Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 1/17/2018 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: January 19, 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 17, 2018. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/sharon-salzberg-01-17-2018

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. So we're talking this month about beginning again. And of course, this is inspired by the beginning of the new year. And it's a time where we often take stock, reflect, and feel like we have a fresh start. But as meditators, we know we can do that any day of the week, day of the year, and do it many times indeed within one sitting in our practice. And as our teacher today,

Sharon Salzberg, has said before, that is the practice. So we're taking a close look at that, simple, simple act this month with our theme beginning again. And we are, as always, taking a look at that theme through the lens of an artwork that is up in our galleries or in our collection. And today is no exception. We are looking at a really magnificent, wrathful protector deity. And if you were here last week, you will remember that we looked at a wrathful last week as well. So we're on a wrathful roll here. But it's really interesting, I think, to take a look at a few different examples of this kind of stock character, if you will, because we can see the differences and the nuances and also come to understand the

kind of categorization of the wrathful deity in a different way. And as we've talked about previously, you know, this is a question we get a lot from kids who come here and adults alike. What the heck are these fierce looking creatures doing in this museum of Buddhists and other kinds of art? And of course, if you've been coming for a little while now, you know that how we explain this is that there are emanations of beings that are both peaceful and wrathful. So same being, two different emanations often, and that these are equally powerful and important. And the message here is that these wrathful deities are protectors, in fact, and that their energy is fierce, and that they are here to protect you from your ego. And the metaphor, the story that we use is that if your

child were running into the middle of the street, you probably would not say, excuse me, sweetheart. You would say, stop! And you would be very effective with that intention. And that is what wrathful protectors do. They help us stop and really awake. That is why often you will see them outside of a shrine. It is thought that before you come into a shrine, just as you can see up in our shrine room, the Wheel of Life,

and that there is this desire to remind you that it's important to stop, take a look at what you're doing, at what your mind is doing, and really be awake. So this particular wrathful is Damchen Garwa Nagpo. This is from China. And this is 18th century gilt brass. And quite a fierce character here with the fangs that we often see with wrathful deities and the skull crowns and this kind of orange flaming hair. He's riding a goat. And I think what's really interesting about this figure is that he was a blacksmith. And blacksmiths and butchers are

considered in ancient Tibet to be like the lowliest in terms of stature. But here he is, an enlightened being, actually. And the story here, which ties back to our theme, is that this deity was really originally a Tibetan deity. And when Padmasambhava brought Buddhism to Tibet at the invitation of the king, that there were great battles between the deities and Padmasambhava won. And that this deity, as many of them did, began again as protectors of the new religion, Buddhism. So that's, I think, complex and interesting and not often a story we would think to associate with Buddhism, but there it is. And it's interesting to think about that choice of beginning again in multiple contexts. So we'll think about it in terms of our meditation

practice today too. So happy Sharon Salzberg could join us today. So she is, of course, the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry, Massachusetts. And she is a renowned and beloved teacher of meditation, and her many books are evidence of that, and there's wonderful, wonderful tools, including her most recent, Real Love, which you can find in the shop with the others. So let's please welcome her, Sharon Salzberg. Hello. Wow. There are a lot of you again. How wonderful.

In the snow. Is it still snowing out there? I've been up in Barry, Massachusetts, home of the Insight Meditation Society. And I was unclear whether I was going to come back today or tomorrow. But then when the class opened up, it was yesterday. And I thought, oh, that's so great. I'm avoiding the blizzard. So I looked out my window this morning. It was like three flakes of snow. And I thought, OK, you know, it was meant to be. So here we are.

So I've been thinking, of course, about beginning again and how we feel about that in general, the kind of conditioning that we have and how essential it is, I think, to get on board with it, because I think it is the rhythm of life. That's just how things are. You know, we hit a roadblock or we feel we can't go on. We have to make an alteration. We have to start over. We have to get new perspective about things.

And we have to look from a different angle, perhaps. And we're always doing that. to look from a different angle perhaps, and we're always doing that and finding the energy, you know, when something maybe doesn't come that easily or we don't have that great breakthrough experience. You know, we do maybe a minute and a half of loving-kindness meditation and we don't love ourselves completely, you know, and it's like, it's okay. You know, keep going, like keep exploring, Keep exploring. See what's next. See what unfolds.

