Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 6/6/2018 with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: June 8, 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 June 6, 2018. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/sharon-salzberg-06-06-2018

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. And now, please enjoy your practice. Once upon a time, about 2,500 years ago, in fact, in a land far, far away, actually it was in Nepal, on the border of Nepal and India in an area called Lumbini, lived a young prince named Siddhartha. And when this prince was born to this king and queen, it was prophesied that he would either become a great king himself or a spiritual leader.

Now, being parents with ambition for their child, these parents decided that the king option was the way to go. So they groomed their young son to become the leader of their community and kind of shunned any directions towards the spiritual path. And they surrounded their young son with all of the pleasures of life, with best intentions, really trying to give him everything that was wonderful about royal life, amazing food and luxuries and all kinds of things. And so this young man grew up knowing nothing of the suffering in the world around him

until one day, as all good young people do, he escaped. He ventured forth into the town around his castle, and he saw things he had never seen before. He saw a person who was old and ailing. He saw someone who was sick. He saw, in fact, a person who had died, and it shook him to his core, particularly when he realized that this would happen to him and to everyone he loved. This was his own personal discovery of suffering and the fact that suffering is generally a part of life. And he had a very difficult time coming to terms with this, having never seen it before. Then in there, he decided that he would abandon his royal life and seek an end to suffering, to seek kind of a meaning and a purpose around all of this suffering. And that is what he did. He gave everything up, his family, his wealth,

and he went on a big journey and tried out all kinds of spiritual paths and even to the extremes of the aesthetic life and giving up food and nourishment really to be able to focus on his spiritual practice. So he did this for a number of years until he decided that by actually saying yes to an offer of generosity from a woman who was passing by who saw him meditating and really struggling in his non-nourished state. And she offered him some rice milk or rice pudding, some say. And in fact, he took it. It was right around that time that he was kind of battling in his mind the forces of Mara, this demon who was trying to distract him with all kinds of things.

And in fact, he meditated through the night with the strength that he had from this nourishment. And as the sun was rising in the morning, he kind of in honor of and support of this focus, this concentration that he had, he made the gesture of touching the earth and kind of asking the earth to witness him. And in that moment, he became enlightened. And that is the story of the Buddha. So we are talking about story this month. Story in a few different senses,

but in terms of the Tibetan Buddhist culture, story and narrative paintings and oral history are hugely important and were ways and still are that are really emphasized in terms of passing down of wisdom from one generation to the next in terms of really carrying on stories, the spirit of stories, histories. And the Lamamani, this kind of figure or role that some would play in communities was this revered storyteller who would pass through often with narrative paintings

as props that they would unroll on the tankas or the scrolls, scrolled paintings, and be able to point out different scenes of the stories and really share and educate people through these memes. So story, I think, is something that we can consider as something that's important in perhaps modern day New York City life just as equally. And it's an interesting one because I think it can sometime, from a meditation point of view, through that lens, through that framework, is something that, you know, if we feel we are too attached to a particular story about ourselves, can perhaps get in our way in terms of meditation or spiritual practice. It's also something that really helps us create who we

are and change who we are throughout our time. So we'll be talking about story this month. So happy to have Sharon Salzberg back here with us. And Sharon is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barrie, Massachusetts. She is a beloved teacher and author, and her most recent book is Real Love. You can find that and many others upstairs in the shop. We're so delighted to have her back. Please welcome her, Sharon Salzberg. Thank you. Hello.

It's summer in New York City. I just got back from Los Angeles. Well, from Barry, Massachusetts, Santa Fe, and then Los Angeles. It's been a long trip. Here I am. Hey. It's so great, and it's so delightful to have this particular image because this is actually my favorite story. It's my favorite story within the Buddhist tradition. It's my favorite story altogether, I think, because it is, just as Don was saying, it's the story of the Buddha's enlightenment and especially that moment

there is this kind of legendary figure called Mara who's sort of the satanic figure in Buddha's teaching he's also, he's like a heavenly being he's a celestial being so the Buddha then known as the Bodhisattva or someone aspiring to enlightenment, as somehow, you know, if this guy gets enlightened, he's outside of my sway, you know, he's sort of beyond me, I can't let that happen. So as, you know, as she said, the Bodhisattva went and sat

under a tree with the determination not to get up until he was completely free of conditioning, of habit, of constraint in terms of delusion and those limitations we have. They're just kind of manufactured. So he wasn't going to get up from under that tree until he was completely free. And then Mara tried to distract him and make him get up, basically. And so through the night, as Mara was taunting him and creating hailstorms and rainstorms and ghoulish sounds and these incredibly seductive figures trying to lure him away, and these incredibly seductive figures trying to lure him away. And the Bodhisattva would always just sit there, undeterred.

