Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 11/22/2017 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

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. Presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg, the New York Insight Meditation Center, and the Interdependence Project. Sharon Salzberg led this meditation session on November 22, 2017. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/sharon-salzberg-11-22-2017

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 slash meditation. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg, the teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center, the Interdependence Project, and the Shambhala 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. Hi, everybody. Happy Thanksgiving.

It's great to see so many of you here today. So welcome to the Rubin Museum. My name is Dawn Eshelman, and thank you so much for joining us for our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. We have been talking this month about the theme of impermanence, which is a really central concept in Tibetan Buddhism. And we're looking today at this gorgeous kind of carving. This is carved out of stone in the 16th, 17th century. This is Machik Labdron. Shuri. This is Machik Labdron. And you can see that she is one of the kind of most famous figures in Tibetan Buddhist practice. She's standing here in a rather dynamic pose. Looks like she's

kind of partying it up. She has in one hand, in her right hand over her head there, a damaru, which is a two-sided drum. And it has a couple of balls dangling from it, and it's played by twisting it around, and so a very kind of rapid drum beat with that. And then in her left hand, a bell. And these are both instruments that you can see upstairs on the sixth floor in our exhibition, The World is Sound, which is in itself all about impermanence. So sound is a metaphor for impermanence. And it's also these instruments are ritual objects and used in what is called the chud ceremony, which Machik Lobdron is linked to. The chud ceremony is pretty intense and in it practitioners visualize their bodies being chopped up and offered to gods and demons. This is an exercise in impermanence, in letting

go. And there's got to be a joke in here somewhere about carving up a Thanksgiving turkey. but there's got to be a joke in here somewhere about carving up a Thanksgiving turkey. I will leave it to you on Thanksgiving Day. You can mull that over. But the practice is really this cutting through of attachments. And it is a practice. It is something that is repeated over and over to really ingrain this concept of letting go and impermanence as something that is very important and central to this practice. So Sharon Salzberg is here today. Our wonderful teacher is back and she'll be here

next week as well. Yeah. So we'll hear a little bit more from her on this concept of impermanence. Sharon is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry, Massachusetts. She is a renowned teacher and practitioner, and she's the author of really great books. Great gifts, guys. The most recent one, of course, is love, and real love. Please Please welcome Sharon Salzberg. Hello. So I craned my neck to see how many of you were here for the first time. I also had a brief conversation with somebody who tells me she's here every week. How many of you come every week when you can?

Wow. That's a lot of people it's so great especially thinking back to those first conversations like you think we should do this it's like so cool it's great so yes happy thanksgiving and dawn thanks for that image now i'm going to watch someone carve the turkey tomorrow. It's going to be like, that could be your body, you know. Not a bad reflection in a lot of ways. So I'll talk some about impermanence. I guess I have to talk about gratitude because you have to, right?

If you're going to make some meaning out of this holiday. I was asked by, I guess it was the Huffington Post, that was doing an article on how to find more meaning in Thanksgiving. And one of my suggestions was, look up the history. It's complicated. Think of it from various points of view, which is always an interesting thing to do. So Machi Globetrotten as a bodhisattva,

as a figure, an archetype, is most highly associated in Tibetan practice with this practice called chöd, C-H-O-D, and it's feeding the demons. The underlying meaning of it is it's like a practice in cultivating more fearlessness, like looking directly at the things we are afraid of that kind of haunt us, and having a certain sense of hospitality. It's almost like those of you who were, yeah, it's funny.

Those of you who were here when I talked about a practice that we often do, if you have a persistent negative voice, like an inner critic, I said give it a name, give it a wardrobe. And I said I named my inner critic Lucy after the character in the Peanuts comic strip sorry any of the Cesar in the room so one of the things we sort of say almost as a extreme oversimplification of this practice is invite Lucy to dinner it's like your awareness is actually stronger than this thing you're afraid of. You have the capacity as a human being to hang in there with this thing you have avoided forever.

That is the one thing you think, I cannot face that. And actually you can. So invite Lucy to dinner. Don't give her the run of the house. That's not the point, you you know is to have this force this pretty negative force take over but you also don't have to be so ashamed and so afraid and so freaked out and you know that Lucy has appeared so I said in that class you know that I had said that

invite Lucy to dinner and somebody in the room objected know, that I had said that, invite Lucy to dinner. And somebody in the room objected to it. And so I said, how about a cup of tea? And they said, how about a cup of tea to go? So that's an extreme distortion of chib practice. It's like, eh, you know, maybe a fingernail, like nothing really valuable. It's a practice of fearlessness. It's a practice of generosity, right? We're offering. We're giving. We're giving over our presence, our bodies. And yet, it's not one of self-abnegation or self-denial.

That's what's so weird about it. When we practice generosity, we touch upon a space within us that is abundant, that can afford to give, that isn't going to be lessened or harmed in some way by the offering. And that may be very fleeting, but that is actually there. That's why generosity itself is like a practice, because it reunites us with this place where we're enough. And so does the idea of chud. It's seeing, oh, I can hang in there with this really difficult space,

this demon. And one thing I think most of us would say about our personal or familial conditioning, and I would assert about the kind of collective conditioning in society, is that we're taught to avoid these things that are so troublesome. That's why they're so frightening. Even a simple thing, not know, not like a massively traumatic thing, but even a thing like boredom. Sometimes I think the whole society is designed so that we shouldn't feel bored from the moment we're born to the moment we die. And if you start to feel bored, that's the signal. You've got to do something. Buy something. Consume something,

they've got to do something, they buy something, consume something, right? Immediately. Or loneliness. There are so many of the things that we would tend to avoid, and then very personal things as well, whatever they might be. So here we are, saying, come in. Even if it's Thanksgiving leftovers, whatever you're offering. Come in, have a meal. I can be with you.

