Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 1/10/2018 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

Every Wednesday, the Rubin Museum of Art presents a meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area. This podcast is a recording of the weekly practice. If you would like to attend in person, please visit our website at RubinMuseum.org/meditation to learn more. 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 January 10, 2018. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/sharon-salzberg-01-10-2018

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. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Rubin Museum and to our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. It's great to be here with you again this week. And we have been talking this month so far about this idea of beginning again. It's something that naturally

we think about as we follow the Gregorian calendar and celebrate the new year in January. And it's also something that we think about as meditators using this practice of starting over again and again throughout our practice, returning to the breath as an object, for example, and putting that into practice in a way that becomes a tool of compassion for ourselves as meditators, just letting go, beginning again. And last week, we looked at an artwork that depicted a bevy of both peaceful and wrathful emanations of beings. It was a little bit like a New Year's Eve party of peaceful and wrathful emanations. And we talked a little bit about this idea of the wrathful protector figure within this lexicon.

And today we're going to talk a little bit more about that concept of the wrathful protector. And in fact, we're looking at one right now. And this is Bhairava. This is metalwork from Nepal from the 14th century. And Bhairava is considered to be a wrathful emanation of Shiva. Shiva is a Hindu god who is really known as creator and destroyer. And Bhairava is that destruction element. Bhairava is a deity that is also worshipped by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains alike, and is a very significant figure in this way. So we can take a look at what we're seeing here. This is Bhairava standing in a warrior pose with feet outstretched. We see four heads here, but there are actually five. And that depicts Bhairava's ability to really see beyond. And in his hands here, he has actually 10 arms reaching out that nearly all of them contain

a different tool that he uses. And of course, this very prominent element here kind of snaking around his torso is a necklace of skulls. And so while we see sometimes wrathful emanations where the actual faces are very fierce and have fangs and, you know, kind of look like scary monsters. This, you know, it's interesting to see this very peaceful face and yet a very clear demarcation of the wrathful nature of this being through some of these tools and through this skull necklace that goes around his body here. that destruction is a part of creation. And in many Himalayan cultures, there is a concept of this being a pattern throughout ages and throughout experiences, that there are cycles of creation and cycles of destruction, that they go together, that both are useful and necessary. And Bhairava in particular is known as a destroyer of fear. So you can keep that in mind as you're meditating today. We are so happy to have Sharon Salzberg here with us almost all month. So great. And we'll hear from her a little bit more about this idea of beginning again.

And as most of you know, Sharon is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry, Massachusetts. She is a beloved and renowned teacher, and we're so honored that she is a big part of this program here with us today and throughout the history of this program. And she is the author of many fabulous books, including Real Love, her most recent, which is up in the shop amongst several other of her books as well. And they're such useful, useful tools. So please welcome her back to our stage, Sharon Salzberg. Hello there. It's great to be here. Tomorrow I'm going up to Barry, Massachusetts, because I wasn't cold enough here. It wasn't

wintry enough. I thought, oh, let me go there. My friend Joseph Goldstein, when I was up there for Christmas, he said, how come we haven't moved south like our ancestors? I said, I don't know, you know, but here we are. And it's great. So thank you for that great presentation of the wrathful deities. The word I think we would probably use in more common conversational English would be something like fierce, because wrathful for us does tend to imply mostly some quality of anger. And the point, the reason that such beings, or maybe a teacher, or a mentor, or a supervisor, is a protector, rather than just being mean or abusive, is their motivation and their level of skill.

You really need to feel that this person is on your side. They're not just lashing out because they're in a bad mood or something. And there is a level of skill. We know if you yourself are in the position of, say, supervising someone at work, it's not that useful to say you're an idiot, you know, because first of all, it doesn't give them any information at all. Should they, oh yes, phones, should they wish to change, right? So there are skills in this.

It made me think of my Burmese teacher, Sayadaw Upandita, who we talk about very often. And one of the things that struck me as really spooky in a way was that the retreat where we first met him is the one we talk about the most. And that was 1984. And that was a long time ago, you know. That wasn't like yesterday. That was really a long time ago.