I think it's the essential skill in all honesty of life. And so it's kind of amazing to me that meditation practice dovetails so nicely with that very kind of training. That's what it is. It's essentially learning how to begin again and begin again and begin again and begin again. is. It's essentially learning how to begin again and begin again and begin again and begin again. So I was thinking of, and especially it was reinforced looking at the art, my second wrathful piece in a week. I am on a wrathful roll, I guess. Kate chose it, so that was even more fun. That was even more fun. You know, I was thinking about those times in my life where I felt that sense of challenge,

either the egoic challenge of needing to be perfect and sadly discovering that I'm not, or the kind of egoic challenge that manifests differently. It's almost like feeling incapable of doing something. So it doesn't feel like it's boastful or it's arrogant, but it's pretty fixed, right? It's pretty stuck. Like I can't possibly do this. So I was also sitting there thinking about giving talks, which of course is what I do all the time. And how many of you, I'm sure, have heard me say this. When I first came back from India, which was 1974, I began teaching with Joseph Goldstein, whom I'd met in India, and Jack Kornfield, who we met once we were back in the States in 74. And

the format of our intensive retreats is that something happens before breakfast. I don't know what. I never do it. Then there's breakfast. I'm not a morning person. Everybody knows that. And then there's breakfast. And then there's an instructional sitting after breakfast with questions and answers. And then there's sitting practice and walking practice and sitting practice and walking practice and a few meals here and there. And then in the evening, there's a formal discourse. There's a lecture. So that's like the kind of intense thing of the day, aside from the meals. So the first course, the first actual retreat, we were invited to teach. It was

Joseph and I. It was a month-long retreat. And I was completely terrified of giving those evening talks. And I couldn't do it. I just didn't do it. Joseph had to speak every night for a month. It was incapable of it. I was petrified. And what I was afraid of was that I would be speaking, and then my mind would go blank, and I'd just be sitting there. And everyone would know, you know, because I was just sitting there. And I couldn't do it. And so it was very funny because these people would come up, yell at Joseph, like, why aren't you letting her have a voice?

Why aren't you letting her speak? And he would say, I'd be so delighted to have a night off. Like, you have no idea. He'd say, talk to her, you know. But I couldn't do it. And then what happened was that there was this one practice I knew about, loving kindness. And I knew the guided meditation for it as a kind of ceremony almost so that okay maybe I can give that one talk on loving kindness because if my mind goes totally blank I can just go into the guided meditation and maybe no one will notice that something weird happened and oddly enough I was having a conversation with Pema Chodron about this. I was telling her this story. And she said, oh, I've always been afraid that I'd be giving a talk and my mind would just veer off onto another topic.

And then everyone would know, you know, that I was just like so distracted. I was just talking about something else altogether. And she said in like, you know, 40 years of teaching, no one's ever complained. Like, do you know you started here and you went there? But anyway, so I thought, okay, I have my answer. I'll only give talks in loving kindness because then if my mind goes blank, I'll just go into the guided meditation. So at home in Barry, I have these tapes because they were all cassette tapes. I have piles and piles and piles of tapes of me giving one talk. This was the only talk that I could give was loving kindness. And then one day I realized, oh, they're all kind of loving kindness talks.

It's like the nature of the relationship is not, it's about connection, right? That's why I'm here. That's why you're here. It's not for me to impart some like peerless expertise, because first of all, I don't have that, you know. And that's not maybe the most effective way of being together anyway, right? It's about the connection. I thought they're all loving kindness talks. And that was the day that I could begin to talk about anything, because I realized something

deeper that was going on. So first of all, how do we define perfection? And what do we think it's going to be? And what about learning and growing and changing and getting better and better at something? And we want that, of course. That's for a life of meaning. You don't want to be like the way you always were. And the way we grow is by falling down and getting up and trying something new and stretching and getting out of our comfort zone and seeing what happens when we actually are present in a different way.