My awareness, my capacity to love, my capacity for compassion is actually stronger than any demon, any aspect of our experience that may come up, because they're all impermanent. aspect of our experience that may come up, because they're all impermanent. There's this very beautiful quotation from the Buddha in which he said, the mind, like my mind, your mind, is naturally radiant and pure. The mind is shining.

It's because of visiting forces that we suffer. Now, this is a really amazing statement for a couple of things. One is these forces are just visiting. Lucy, the demons, they're just visiting. They may visit a lot, right? But they're still just visiting. It's not who actually lives here. It's not our deepest truth of who we are. The visiting. And he also said, take note, it's because of visiting forces like greed, jealousy, anger. It's because of visiting forces we suffer. He didn't say it's because of visiting forces that were terrible people, you know, evil people. He said it's because of the visiting forces we suffer. So that's an important consideration. And I just love the image.

I love the saying because right away I could imagine myself sitting happily at home, minding my own business, and hear a knock at the door. It's kind of like Halloween, right? And you open the door and there's some force you really don't want to see. Greed, your own fear, your own jealousy. And it's so tempting to, like, fling open the door and say, welcome home, like forgetting who actually lives here. It's also tempting to try to shut the door

and pretend you never heard the knock, which is sort of an interesting tactic, but unfortunately it doesn't work. You know, we desperately shut the door only to find that very force comes in somewhere. One of the greatest tools we have is remembering it's a visitor. This is coming, this is going,

because we dive right in usually. You know, I'm such an angry person, I will be forever. This is the only thing I'll ever feel. This is what I was feeling all along. Nothing else was real. Right? So we solidify, we reify, we make substantial that which is always, always changing.

And then we have a distorted relationship to reality. Then we're sunk. Right? Even just to remember, then we're sunk. Right? Even just to remember this is a changing state, is a tremendous asset in being able to open that door and be there in a different way. We want presence. We want balance.

We want peace. We want calm. we want love we want kindness we want compassion and we can have all of those because that's the cultivation in a way they're all facets or aspects of being mindful that's what we're actually practicing when you know you sit and it's usually, I mean, it's never really just the breath, right? The famous list of the hindrances, you know, are the cold hindrances because they tend to be seductive states, and if we get lost in them,

then they hinder our concentration, our ability to really be present. But they're not bad states. It all depends on how we relate to them. And they're talked about a lot in meditation teaching because they come up so often, and they come up so often because they come up so often in life. Unlike people's image of what should happen, like you take a few breaths and you zone into this peaceful realm.

And you're kind of transcendent, and it's so nice. Not a thought to be had. And then you sort of emerge half an hour later. Oh, where did the time go? You know, it was just so blissful. In contrast, commonly it's a few breaths, something aches or you get bored or one of the hindrances arises. But that's not considered bad. That's like the knock at the door.

And how we respond to that knock is everything. That's like the knock at the door. And how we respond to that knock is everything. That's where the real skill comes in. And it develops. It grows over time. So the first hindrance is desire or attachment. You're sitting there perfectly content. And you're seized with this belief that, God, what time is this store open until? I've got to get up there. Maybe I'll sneak out. Out of the corner of my eye as I was walking in, I saw this bag. I think I need that bag. Just saying.

You know, that kind of thing comes up. Or aversion, angerversion anger fear out of nowhere that person like 18 rows behind me is breathing really loudly or anticipation of tomorrow you know a holiday gathering family, you know, whatever. So it's attachment, aversion, sleepiness, sluggishness, kind of zoning out. Even if you don't completely fall asleep, it's just a sort of muddled, dull sort of state. And then the energetic opposite of that, restlessness. There's a lot of energy, but it's really ungrounded and unchanneled, and you feel agitated and worried. And then the last of the hindrances is doubt. Doubt is tricky because certainly within the Buddhist teaching, doubt can be a very, very positive quality. It's really urged

that we question everything and find out for ourselves. But this is more like almost like cynicism or not being willing to try something out to see for yourself if it's true it's just like standing aside and say it's not worth it because then you're not gonna try it you're not gonna actually do anything things that we're doubting yourself you know like it's work they say for 2600 years it's not to work for me or whatever it might be you know like so with all these states we you know they will come for sure it's not a sign that things have gone awry they're expected to come the question is how do we relate to them you know can we

recognize them for what they are can we remember they're impermanent? They're coming, they're going. Can we just hang in there with them without giving in to them and without pushing them away, just being there with them? That's the training. And then let go. Let it go. Sometimes it's so odd, you know, you see one of these things come up, and it's actually fading, and you watch your mind grab it and bring it back so you could feel worse about yourself. You see all kinds of things. It's quite interesting.

So we're going to sit together. Should a hindrance arise, just in case, don't worry about it. See if you can recognize it for what it is. Remember that it's changing state. And then bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath. Okay, so we're going to start. You can sit comfortably. Close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease you can let your attention settle into your body find the place where the breath is or the chest or the abdomen See if you can feel that breath that's clear or clearest. You bring your attention to that place where it's strongest for you. See if you can feel one breath.

You may get an image of the breath or hear the breath, but let that be in the background. So your attention is really going to feeling the breath. Something like a hindrance comes up. It's okay. You can recognize it. Any emotional state, for that matter. Remember that it's a changing state. It will come and go.

See if you can let go and bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath. And for perhaps those many times when you're just gone, you're completely sucked in somewhere, don't worry about it. That too is a time of practicing letting go and beginning again. Just see if you can let go gently, bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath. Thank you. Takk for ating med. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Thank you.

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