But we invited him to the Insight Meditation Society to teach this three-month retreat, never having met him before, because we'd heard he was a really great teacher, which he was. But what people didn't mention was how fierce he was and demanding and intense. And that all turned out to be true. He had the habit, we were meeting him six days a week for these private, very short, usually, meetings

where you would describe your practice and then he'd give you some feedback. And that, by the way, was a very interesting exercise because there was a certain formula you had to use in order to describe your experience. He wasn't really interested in interpretation or conclusion. He wanted data. And it was so interesting peeling away the layers because really what you wanted to do

was walk in and say like i had a terrible morning which tells them nothing right like were you sleepy were you restless why do you think it was terrible maybe it was just painful but good you know like so going uh much deeper than all of that kind of conjecture and supposition and conclusion was very interesting. So then you would just present your practice in some way, and he would respond. And he was speaking at night. He'd give a lecture six nights a week.

And this was a completely silent retreat. He was the only person I spoke to for three months. And one night he said, one of the meditators waiting to see me for that short meeting, he said, he told me that waiting to see me was like sitting outside and waiting to go to the dentist. And I thought, who told him that? Because it was true. If you're apprehensive and afraid of the dentist, maybe your dentist is your best friend, or maybe you are the dentist.

But if you have that kind of phobia, that's what it was like. And my mantra, actually, which I would repeat over and over and over again, was, the teacher is there to serve me. I am not here to please him or make an impression or have, you know, some praise. Really, he's here to serve me. And if I can just open, because I did completely trust his motivation. You know, I don't think he was mean-spirited.

I don't think he was trying to feel better about himself by putting us down. I don't think he was trying to feel better about himself by putting us down. I absolutely trusted that he was really on my side, maybe more than most people we meet, actually, because he wasn't there for himself. He was there for me and every single one of us. And that was kind of a beautiful realization. I mean, I would say it a lot, you know, because it's really fast.

He said, just serve me, just serve me, just serve me, because it was a little, you know. And one of his common things to say at the end, because these were very short, you know, you would just present, you're sitting or you're walking, meditation, whatever. He would respond and you'd go off. One of the common ways he would end that coming together was by saying, try harder. And for me, because we had a certain kind of bond, that landed inside me as, oh, he thinks I can do it. He thinks I can really give something my all and not hold back and just go for excellence. He believes in me.

For other people, it was devastating. And by the time when he would come and I was more assisting him, as soon as he'd say that, I'd get up, I'd go out in the hallway waiting for the person to leave because I knew they would just be a mess. So then that brings up the level of skill. There are ways in which we intuitively kind of modulate the message. Somebody just wrote to me on Twitter and said something like,

I seem to need fierce, I seem to need tough love. I seem to need fierce compassion. Is that a problem? I don't know, you know. Do you trust the motive of whoever, you of whoever is guiding you or helping you? And how do you feel about yourself? Do you feel better or worse about yourself? Because the teacher is there to serve me, right? And there's a saying in Zen that the goal of every good teacher is to have students who surpass them.

And I think that's right. You know, and so, which also reminds me of when I wrote one book called Faith, on faith. And one of the qualities of faith within the Buddhist tradition is that it gets stronger as your self-respect grows. You know, it's not a question of giving up your own vision of what's true just in deference to somebody else. But as you question and you doubt and you explore, you insist on seeing something for yourself, and that confidence grows because it's coming from within. That's when faith really grows. Faith isn't defined as belief. It's defined, it's literally defined as offering your heart. It's giving your heart over to something, and you need to know, first of all,

you have a heart, and that that is one precious gift, right? That is worth something. one precious gift, right? That is worth something. So these things are all kind of intertwined. One of the things that's so interesting, being here so many times, talking about the same topic, which one kind of does anyway, you know, one of the core qualities

is this ability to begin again. And actually Upandita, fierce as he was, was one of the main people who reinforced that for me. Within the Buddhist psychology, there's a distinction that can be made between guilt and remorse or regret. that can be made between guilt and remorse or regret. Regret or remorse is considered skillful, which means it's useful to help lead us out of suffering into wisdom and connection and love and so on. That's what skillful means. And so unskillful means the opposite. It just brings us to more and more suffering. So remorse or regret is considered skillful we've said something, we've done something it rips the harmony

of something, we turned someone against someone else or we lied or whatever it is and we feel the consequence of that sometimes a long time later in a very surprising way any kind of introspection, I think, inevitably brings us to this sense of almost like a moral inventory. And you just remember these things. And the Buddha said something very beautiful once. He said, if you truly loved yourself, you'd never harm another.

If you truly loved yourself, you'd never harm another. If you truly loved yourself, you'd never harm another. And it is out of not loving ourself and not remembering what we're actually capable of that we do. We're so reckless, so frightened, you know, we do and say all these things. And when we remember them, it's almost like we remember that feeling, that lack of love too. And it's very painful. But the idea with that mind state is that we experience the pain of whatever. In effect, we forgive ourselves because we need energy to move on with some determination not to just behave that way again. Like, ooh, I really learned something there.