And so the last attack of Mara, it's said, is basically one of self-doubt. He said to the Bodhisattva, especially if he'd been from New York, he said, who do you think you are? You know, like, who do you think you are to even imagine you could get free? Who do you think you are? To think you can sit under this tree and go right through all those delusions

and all those limitations and all those assumptions about life and come into harmony with how things are. Who do you think you are? And that's when the Bodhisattva made that gesture. He reached over his knee and he touched the earth. He asked the earth itself to bear witness to the many lifetimes, it would be said, that he had practiced generosity and kindness and morality,

all kinds of qualities that in a way had created the moral force that swept him right up to that moment in time at the base of that tree. So he was saying, yeah, I have a right to dream that big or have that high an aspiration. Actually, I do have that right. So he touched the earth. The earth shook in response. That was the way the earth were witnessed.

And Mar, feeling that, realized he was vanquished and he fled into the night. The Bodhisattva was enlightened with the appearance of the first morning star. And so here we are in Chelsea, you know, like 2,600 years later, telling that story or a version of that story to ourselves and out loud to one another. It's a story of possibility, right?

It's a story of what do you do with those voices that come at you internally or externally that say, who do you think you are? You can't do it. You can't. I mean, you know, maybe you can do like a fraction of that. You can't really do that. What do you do when you face all of that, the fear and the desire and the confusion and the doubt. And look at that. We can keep sitting there. We have a right to be sitting there. We don't have to think, oh, you know, not me.

Or, oh, how correct you are. I can't do anything. Or whatever it might be. We touch the earth all the time. It's almost reflected in what is actually on my, I don't know if it's still on my website. It was on my original website. I had a very early website.

And when friends wanted to do it over, they would say to me, oh, this is like a legacy website. It was like a list. So part of the list of my original website was Sharon's favorite sutta. Sutta is the word for Buddha's text in Pali, or sutra in Sanskrit. And it turns out my favorite sutta, which it is,

it's not a whole sutta, it's a passage, comes from the Buddha where he says, abandon that which is unskillful. Skillful and unskillful are kind of the poles in Buddhist psychology. When we look at our own emotions, we look at the forces that arise within us. We look at anger, joy, jealousy, generosity. We look at all these different things that arise.

We don't really call them good and bad or right and wrong. We call them skillful, that which leads to the end of suffering, or unskillful, that which leads to more and more suffering. So that's a different approach right there. So the Buddha's saying, abandon that which is unskillful, that which is gonna cause suffering for yourself and for others. You can abandon the unskillful.

If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it but because now you know why it's my favorite passage but because it is possible I say abandon the unskillful then he goes on to say if abandoning the unskillful would cause harm I would not ask you to do it, but because it connects us or reconnects us

to a greater sense of possibility and openness and our own potential for love and compassion, etc., that's why he asks us to do it. And then the sutta goes on to say, cultivate the good, right? That's like the skillful. That which does have us feel more connected and understanding rather than sort of being in a very reactive state

and really having insight into the nature of our experience. Cultivate the good. You can cultivate the good. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it. But because it is possible, then I say, cultivate the good. And I really, I just love that. You know, that Buddha thinks I can do it. Look at that. Which actually was a very meaningful thing for me. We have every day, many times a day, we have these moments where we can say, yeah, you know, I'll just do this again, or whatever,

not taking the time to realize, oh, that caused a lot of pain last time I did it. That was just yesterday. Let's try another approach. And then cultivate the good. Sometimes it feels like a risk to be kind or to be present in some way. But how about undertaking that as an experiment? but how about undertaking that as an experiment?

It's a very different story about our lives altogether and really using all of our day, all of our life, as our own kind of creative medium, because here we are. All these moments. Are we going to go here or are we going to go there? So let's sit together so presence is the basis of even being able to see what's going on in our minds and we deepen and help establish presence usually through awareness of something

like the feeling of the breath it's just a way of steadying our attention so even if we get distracted over time it's not for as long we can come back more and more gracefully so see if you can settle your attention on the feeling of the breath. Just the normal, natural breath. You don't have to try to make it deeper or different. Wherever you feel it most distinctly, nostrils, chest, or abdomen, wherever. Find that place, bring your attention there, and just rest.

See if you can feel one breath. 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. Thank you. As you find your attention wandering, you get lost in thought, spun out in a fantasy, or you fall asleep, truly don't worry about it. See if you can let go gently of whatever's taking you away. Bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath. We let go and we begin again. Thank you. Thank you. Takk for watching! Gullu Thank you. Thank you. 1.5 tbsps of sugar 1 tbsps of honey 1 tbsps of honey 1 tbsps of honey

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1 tbsps of honey 1 tbsps of honey Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. um Thank you. Thank you. rubenmuseum.org slash meditation to learn more. Sessions are free to Ruben Museum members, just one of the many benefits of membership. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day.