal

natural breath. Find that place. Bring your attention there and rest. See if you can feel one breath. And if you like, you can use a quiet mental notation like in, out, or rising, falling. To help support the awareness of the breath, but very quiet. So your attention is really going to feeling the breath, one breath at a time. And if images or sounds or sensations or emotions should arise, but they're not that strong,

if you can stay connected to the feeling of the breath, just let them flow by. You're breathing. It's OK. But if something arises that really pulls you, spend a few moments just recognizing, oh, this is what's happening right now. You don't have to do it with a word, a verbal notation, although you might. Recognize, oh, this is anger or there's joy.

If something strikes you, it's easy. And then you can return your attention to the feeling of the breath. And for all the perhaps many times you just get lost, you fall asleep, you have no idea where you've been, it's okay. That's a moment to really practice letting go and practice beginning again by bringing your attention back to the feeling of the breath. you Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. In some ways, change itself is the object of our interest or meditation, whether it's joy that's constantly changing or sorrow, an image or a sound, whatever might come up predominantly,

we pay attention to it to see more deeply into it, which means we have to let go of the judgment and the deliberation and the strategizing and anything else that might arise just to experience fully what actually is. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching!. Thank you.. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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.