Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 6/14/2017 with Kate Johnson

Episode Date: June 16, 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 and the Interdependence Project. Kate Johnson led this meditation session on June 14, 2017. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/kate-johnson-06-14-2017

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 meditation. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and teachers from the Interdependence Project. 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, everyone. Hi. I hope you all survived that little heat wave we had. Some very hot weather there, and some sweet relief with the rain this morning. But speaking of hot, have you seen this artwork we're looking at today? It's a pretty incredible expression of passion. We are looking at a male and female

deity in an embrace. And this particular deity, the male, is named Guya Samaja Akshobhya Vajra. Try saying that three times fast. And the female may or may not be Vajra Yogini. This is from Tibet, 15th century metalwork. And of course, you know, it's quite, on the surface, quite powerful and striking image to come across in a gallery. And really incredible when you dive a little bit deeper into the symbolism of what this represents through a Buddhist lens. So this is really a depiction of compassion and wisdom in union. And it is those two elements, compassion, which is represented typically by the male in the figure, and wisdom, typically represented by the female, coming together that represents what circumstances, what qualities support enlightenment. And so we're seeing an expression not only of love, of passion, but of this spark and kind of passion that really is all about enlightenment.

This greater love, this love of all beings. And we're talking about love this month. Lucky us. So shout out to Gay Pride out there. And really excited to think about love through lots of different lenses through the artwork here. We talked last week about love of the self, another, and of the whole world. And we'll probably continue to do that throughout the month. I just want to thank our partners, as always, Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and the Hem Himera Foundation and so pleased that Kate Johnson is back with us from the

Interdependence Project she's teaching our session today she teaches mindful yoga in New York City public schools and Buddhist meditation at the Interdependence Project she holds a BFA in dance from the Alvin Ailey School at Fordham University and an MA in performance studies from NYU. She has trained at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Interdependence Project, Laughing Lotus Yoga, and the Presencing Institute.

And she's working on a book about waking up to power and oppression as a spiritual practice. And that's coming out this fall, Parallax Press. Please welcome her back, Kate Johnson. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Yeah, it's good to be here. I'm really excited to be able to work with this theme of love this month. When I got the email, I was like, yes, finally. And as Dawn mentioned, certainly it's a blessing to be able to talk about love during Pride Month.

And maybe even more of a reason to point out that for this particular image, we're not talking about necessarily the sexual union of a male and female person, but the integration of masculine and feminine energies which, as we know, can be present in any gender manifestation. And I also wanted to, you know, talk a little bit more about this integration of wisdom and compassion and really ground it in the root meaning of the word that we usually translate as mindfulness, which is sati.

Many of you might have heard this word before, sati, S-A-T-I. Often translated as mindfulness and from what I understand from scholars has this etymological meaning that is similar to our phrase to remember what it means to remember and so we can think about this as in our mindfulness practice when we discover that we are lost in thought and we remember that we're meditating and we come back you know this is one aspect of the remembering, right? Remembering where we are, who we're with, remembering our true nature. You know, these are all elements of a mindfulness practice. And it has another sense too of remembering, like literally taking the distinct parts of ourselves that have somehow become

split or fragmented in some way, just happens just to kind of get through the day, and remembering them, like putting them back together. And so this quality of integration is something that, and wholeness really is something that I find expressed in this beautiful piece of art that I'd love for us to explore more today. So, you know, all this to say that love has many different kind of flavors and qualities. I always feel a little, I don't know if you guys remember that ridiculous show Flavor of Love on MTV. It was bad. It was like a dating show with Flavor Flav. bad. It was like a dating show with Flava Flav. No one wanted to see it, but the phrase is really great, right? The flavors of love, that there are different qualities. And the last time I was here,

it was during the month where we discussed focus and talked about the kind of fierce love that allows us to say to ourselves when we find ourselves moving towards a, you know, habitual obsessive thought to say no enough, that this can be an expression of love. And today I'd love for us to explore another flavor, which is that one of kind of this flavor of love, the kind of wholeness, integration, the taking of the many arms and wrapping around all of our experience so that there's nothing that needs to be kind of kept outside of our practice.

And these can seem contradictory, but they're really both skillful means for working with this, you know, multifaceted, multidimensional experience. So just to say I recognize that one or the other might be more appropriate for you today, and feel free to work with your practice in the way that your own wisdom allows for.

