Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 11/14/2018 with Kate Johnson

Episode Date: November 16, 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 13:00. 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 supported in part by the Hemera Foundation with thanks to our presenting partners Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. Kate Johnson led this meditation session on November 14, 2018. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/kate-johnson-11-14-2018

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, everybody. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and to our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. Great to see you all. How are you doing? Better.

Good. Okay. Great. So thanks for joining us today. Oh, also, just curious if there's anybody here for the first time. Welcome. Welcome, welcome. Great to have you guys.

And who comes almost every week or every week if they can? Great. And in-between, in-betweeners, yes. Great to have all of you. And those listening on podcast as well. We podcast these sessions for free. You can find them on our website or iTunes. We've looked at a few incredible wrathful protector deities recently, and we're looking

at another one today. This is Sri Devi. And I think the last time that we talked about wrathful deities, we talked about the wrathful as a being, not just against something, but deeply for something, and passionately committed for something. And as I always do when we're talking about wrathfuls, I will tell the story of curators often used to talk about wrathful deities and their purpose. So if a parent sees their child run into the middle of the street after a ball or something like that, they are

not going to say, excuse me, sweetie, why don't you come on back here? They're going to use their loudest, most protective, fierce voice and say, stop. This is part of the reason that we see sometimes wrathful figures at the entrance to a shrine room or a particular room of objects that is meant for practitioners of a certain level within the Tibetan Buddhist context is this is a chance to remember that you need to wake up before you come into the space to do your practice. So that's a kind of another way of thinking about the purpose behind these figures that are sometimes surprising to people who are maybe new to this iconography and expect peaceful lotuses and things like that.

So this is Sri Devi. This is from Tibet, 15th century. And it's really lovely and unusual to see, you know, an object that is this color, this dark, rich color. You can see a little bit of gold, especially in the crown and the jewelry here. And also at the base, you can see this kind of inlay. It looks like red here in the image right under the mule's feet. And if we take kind of a close look at some of the details here, we can see the telltale fangs of a wrathful protector. And she is in fact holding a skull cup. Often these gory images of her perhaps ingesting something that is indeed flesh of some kind is a symbol of transformation, of taking something in and just

transforming it completely into the energy that is needed. And this deity has an arsenal of magic weapons hanging from her mule's harness. I know the detail is a little bit tricky to see here but of course if you want to take a closer look your ticket admits you on a free gallery tour with Jeremy right afterwards and you can really get up close and take a look at everything here. But what we'll see here is a bag of diseases and even a ball of thread hanging over the mule's rear leg. And this ball of thread would have been made from a string created from five colored threads, red, yellow, blue, green, and white. These symbolize this ability to bind enemies that are enemies of the faith. There's another kind of layer to think about here as we consider this particular wrathful deity,

what it means to be a protector, and all the complexities that go along with that. And we can look at that through the lens of our recent holiday, Veterans Day, as well. So the power and importance of protector deities and the complexity around that role. Delighted to have Kate Johnson back here with us. Yeah, just always a treat to have you, Kate. Kate works at the intersections of spiritual practice, social action, and creative expression. She's been practicing Buddhist meditation in the Western Insight Theravada tradition since 2008 and is empowered as a teacher through Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

She holds a BFA in dance from the Alvin Ailey School at Fordham University and an MA in performance studies from NYU. And she's a core faculty member of MIT's Presencing Institute, training hundreds of leaders and changemakers in mindfulness practices and dance improvisation to surface the collective wisdom of the social body and use it to inform strategic planning and systems change.

And she's working on a book about waking up to power and oppression as a spiritual practice. Please welcome her back, Kate Johnson. Hi. You're looking great today. You too. Thanks. You too.

Thanks. Yeah, it's great to be back here, and I'm excited to be able to be with the wrathful protector deity, Sri Devi. And as Don was talking, I was thinking, yeah, you know, actually, when I started practicing mindfulness meditation, the images that were in the center that I went to were the lotuses and the peaceful Buddhas with the eyes closed and the gentle smile, you know. What I went there for in many ways was to work with, you know, grief, deep anger, dissatisfaction, that some of which came through internal conditions and some of which came through my heartbreak at what I saw in the world and in our social systems. And so, you know, seeking mindfulness as a way to metabolize that in some way so that

it didn't kind of eat me alive, right? And so I love these images because I didn't encounter them until a little bit later in my practice life. And I feel like Sri Devi and these other wrathful deities are these incredible invitations to consider what a wise expression of wrath might be. To be able to recognize that when it arises in us or arises in someone else and to not fear it, but to let it do its thing, to let it do its thing, which is transformation. So as many of you know, these deities can have different kinds of manifestations. Some of them are peaceful. Some of them are joyful, some of them are wrathful. And often it can be even the same deity and certainly the group of beings that manifest as Sri Devi also sometimes manifest in a peaceful manifestation, right? So they're not wrathful

all the time, but they're wrathful kind of at an appropriate moment when it's really needed. moment when it's really needed. And, you know, when wrath arises in human beings in a confused way, it's kind of marked by a, it can manifest as hatred. It can manifest as obsession or fixity. Oftentimes a wrath that is confused is really confused about what it's angry about, what the real source of the problem is, and it also could be fiercely trying to protect our sense of self, right? Whereas a wise wrath can be one that is, I mean, just the example that Dawn gave, a parent that's protecting their child from harm.

