Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 2/24/16 with Jon Aaron

Episode Date: March 2, 2016

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. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and the teachers from the Interdependence Project. This week’s session is be led by Jon Aaron focusing on the theme of the Renunciation. To view a related artwork from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection, please visit: rma.cm/ob

Thank you. would like to join us in person, please visit our website at rubemuseum.org. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and the 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 Rubem Museum's permanent collection. And now, please enjoy your practice. John Aaron teaches at the New York Insight Meditation Center and is one of the guiding teachers at the Maycomb Meditation Community at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. He's a certified teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction and has taught over 40 cycles

of the seminal curriculum. He is a co-founding member of New York Mindfulness Meditation Collaborative. Please welcome John Aaron. So welcome everyone. It's nice to see you again. It's always nice to be here. So yeah, when Dawn asked me what I wanted to me what my theme was for the day, I decided it would be renunciation. And then just this afternoon, she said, why did you choose that topic? And the one thing I forgot to tell her about an experience that I'd had while I was on retreat back in December, I found myself, while I was meditating, have

these intense internal debates about the plot twists in the TV show Homeland. And I was really getting upset about the decisions made by the characters. And there was this incredible amount of proliferation around this. And anybody that's seen the show probably knows what I'm talking about. And of course I was wasting valuable time

that I should have been meditating by proliferating around these plot twists as if I could do something about it. valuable time that I should have been meditating by proliferating around this plot twist, as if I could do something about it. And then I thought, well, if I'm going to proliferate, at least I should proliferate about something that's, quote, real from my life, instead of proliferating around this fictional TV drama. It seemed kind of absurd. Now I don't want to get into this kind of

Pandora box about whether my quote real-life experiences are any different than the fictional life of Homeland. That's really not the point of this discussion. That's a whole other talk. But what was really clear to me at that moment is if I had at least renounced watching Homeland for the few months before I went on retreat, perhaps it wouldn't have occupied the space that it was occupying in the mind. So just harking back to what Don just said about, you know, having an empty bowl for the for the monk allows the space to be filled. And instead, my mind at that moment was filled with the proliferating thoughts around the strange decisions that some of the characters

had made in Homeland. And then about two weeks after that, an email came from the Berry Center for Buddhist Studies that had a beautiful article written in it by Musong, who was the resident scholar there, and it was called The Urban Hermit. And this was sort of his take on several books that were written on the topic, one of which was by somebody named William Powers, who some of you might know, who wrote a book called Slow City. He teaches or has taught at NYU and has written any number of other books. And it was about how he was attempting to have a kind of slow, simple life while living in New York.

And this practice of renunciation doesn't really get a lot of airplay in this world of urban mindfulness, because we think of it in generally negative terms. I have to give up that? And yet, if we're really practicing meditation, just in the moments that we're meditating, we are actually practicing some form of renunciation. So what are we renouncing when we're sitting here meditating?

So the first thing that we're renouncing is the need to do anything. Meditation is not about doing, it's about being. It's just about being. And we're also renouncing the need to be anyone. So generally speaking, we either close our eyes or at least our gaze is not fixed on anything. And we're not being looked at as we're meditating. So we can let go of the physical identity that we carry around with us. We can sort of renounce the various tensions that may be held in our body. We can let those be and let those go. So, that, just that 10 or 20 minutes or 15 or 45 minutes that we're practicing is a form

of renunciation. We have to recognize that and accept that. But where else in our lives, you know, can we actually practice renunciation? And I've often suggested to people that at the very least they renounce some of their electronic media addictions, which I know is hard, but just if one tries to not pick up your phone or your whatever your device is, whatever your device of choice is, an hour before you go to bed, how does that shift things? How does that shift the way you sleep?

Looking at this crowd, I'm kind of guessing, I'm hoping, that it's not filled with too many people who look at their phone the first thing they wake up in the morning. But that's another form of renunciation. There's so many opportunities we have for practice, and that's one of them, is just letting go of some of our habits that we're so attached to in electronic media these days, which, of course, if I had been giving this talk 15 years ago,

would not even be on the agenda. But now, suddenly, it's really rampant, and we get so hooked on it. Can we let that go when we're on the subway? And I'm as guilty as the next person. It's just a very interesting place of practice. So looking for these small things in our lives that we can at least let go of momentarily.

So in a Buddhist context, and what's kind of interesting about the Bon practice, as I understand it, I believe, is that they have a particular kind of retreat which is called the dark retreat. And they're 49 days. And they go into a place where there's no light at all. And now I know there's somebody in the room who is seeing impaired. So that's an experience. That's one experience. But when we're used to seeing, when we're used to being present with sight, and suddenly it's completely taken away, so we've renounced it completely, and I mean dark, what happens

in that process? So there's a major form of renunciation there, obviously. But renunciation is one of the ten paramis in Buddhist practice, which is the perfections of the heart. And what we're really working with with renunciation is dropping those things which obstruct the process for freedom. So dropping those elements from our life which get in the way of our own freedom. And these can be material things.

It can be people. And it can certainly be views and attitudes. So those are places to start, just looking, well, what can I let go of? What can I do without? So it's a very, very interesting practice. And the other side of renunciation, of course, is the act of generosity, because it allows, in the case of the

monk, allows him to experience the generosity of others. And in the case of our renouncing things, we're actually creating space for other things to happen. So as we meditate today, which we'll start in a minute, just realize what you're letting go of at this moment, what you're renouncing in this moment. So as soon as the thought arrives in the mind, oh, I'm meditating, let that thought go and just come back to meditating.

Meditating is happening. Let go of the I in that moment and just allow meditating to happen. So let's take a comfortable posture. Your feet firmly on the floor. Find a posture of balance. Seeing that all the weight is coming right down into your sit bones. You need to sort of move around a bit to find that place of balance, allowing the eyes to gently close. Just observing what's resonating from anything that was just sad or what may be resonating in the mind from anything that happened earlier or thoughts that you may be planning for later. Without having to change anything, just realize what's held in the body. The shoulders are tense.

The face, the jaw, the eyes. Giving yourself permission to relax. So awareness knows the body breathing. Sounds arising and fading away. And in those moments where you find yourself engaged in a thought, at that moment you're actually no longer fully aware. Actually, at that moment you are fully aware, but the moment you're engaged with the thoughts, you're actually taken away. So once you notice that there's an engagement with thought thought coming back to simply knowing the breath,

knowing the body. Knowing the body breathing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So awareness is anchored in the breath, anchored in the body. fading away of thoughts, sounds, mind states. In that moment where there's an identification and an engagement, softening around that. Returning to simply the breath, the body. No judgment. With an open heart.... Gå in. Thank you. Gullivet Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Just checking in and noticing that there is a constriction around a thought or a mind state and just softening around that. Thank you. Just renouncing the need to achieve anything. Renouncing the need to strive. Simply being present for what's happening now.

Just being. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Gå. Thank you. Thank you. So thank you all. Thank you.