But if you'd like to try this on, this is the kind of practice that I'll guide. So we'll basically work with a simple mindfulness of breath and body sensation practice. So you may choose a spot to focus on your breath that feels available to you, whether it's the nose or the chest or the belly. If the focus on the breath feels agitated, you could also try another body sensation, like the feeling of the hands resting or the feeling of the tush on the cush, as

one of my friends said, or the feet on the floor, something where we can feel contact and have a sense that, oh, this is a body that I'm aware of right now. And then what tends to happen is we'll stay with that sensation for a while. And then the mind, because it has this kind of tendency to scan, will notice something else. And in that moment, see if it's possible, like rather than, you know, sometimes I don't know about you, but sometimes when I'm practicing mindfulness meditation, I almost have the sense that I'm like shooing flies off of a pie or something, you know, it's like pow, pow, you know, like get back, you know. So to see if it's possible, you know,

with this particular flavor of love to invite whatever, you know, thought stream or whatever sensation, whatever mood that is arising that has drawn your attention away and actually include it in the practice of being with the breath or the body sensation. So it's almost like co-parenting a eight-year-old and, you know, when she wants my attention, often she wants to like go, me to go do something with her somewhere else. And so my job is to kind of of actually include her in what I'm doing so that we still get to spend time together.

And lately that's actually happening in meditation too, which is exciting. So this is an opportunity for us when we find that there's another thought or another body sensation to say, okay, aching shoulder, you can be here too and we're just going gonna be with the breath. Or, okay, worry, okay, heartbreak, I see you, you're welcome here, and is this a breath in or a breath out? So it's a more kind of gentle holding awareness.

And I'll guide us through it, but does that sound okay as kind of a lay of the land overview? Okay, great. So, yeah, please find your comfortable meditation seat. We can let your feet touch the floor if that is available to you. Yeah, like if you'd like to shrug your shoulders up and roll them back or roll the neck a bit. You know, so there's a sense of having enough space. sense of having enough space. And then the hands can be in any configuration. They can be resting on the knees or the thighs,

or they can be clasped in the lap, just a place where the hands feel like they can rest. And also resting the eyes, closing them or letting them soften so that it might be just a teeny bit open, but they're not searching outside. They're resting so that we can turn the attention inside. Just taking a moment to sit without doing much so that our kind of hearts and minds can catch up with our bodies. inviting your whole heart, whole mind to arrive, inviting in. A mentor of mine talks about love as letting ourselves be who we are. Whatever that means for you in this moment.

so whatever that means for you in this moment whether who you are at this moment is a tired person or a agitated person or it's inviting And then within this loving awareness, just choosing a spot to rest your attention so that we start to cultivate a greater stability by finding a physical sensation that feels soothing and studying a sensation we can want to come back to. A sensation perhaps we can even fall a little bit in love with. Whether it's breath, hands, feet. Thank you. And inviting the full heart and mind to be present or pressure, vibration. And notice it changing.

And allowing your awareness to be magnetized by that sensation, just like it is when we're falling in love. It's all we see. Thank you for watching. I'm noticing if there are any visitors that have arrived in your awareness, a thought about the future or past, another bodily sensation that's pulling your attention, or a mood in the mind. If you can kind of inwardly welcome this, whatever it is, and yes, this can be included too, and let's watch with the breath. Let's be with the hands. together. Thank you. Thank you for watching. I'm going to show you the inside of the house. The house is a little bit small, but it's a nice place to live. The house is a little bit small, but it's a nice place to live. The house is a little bit small, but it's a nice place to live.

The house is a little bit small, but it's a nice place to live. Thank you for watching. Again, noticing if anything is pulling the attention, and rather than pushing back against it, see if it's possible to reach out and include. And then as we return to our objective focus, the breath or the body sensation, to focus the breath or the body sensation, noticing if there's a sense of wholeness, integration, mind, body, heart together, remembering. Remembering. Thank you for watching! I'm going to show you the video of the Thank you for watching. Rengoku-machi Remembering. Thank you for watching! I'm going to take a picture of the Thank you for watching. R1 Thank you for watching! Rekordverk. Thank you for watching! Remembering. Thank you for watching! Rekordverk. Thank you. And now, just gradually starting to widen the awareness so that we're opening up the frame of the picture and really taking in, in a felt sense kind of way the entire body at this moment. I'm feeling that space that we're in. sensing our presence on the planet this moment and our connection with all of the other beings on this planet and including the whole entire package for a moment in our loving awareness. And what if everything could be included in our practice? So whenever you're ready, you can feel free to slowly raise your gaze,

start to move the fingers, stretching out if you'd like. Your room was so still. Thank you for your practice. 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.