It also reminds me of many years ago in Tucson. The Dalai Lama was speaking and organized, he was there for many days. And the organizers of the event had it arranged so that he was speaking in the morning and the afternoon with his translator. And then in the evening, they wanted different Western meditation teachers to be leading. So I was like the first night, right? And it was very nerve wracking. There were maybe 1,200 people in the room. He wasn't there, thank goodness, but his throne was right behind me. And it was kind of intimidating. And then it was over. And I was so happy at that point that it was the first night, because then I could just enjoy the rest of being there. You know, I didn't have to worry.

So I just enjoyed the rest of being there. And a couple of days later, the way that Donovan was teaching was he'd read a passage from one of the texts, from the text he was referring to, and then he would give some commentary about it. And then as all that was being translated, he would skip ahead to the next passage that he wanted to be reading. So he'd done that, but something the translator was saying caught his attention. So he said to the translator, that's not what I said. And the translator said, yes, it is. And he said, no, it's not. And he said, yes, it is. And Dalai Lama said, no, it's not. And it was a very minor point, but it was a point. So finally, the Dalai Lama flipped back to the passage they were actually discussing.

And he burst into this big, big laugh. And he went, oh, ha, ha, ha, I made a mistake. And I thought, look at that. If a few nights before, in front of those same 1,200 people, I had made a mistake, first of all, would I have admitted it? And second of all, would I be laughing about it? I don't think so. You know, but look at that moment, you know, and it's, you know, we tend to think of that moment as kind of laziness,

but it's so far from laziness. It doesn't mean you don't spend years trying to understand that text and you don't put your all into it and you don't prepare. But it means something quite other than that in kind of one's frank assessment of one's humanity, right? People make mistakes. Or I need to look at that more carefully or you have an interesting point i never considered things from that angle before you know that's kind of a learning dynamic

vital organism that that is continually growing and that of course is what we want which means we have to neither assume that mantle of like i know it all and don't you know don't need to listen at all or don't need to change anything at all ever but it also means letting go of you know that other kind of manifestation of ego since we've got this wrathful deity to help us, you know, which looks meek and looks humble, but it's kind of rigid, you know. Like, I can't possibly give a talk. You know, I mean, what would that sound like? I mean, really.

Do you know the work of John O'Donoghue, the poet, late Irish poet who was a fabulous speaker and thinker and a beautiful, beautiful person. And he was like, he was the most articulate person I think I've ever met in my life, just the way he used language. We met because somebody put us on a panel together we'd never met before, and he used language. We met because somebody put us on a panel together we'd never met before. And he went first. And I was sitting there thinking, oh, my God.

This is like being on a panel with the Yates or something like that. What am I going to say? And of course, there's just that moment of like, this isn't a competition. That's not what it's all about is this constant comparing and assessing and evaluating and needing to be good or not good at something it's like just have the experience just do it like open to it really really be there and you know some of the many places where where we just learn that that's what's most important, is not holding to

a fixed view of oneself as superior or inferior, right? But being able to kind of be with things as the experience is actually unfolding. And when we falter, and when we forget, and when we space out, and when we sit there, you know, we can't think of what we were talking about to begin with, then we just kind of breathe, and then we start over. Because we can. Especially as we're all kind of doing it together. So why don't we sit?

We will get to practice starting over a lot, most likely. See if you can sit comfortably and look for that place that feels balanced to you, where you feel like you have some energy in your body, but you're also at ease and relaxed. Doesn't feel like you're about to do something phony or artificial. You're just going to be with your experience. You can close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease.

You can start if you like by listening to sound and when you feel ready moving your attention into your your body and onto the feeling of the breath. Just the normal, natural breath. Takk for ating med. Thank you.... if you find your attention has wandered you're lost in thought spun out in a fantasy or you fall asleep truly don't worry about it see if you could let go gently it's like

your hand is open your palm is open a bird lands there, let it fly away, let it go. The thoughts, the feelings, whatever it is. Just let go gently. And shepherd your attention back to the feeling of the breath to begin again. Thank you. Thank you for watching.. Thank you. Slut. Thank you.... so thank you

have a great week applause that concludes this week's practice if you'd like to attend in person please check out our website rubenmuseum.org meditation to learn more 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.