Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 5/4/16 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: May 17, 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 and the NY Insight Meditation Center. This week’s session is led by Sharon Salzberg focusing on the theme of Reslience. To view a related artwork from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection, please visit: rma.cm/-l

Thank you. 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 Interdependence Project and the New York Onsite 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. Sharon Salzberg is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society. She has been studying and teaching for over 45 years, and she is the author of many fabulous books,

so helpful if you want to dive a little bit deeper and take your practice to the next level. And one of those books, her most recent, is Real Happiness at Work, which you can find upstairs in our shop or online. Please give a warm welcome to Sharon Salzberg. The one time I went to Tibet actually was 1985, and they had just opened up the country for people who were not on official tour groups. we ended up flying into Lhasa and going overland through Tibet to Kathmandu, which was rugged. But it's like one of those, I have stories to tell,

but one of the stories is about seeing many pieces of art just like that, you know, up in a wall in a monastery with bullet holes. And it had me reflect so powerfully on both history and perseverance and endurance, and it was still there. History happens. Time goes by. There's adversity.

There's tragedy. There's glory. There's triumph. All these things happen happen and some things, and in this case very richly symbolic things, persevere. They endure, they don't give up in a sense. It's not like, oh now you're useless because it's different. In some ways it's more useful, isn't it?

different. In some ways it's more useful, isn't it? I kept looking at the figure and what kept coming to my mind was something that goes around sometimes on the internet from the Dalai Lama where he wrote, never give up. And it's just a refrain on various ways of saying never give up. And that's very much what I thought of in looking at that but the thing about resilience is that that endurance that ability to sustain and exist isn't rigid and uptight and like fierce in the sense of nasty like you're not gonna get me you know it's it's something so supple and porous in a way it's like the ability to breathe anything that's

frozen is like traumatized right because it can't move it can't nothing can emerge it can't join into these cycles of life of going up and down and accommodating things and opening and closing, it's frozen.

But once we open in a different way, there could be the very same incident or experience or circumstance, but we are so different with it that we're not now isolated apart from this flow of life because everything's still flowing we're still a part of this kind of greater picture of life and that makes all the difference and that of course reminds me of sort of the essential point about mindfulness. I was telling Dawn I was at a mindfulness conference in DC this last weekend. Were any of you there by any chance? There were like 700 people there. It completely astonished me. So once again, I was sitting in front of this group of people thinking, group of people thinking, really? You're all interested in mindfulness? And then I got on the train to come back up here. And my favorite thing happened, which was the conductor said, please be mindful of the gap between the train and the station platform. I got so excited.

I had to tweet it out. And I noticed how many people retweeted it. You know, look at that. Everyone else is excited too. So, but mindfulness evokes very much that sense of suppleness, right? Something wonderful, beautiful, tremendous happens, and we don't freeze around it. Like, I've got to keep this forever. I've got to keep this from ever changing, or I'll be left at a loss or bereft or deprived. Something really painful happens,

and we don't freeze around it as though we're really isolated, as though we're the only person to ever feel such a thing, as though we were now cast off from the flow of life, as though it were our fault, because we should have been able to control it, whatever it is. So when we don't freeze, when we don't relate in that way, when we're more mindful

then there's kind of that sense of flow of spaciousness of being able to integrate whatever that experience is into a larger picture and then because i always like to talk about neutral experience i'll throw that in as well because that finishes the model. I guess we freeze around neutral experience too in a different way in that when something is instructively pleasant or painful, which is kind of ordinary, routine, repetitive, that's when we tune out, we numb out, we kind of get half asleep as though waiting for something better to happen, more deserving of our attention and our life force

than this ordinary thing. And we get, in the end, very cut off from... If you really think about, for a moment, just how many moments in your day fall into that terrain, sort of the in-between, pleasant and unpleasant. And imagine pressing the off switch with all those moments, which in effect is what we do. It's a lot of moments. We're just not there.

