Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 1/09/2019 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: January 11, 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 supported with thanks to our presenting partners Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. Sharon Salzberg led this meditation session on January 9, 2019. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/sharon-salzberg-01-09-2019

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. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and to our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. Great to be here with you all. How's your new year going so far? Good. Good. Great. We are talking about intention this month, partially because it is a new year and often around this time, there is or not, I think intentionality is a really helpful concept, right?

It differs a little bit from goal setting in that it is certainly something you can take action towards. to be kind, right? Then that's just a continuation of a process for you throughout whatever period of time you'd like to explore it. So I think it's helpful in realizing goals, but also in making progress in a different way too. So we are also talking about intention, given some changes going on in our exhibitions here. We have just rounded out this year-long conversation of talking about the future. And now we're turning our sights to this concept of power. And we'll talk a little bit more about power next month. But opening soon, we will be sharing kind of an interactive exhibition at the center of the spiral all about intentionality and the power of intention. And later, there will be an exhibition opening up upstairs in the galleries that is all about

the power of intention and prayer wheels, in particular, the use of prayer wheels by practitioners. So this idea of intention is really something that is exciting and a lot of buzz about here right now and lots of ways to think about it and explore it. One thing that I think is so interesting is that in Tibetan Buddhist practice, there's the concept of merit, right? When you do a good deed, you accumulate merit, and that is in relationship to this concept of karma. But if you set an intention to do something, and then you do it, the merit is tenfold, or, you know, you get extra credit, basically. So I just think that's a really interesting thing to note, right? If you intend to do something and then follow through, that is considered to be even

more beneficial to you and to those around you. So speaking of merit, we're looking at a stupa today. And I'll connect the merit dots in just a moment. But the stupa is a symbol that we see all the time. It is something that can occur all over this kind of scale of things. We can see tiny little stupas in terms of small little handmade sculptures out of clay. small little handmade sculptures out of clay. We can see this type of resemblance of a stupa, which is a sculpture about two and a half feet tall in our galleries, which you can see later with Jeremy, if you'd like. It's on the second floor. And then, of course, stupa, it can be an actual architectural element. So marking a space and really, you know, taking up as much as, you know,

many stories high into the sky. So stupa is used for the ritual display of offerings. So it often holds precious relics of the Buddha or other important religious leaders. And originally stupas were just, you know, these mounds of earth. But gradually, they evolved into more complex forms. And we'll just take a look at this beautiful form here. There's, you know, at the top, a lot of kind of visual movement. There's, you know, some elements at the top that maybe look a little bit like snakes, right? They're kind of wavering there. And as we go down the sculpture with our eye, the elements just become more and more simple and grounded.

And in fact, there is this kind of grounded feeling that one can receive when looking at a stupa. Practitioners, Buddhist practitioners, will circumambulate the stupa in order to gain merit. And so it is that concept of circumambulating that we're tying back to this idea of intentionality. And what is it that you are holding dear in your life right now that you want to circle and spend some time with? We are here with Sharon Salzberg today, so welcome back, Sharon. Happy New Year. Sharon is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society

in Barrie, Massachusetts, and just an incredible teacher and author of many wonderful books, including Real Love. And we are delighted to have her back. Please welcome her, Sharon Salzberg. Hello there. How long do we get to say Happy New Year before we seem out of date? I'm proud to say I did not write an incorrect date on a check yet. I'm proud to say I did not write an incorrect date on a check yet. So intention. Seems to me we speak about that fairly often. I think I just talked about it here somehow.

So it came to my mind, especially looking at the image of the stupa, was a sense of resolution, resoluteness, that kind of strength. And so I thought I would speak more about that angle today. And actually, everything, I think, will always come back to a sense of balance. For many of us at different phases of our life, or maybe a certain teacher is emphasizing the sense of resoluteness. You make a determination and you stick to it. Not harshly and not in a punitive fashion and not in any way being cruel to yourself, hopefully,