Guilt, on the other hand, is considered unskillful because it's a state where we're stuck, right? It's like we can't so readily move on. We just go over and over and over and over and over. Whatever it is we did or what we said, as though that were the only thing we ever felt or done or said in our life, you know, and everything kind of collapses around some action. And it's, it's so painful. It's so debilitating that it's considered unskillful because we have no energy. You know, it's so demoralizing. It's like if you were, you know, a very simple example, if you were sitting with the intention as we're about to do, just resting your attention on the feeling of the breath.

And then you realize your mind had wandered and you spent the whole rest of the sitting blaming yourself in the afternoon and into the evening. It's so tiring. And it's not onward leading. You're just going round and round and round. You feel worse and worse. So where's the energy for resilience and for beginning again?

It's not that easy. So this was something that Upanjitu was very, very strong in, making that distinction. And the following year, after he came to Barry, I went, Joseph and I and a number of friends went to Burma to sit with him, also for three months, and that's where I did Loving Kindness. And people who knew him or have read about him are often amused that he was my Loving Kindness teacher because he was so fierce.

I say, really? But he was very loving. Anyway, so the way the interviews, those short meetings happened in Burma was that he'd be sitting in his room, and you would go in to there, and you'd go up to the front of the room, you'd sit down in front of him, and you'd describe your practice. And in the meantime, the person who was going to come after you

would wait in the back of the room. So that meant that I was there for three months, so for the whole three months, I got to hear someone else's practice, like every day, six days a week. And that was Joseph who was ahead of me. So every day, you know, I would listen to him. And one day he just seemed kind of down, you know, like I could hear in his voice, he was troubled. And he said to Upandita something like, I had a memory of something that I did 25 years ago, something like that.

And it just came to me, and it was really bad. And I feel terrible. And Upandita sort of gave him this same talk about the dirts of guilt and remorse, and yes, we do feel the pain of it, but then we can move on out of compassion for ourselves and just wisdom. But if you just go over it and over it and over it,

then you're building a whole identity around that, and it's not that skillful. So in the meantime, I'm sitting in the back of the room the whole time thinking, I wonder what he did. It sounds so bad, you know? He's really bummed out. He must have done something horrible. But I couldn't ask him because it was a silent retreat. So months went by. We left Burma together. We were in Bangkok, and the first night we were having dinner, because there's no dinner in Burmese monastery, and we're sitting in this restaurant, and I said,

so, by the way, a couple of months ago, when you were talking to Upanditi, you said you'd done something horrible, like so terrible, and you must have been really quite young. It was like 25 or 30 years ago, you know, so what'd you do? And he described this time he was like 16 or 17 years old. And a lot of the girls in his class were having sweet 16 parties. And he got invited to one and he thought, you know, I don't really feel like going to another party. I won't go. And it turned out that not a lot of people went to her party, and she just felt horrible.

So 25 years later, out of nowhere, it came back. So I started telling that story as a way of distinguishing between guilt and remorse, because it does feel bad. And still we need to move on, right? That's the whole recognition that our whole life is like a creative medium for us. So on my birthday, which is in August, I was, Joseph and I were teaching together in California

at this retreat center, and I told that story. And then afterwards, after the talk, the staff of the retreat center gave me a birthday party. And Joseph came and he afterwards, after the talk, the staff of the retreat center gave me a birthday party and Joseph came and he said, I didn't really feel like coming. But I figured in 30 years I'd be sitting somewhere minding my own business and this memory would come back like I didn't even go to her party, you know.

So here we are. We're just always kind of recognizing that need and the ability we have to keep beginning again in that way so what do we sit which is the core of what we're doing is beginning again see me get sit comfortably and close your eyes or not. Wherever you feel most at ease. Just let your attention settle into your body and settle on the feeling of your breath wherever you feel it most distinctly. And if you like, you can use a quiet mental notation like in, out, to help support the awareness of your breath, but very quiet.

to help support the awareness of your breath, but very quiet. So your attention is just going to feeling the breath, one breath at a time. It's just one breath. and when you find your attention has wandered, you've gotten lost in thought, or spun out in a fantasy, or you've fallen asleep, here's your big chance to let go gently and with some kindness toward yourself, just shepherd your attention

back to the feeling of the breath. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to take a few minutes to get through this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Be well, 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.