So now we're going to press the on switch. So now we're going to press the on switch. So that is the actual training in mindfulness, is to have that kind of open, fluid, spacious awareness toward that which is pleasant and wonderful that comes our way, that which is painful and difficult that comes our way, too, and all those places in between. So somebody asked me when we were waiting sort of what my practice looked like these days,

my own practice, and I asked in return, do you mean in terms of method, like what do I actually do when I sit, or do you mean in terms of experience? So he said experience. So I think my answer really would have to be sort of along these lines. As I often describe myself as a very beginning meditator,

I was 18 years old. I was in India. I was really practicing introspection in a deep way for the very first time in my life. And I was so judgmental. So that I was freezing all the time, especially around painful and difficult things that were coming up. I was shocked. I was dismayed. I thought it shouldn't be this way. I should have been able to stop this. Why am I feeling this?

And as many of you probably have heard me tell this story about going up, as one example, going up to my first meditation teacher, this man, SN Goenka, and saying to him, I never used to be an angry person before I started meditating, thereby laying blame exactly where I felt it belonged, which was on him. Clearly it was his fault. And of course I'd been hugely angry, but I hadn't really been aware of it. And so those were some very uncomfortable times.

And I began to trace, after a little while, it took some time, began to trace, after a little while, you know, it took some time, but I began to trace my sense of progress, not around what was happening, but I called it moving from, like, intense self-judgment to a kind of rueful amusement, like, oh, you're back, you know, like, hello're back you know like hello again you know whatever and i began to be quite amused at my own mind which is a very good thing right because we can't seem to stop the flow of change actually in terms of pleasant unpleasant neutral all this stuff happens and we look at that image you know some really intense things happen. And even less intense than that, there's sort of the wear and tear, you know, of not getting what we want or, you know, the aches and pains or whatever it might be. And yet, we have so much capacity, each one of us,

to be very different with all of this and to have a whole other relationship. So this doesn't tend to happen by magic. For most of us, this is a question of training. And it's the kind of everyday application of our attention. It's like retraining our attention to be different. And you have to kind of give yourself a break, I think. I think if any of us most likely were sitting down at a piano for the first time, we would have a certain kind of kindness toward ourselves

and not expect some magnificent thing to come out as we're just starting, right? And it's very similar to that. It's a training, which means time, patience. Keep on going. Don't give up. You don't have to judge yourself so harshly. It's not about what's happening. Things are changing. It's okay. And over time, you really do see just what I described to myself,

not necessarily that the content of your experience changes completely, but how you are with it changes completely. And that makes all of the difference. Okay, so let's sit together. And one way of understanding the term resilience is beginning again. So as you sit, see first of all if you can sit comfortably with some energy in your body, like your back's straight but not stiff and uptight. body like your back straight but not like stiff and uptight. You also want to be relaxed and at ease and you can close your eyes or not, however you feel most comfortable. Throughout the course of this sitting as we come to rest our

attention on what will be our primary object, which is the feeling of the breath, you will have to begin again countless times. That's just understood. So you don't have to think of that as a problem. You can think of that as the training. To start with, we might just sit and listen to sound for a few minutes. It's a way of relaxing deep inside, allowing our experience to come and go. Of course, we like certain sounds and we don't like others.

But we don't have to chase after them to hold on or push away. Just let it come, let it go. And bring your attention to the feeling of your body sitting, whatever sensations you discover. Bring your attention to your hands. This is one way of making the transition to the world of direct sensation. So instead of thinking like fingers or hand, what are you feeling? Maybe pulsing or throbbing or pressure or warmth or coolness.

You don't have to name these things, but feel them. That's what we're your attention to the feeling of your breath. The actual sensations of the in and out breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly. So that might be the nostrils or the chest or the abdomen. Thank you. See if you can feel one breath. One breath. See if you can feel one breath. Without concern for what's already gone by.

Without leaning forward for even the very next breath. Just this one. If you like, you can use a quiet mental notation, like in, out, or rising, falling, to help support the awareness of the breath, but very quiet. So your attention is really going to feeling the breath, one breath at a time. And if your attention wanders, you get lost in thought, spun out in a fantasy, or you fall asleep, truly don't worry about it.

We say the most important moment of the whole process is the next moment after you've been gone. Because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. So you don't need to blame yourself, you don't need to get down on yourself. The whole training is in letting go gently and beginning again. Just shepherd your attention back to the feeling of the breath.

And if you have to do that countless times, it's fine. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.. Oh, Lord. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So thank you. Thank you. 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.