Wise wrath has this incredible clarity about it. And rise wrath has this incredible clarity about it. It's like when it arises, it lets us know that a boundary has been transgressed and everything in our being kind of rises up and says stop. No, no more. Time's up, for example. What I thought we could do today is just do a little inner exploration of perhaps a moment where you experienced in your own life this moment of a boundary being transgressed, a feeling of protection energy arising. feeling of protection energy arising and that we could use this mindfulness practice as an opportunity to do some wise reflection on a moment like that, to become more familiar with the flavor of wrath as a form of wisdom and to become comfortable with it. And that we could talk a little bit about how that manifests within us and maybe

in our culture after. So what I thought we could do is take the first, probably the majority of the time, sitting and grounding and settling the mind. That seems to be the best way that I've found to be able to know the difference between a wise wrath and a confused one is to just have a settled mind. So we'll let the mind rest on the feeling of the breath. Occasionally the mind will wander. We'll remind it to come back. And then towards the end of the practice, I'll guide a short contemplation using a framework that is popularized by a teacher named Tara Brock. It's called RAIN.

And it's a framework that we can use for exploring lots of different strong emotions, including wrath. So I'll talk you through that when we get there. But just it's an acronym, and the stages are to recognize, allow, investigate, and non-identify with a strong emotional experience. And the idea there is that if we're able to be mindful of a strong emotional experience, then we're not caught up in it. And we can let it serve its purpose for kind of the highest good possible. So I hope that sounds okay. Yeah? Okay.

So go ahead and find your meditation position that works for you at this moment. Here in this room, we're sitting in chairs so letting your feet touch the ground and feeling that touch. Closing the eyes or letting them softly focus at the space in front of you. Giving your weight to the chair so that the body can become more relaxed. And letting that relaxation be balanced with a gentle alertness, a sense of lift in the spine, brightness of the attention. Taking a moment to check in with your mind and heart and body just as they are right now. How am I doing?

Anything here that's calling for my attention that wants to be recognized? And then just transitioning into a mindfulness practice where we'll aim to let the mind be simple and to rest in the simple awareness of one thing at a time. And so if breath meditation works for you or if you'd like to try it, and just turning your awareness towards what it feels like to breathe. And if you can, relieving yourself for the next 10 minutes or so of paying attention to everywhere the mind wanders and tracking the environment. Everywhere the mind wanders and tracking the environment. See if you can just rest in the simplicity of feeling the sensations that come with breathing in and the sensations that come with breathing out. Thank you. So And of course, from time to time, the mind starts to wander around and awareness notices. And at that moment, we can choose to just return the awareness back to simplicity, this one breath that we're on. And then this very active returning the attention to the breath is a form of protection that we're protecting our own mind from distraction, protecting our mind from dispersion,

protecting our mind from aimless wandering, wandering. A fierce protector of our own mind and heart in this moment. Feeling the breath come in and go out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Every once in a while, just noticing what the mind is noticing. And then gathering the awareness, if necessary, back to the feeling of breath. So offering the mind a protected space to settle, to gather, to be nourished, to rest in the simplicity, connecting with the feeling of one breath at a time. okay Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And then in this next few minutes, I'll guide a contemplation. And for this, I'd like you to recall a time when wrath or anger arose for you as an expression of wisdom. as an expression of wisdom. So as a response to being harmed or seeing others harmed, as a signal that a necessary boundary had been crossed. Now see if you can remember a time where

a wise wrath arose. And then we'll use this RAIN framework to investigate it, starting with R, which stands for recognize. It's a step that we've really already started, just recognizing the presence of this intense emotion of wrath, of anger. Of anger. anger. Noticing what part of that is present now as you reflect on this moment. And then the second stage of this exploration is allow.

Oftentimes with wrath or rage or anger, there can be a sense of, oh, don't like this, want to push it away, uncomfortable, bad, shouldn't feel this way. way, uncomfortable, bad, shouldn't feel this way. So you want to see if there's any judgment around this strong emotion. And seeing if it's possible to soften. Like it's okay that anger arises. It's okay that wrath arises. This is a natural human expression. So then allowing, we start to give it some space, give it some room, give it some room, relax the tendency to try to squeeze it out or make it something else and just say, oh yeah, this is here. Allowing. Allowing.

And then we'll continue with the I of investigation. investigation. So in this space that we've created, an opportunity to really be curious about what this state is like. Investigating the body sensations that come up with wrath or rage. So where is there tension in the body? Is there energy? Is there numbness? Does it have a color? Does it have a shape or a place where it lives in the body? Does it have a story or a script? A script. Noticing the associated thoughts that come with this mind,

this strong emotional state. A story about who I am or who they are does it have perhaps an elemental quality is it fiery and hot is it hard like earth? Icy like water? Is it unpleasant? Is it pleasant? Is it a little bit of both? And then the last phase of this exploration marked by the N is non-identification. non-identification. So really having seen the presence of this state, allowed it, been curious about its component parts,

we're dropping into the wisdom that this is a mind and heart state, but it's not constant. It's always changing. Perhaps you've even noticed it change as you've investigated it over the last four or five minutes. So that we don't have to become this state, but that we can allow it to arise and move through us, perhaps transforming us in the process, perhaps moving us into action. But it's not ours to become. And we're certainly not alone in it. I'm resting in this wisdom of non-identification for a few moments more. Ah yes, arising and passing away. And then letting go of that contemplation and just letting the mind relax again.

Dropping into the simplicity of breath for just a moment or two more. And as you do, feeling your awareness really present in the body right now. So coming back to this moment by feeling that the feet are really resting on the floor, that our body is really sitting in this chair, the coolness of this particular air. A sense of sitting in a community of practice. In a moment, I'll ring the bell to close the practice. And I just want to invite you to listen until the sound of the bell disappears for you. And as you do, perhaps imagining that any benefit or goodness that we've generated by working with our minds and hearts in this way also goes out with that sound in all directions

as far as our awareness can go. And that anyone in that range who's touched by that sound receives that benefit too. 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. you