but really to be able to see the lay of the land, to see what unfolds in your mind. You decide to give someone a gift, and then you watch your mind go berserk. It's not enough. They're going to think I'm cheap. They're going to, you know, what a terrible color. It doesn't match anything. You know, they're going to think someone gave it to me. I'm giving it to them, you know. And you just kind of watch the play of your mind as you go through the not enough tape. You know, what I have to give could never be sufficient, could never be adequate. I am never

sufficient or adequate. And then, as I've spoken about before, you give it anyway, because that was your original intention. And you watch that. What's it like in the relinquishing of an object? And what's it like later? Do you ever actually regret it? So we set up these exercises, you could say, to give us the opportunity to make a resolve, carry it out, and watch, really learn. What's the nature of that withholding of that fear? Is it ever really a wise voice or is it just sort of the baggage of old, you know, that we tend to carry with us? What's it like when you want to thank somebody or you want to express appreciation to them

and you feel that same kind of withholding, like, oh, you know, that sounds stupid. Or even just to say in consolation to somebody, I'm sorry, I have a friend who would describe herself as really kind of like grief phobic. And her incredible terror is that she's going to say the wrong thing. and her incredible terror is that she's going to say the wrong thing. And so she tends not to show up in those situations where somebody's died in the family or something, and you might say, I'm sorry. I remember when she was not willing to go to this person's mother's funeral,

and I said, you know what? No one's going to remember what you say. It's like, at all. They's going to remember what you say. It's like, at all. They're going to remember that you were there or that you said something. They're not going home and parsing your language. I'm like, can you imagine? They said, I'm sorry. I mean, some people might object to being told that.

I mean, I hear that. But really, from within us, that's not the point. It's not to be perfect. It's to maybe face something that's uncomfortable. Understand it's a construct. It's just manufactured. And go for it. Right?

So we need some resolve to kind of do the harder thing or the unaccustomed thing. And for a lot of people, that unaccustomed thing could be something like loving kindness for oneself. There are these exercises in very classical Buddhist teaching about think of the good within you. Because the idea is not, of course, to get conceited or arrogant or kind of fluff up your ego, but it's really for a more balanced perspective, because we can spend an awful lot of time thinking about the mistakes we've made and what we've done wrong

and how we're not enough and we always give stupid gifts and, you know, whatever. And so the point is more like a more truthful picture is a bigger picture that may recognize our issues and faults and also recognizes the good within us, that maybe we're generous mostly or, you know, we're truthful or something, whatever it is. And so to have a more complete picture, we need to look at the other side. And I think it's very uncomfortable for most people.

But it's so classic that even in a very orthodox kind of traditional setting, in, say, an Asian monastery or something, you might be asked to do that reflection. Because also the idea is not to be, you know, there's so many times internally or externally we're facing some degree of difficulty, of suffering, of adversity, of not what we wanted to have happen. But even I think in the kind of modern consideration of stress, there's the stressor, which is the incident or the situation, and then there's the resource with which we are meeting it. That's what makes up the stress response. And we know that, that you can be having just like, you're fighting a cold, you haven't slept,

your bank just called you because there's some issue with a check. Nothing you're doing seems to be going smoothly. It's just that kind of week. And then this little thing happens and you go haywire because it's too much. You don't have the energy from within to meet it. Or maybe we feel incredibly supported. We're trying to do this very hard thing, or we're facing this really, really difficult challenge, but we don't feel alone. We feel that sense of community. We recognize how many people are with us and trying to help us,

and we can let them in, and we realize we have options, and we remember to breathe, and, you know, we took a walk, and, you know, our neighbor got a new puppy who licked our face, and, you know, and then we meet that really difficult situation with something, right, rather than feeling quite as overwhelmed, not because the situation is any better. It might be considerably worse, actually. But we're meeting it with a sense of inner resource. And so part of why we do that reflection on loving kindness for ourselves

or what's the good within me is to build that sense of inner resource so that if we are meeting something very difficult we don't necessarily crumble at all but we have the wherewithal we have that that sense of resiliency so what is the hard thing not impossible but kind of challenging like as you know i've said here before one of the things my own teacher this woman named Deepama said to me when she told me to teach which was in 1974 when I was leaving India for the second time and I was going back to the states for what I was sure was going to be a very brief visit before I turned around went back to India for the rest of my life.

I went to Calcutta, which is where she lived, to say goodbye and get her blessing for my very short journey. And I told her what my plan was, and she said, well, when you go back to the States, you'll stay there and you'll be teaching. And I said, no, I won't. And she said, yes, you will. back to the States, you'll stay there and you'll be teaching. And I said, no, I won't. And she said, yes, you will. I said, no, I won't. It was ludicrous.

I mean, I couldn't even imagine. And she said, yes, you will. I said, no, I won't. And we kind of went back and forth. And then she said an amazing thing to me, which was, you really understand suffering. That's why you should teach, which was an extraordinary statement. I, like many people, had had a very tumultuous, difficult childhood. And she was framing it in such a way that, oh, this is useful, which was new.

And then she said to me, you can do anything you want to do. It's your thinking you can't do that's going to stop you. And I left her, what we would probably call a tenement room, and walked down these flights of stairs. And I'm thinking, no, I won't. But, of course, as it turned out, she was right and I was wrong. So I think about both those statements. And in this context, I think about you can do anything you want to do. It's your thinking you can't do it that's going to stop you, because there's no

amount of resolve ever that's going to get me to jump out of an airplane, ever, ever. It's not going to happen. And there's some things that, you know, I might have done when I was 18 when I went to India. I'm not doing them now. It's not going to happen. So it's not literally true about everything. There are questions of capacity. There are questions of energy and so on. And yet there are so many things where it does seem to be a construct in our minds. It's a thought.

It's a pattern of thinking. I'm too old to learn another language. It's a thought. It's a pattern of thinking. I'm too old to learn another language. That's not true. It feels true because I haven't been able to, but nor have I devoted much time to that effort. You know, I can't do this or I can't do that. And so many of those, if you look, not the real ones, the realistic ones about jumping out of airplanes or whatever, but so many of them are actually a thought. And that doesn't mean it's easy to undo the thought and the power of the thought, but if we have a certain sense of resolve, then we at least make the experiment.

And it's not in the light of passing failing you know it's what am i learning what am i seeing in this uh in this movement in this effort in this opening in this in this stretching in this growing so what a perfect season you know for I feel like I just did a thing, I don't know when it's going up, for Radio WNYC, and it's, I forget the name of the show too, but it's either 10 Things That Scare Me or Things I'm Scared Of, something like that. So if you tune into that, you'll eventually hear 10 Things That Scare Me. And when they first proposed it to me, I thought, I started thinking, I couldn't think of 10.

Then I thought, like, 1,000. You know, like, I couldn't stop thinking. And those are real. And it's like, the first is I'm afraid of heights, so that's why the airplane is never going to happen. It's just not. But what can happen? You know, where am I just holding myself back from habit or from the

story someone else told me about me or the story I've been telling myself about me or my circumstance or whatever? And let's stretch. That's what this time of year is for. Okay, so let's sit, which is a stretch for many people. And I would say, you know, really just rest your attention. To begin with, rest your attention on the feeling of the breath, just the normal, natural breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly. And there's some resolve here, too. It's not just relaxing.

When you find your attention has wandered, it's very tempting to either think, I'll just finish this thought, because if I can work out this recipe, then I can sit here in peace for the rest of the sitting, right? And then we're just gone. Or to say, this is just so dreadful, it's terrible, let me judge myself for 30 minutes,

which will take me through the end of the sitting into lunch, right? But we need some resolve. It's a commitment. right? But we need some resolve. It's a commitment. When I see I'm just lost in thought, I'm going to try to gently let go and come back to the breath. And if I have to do that again 10 seconds later, that resolve still holds. What's the nature of commitment when it can be combined with gentleness and a lack of judgment

it's a resolve I'm going to do this with patience, I'm going to do it over and over again so you rest your attention on the feeling of the breath you realize you're a million miles away somewhere see if you can let go and come back Rest your attention on the feeling of the breath. You realize you're a million miles away somewhere. See if you can let go and come back. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 52, 53, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 51, 52, 53, 59, 52, 53, 53, 59, 52, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 53, 1. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to make a Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. just one of the many benefits of membership. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day.