Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation with Sharon Salzberg 04/26/2021

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Theme: Awaken Artwork: Buddha Shakyamuni; Tibet; 14th century; gilt copper alloy; Rubin Museum of Art; C2001.10.2(HAR 65025) [http://therubin.org/31v] ; Teacher: Sharon Salzberg The Rubin Museum presents a weekly online meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area, with each session focusing on a specific work of art. This podcast is a recording of the live online session and includes an opening talk and 20-minute sitting session. The guided meditation begins at 17:25. This meditation is presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg, teachers from the NY Insight Meditation Center, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. To attend a Mindfulness Meditation online session in the future or learn more, please visit our website at RubinMuseum.org/meditation. If you would like to support the Rubin Museum and this meditation series, we invite you to become a member and always attend for free. Have a mindful day!

Welcome to the Mindfulness Meditation Podcast presented by the Rubin Museum of Art. We are a museum in Chelsea, New York City that connects visitors to the art and ideas of the Himalayas and serves as a space for reflection and personal transformation. I'm your host, Dawn Eshelman. Every Monday we present a meditation session inspired by a different artwork from the Rubin Museum's collection and led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area. This podcast is a recording of our weekly practice, currently held virtually. In the description for each episode, you will find information about the theme for

that week's session, including an image of the related artwork. Our mindfulness meditation podcast is presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg and teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. And now, please enjoy your practice. Hi, everyone. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art's weekly mindfulness meditation practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. Great to be back here with you all. And thanks for joining us for our weekly practice here.

We are here every week practicing with a different object from our collection as a kind of framing for how we're entering into our practice together. Of course, we at the Rubin here are a museum of Himalayan art and ideas in New York City. So our art has something very specific to say about meditation and the different practices and approaches. It's great to see some of you are joining from all kinds of locations. Hey, Jackson Heights. All right. I invite you not only to tell us where you're joining from, but this month, as many of you know, we are exploring the theme together of what it means to

be awake, awakening. And this comes from an exhibition that we've just recently opened called Awaken, a Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment. So we're asking you to look at moments in your day, in your life, where you are feeling awake, feeling connected, feeling present. And if you'd like to share any of those moments that you might have had over the last week or even just in the last day or so, please do. You're welcome to. Please do. You're welcome to. Please also just want to take this opportunity to invite you to visit the museum, which is following very beautifully safe protocols. You know, it's a real treat to visit right now if that's comfortable for you and you're able to in this very kind of low capacity situation.

It's a very special, quiet time in the museum and hope you do get a chance to take in the new exhibition. Here we go. We'll take a quick look at the artwork that we were looking at as you were waiting here today. And this is coming to us again within this context of awaken, awakening, what it means to be awake in the many definitions through the Tibetan Buddhist lens of enlightenment and through a secular lens as well. And today we're looking at this beautiful, glowing, golden sculpture of Shakyamuni Buddha. This is from 14th century Tibet and this is gilt copper alloy. And we're looking at the Shakyamuni Buddha but with a combination of elements here that suggest something very specific to us. So we see the Buddha in his monk's robes but also with a crown, a kind of Bodhisattva-like crown. And this combination suggests to us that

this is the Vajrasana Buddha. This is really this iconic Buddha from that very moment of his enlightenment, where he sat under the Bodhi tree and called upon the earth to witness him. And we can see a few clues as to the Buddha's enlightenment here in the iconography. If you look from the bottom up, we see seated on a lotus throne. We see that he is in a meditation seated position with his right hand touching the earth in what we call the earth-touching gesture, right? Where he's really in that moment calling upon the earth to witness him. And his other hand is rested, seated in his lap. He has his downcast eyes and two very feather-light eyebrows right above his eyes

that meet in the middle of this very kind of sharp nose. And above that, we have the urna on this mark of the third eye here, which symbolizes his ability to see the divine world and be awake to much more than just what is going on in front of him. And then above that, we have the crown that we discussed and also the ushnisha, this sort of protrusion on the top of his head that also reminds us of his enlightenment, his awakening. So we will practice with our wonderful teacher today who will tell us a little bit more about this idea of awakening. Sharon Salzberg is back.

She's the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry, Massachusetts, and is the author of many wonderful books, Real Change, Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World, Real Love. And you can find all of these, Real Happiness, at the Rubin Bookshop and in many other places as

well. You can learn about all of her wonderful activities. She's had so many wonderful, helpful things going on during this time and visit SharonSalzburg.com to learn more. Hi, Sharon. Welcome. Hi, thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here with all of you and people who are close to me as I read in the chat and people who are very far away. So it's, you know, it's a wonderful gathering. And I'm very intrigued by this word awaken. I think it's just fascinating in that image, which is my favorite image. Those of you who've sat with me here before know i keep choosing you know buddha shakimini with his hand over his knee whenever i have the option and uh it is my favorite image of the buddha and in for many reasons and um as the

legend goes this was the eve just before his enlightenment where the Buddha was challenged by this legendary figure called Mara to get up, to give up. to envision a life that is free, that isn't bound by conditions and habit and culture and so on. And in response, the Buddha then known as the Bodhisattva reached his hand over his knee and called upon the earth to bear witness. And this was just a little period before his enlightenment. And so it symbols that kind of steadiness of vision, that idea of possibility, that belief in oneself, not in a conceited or arrogant way, but in a way that in a sense ties us all together because the capacity, the possibility, the Bodhisattva found within himself and was asserting with that gesture was something that is not just inside him.

That capacity for infinite love and complete compassion for oneself and for others and boundless wisdom and so on is said to be a capacity within each of us. wisdom and so on is said to be a capacity within each of us. And so as he affirmed his right to be there, he was representing all of us because we have a right to have that daring vision. So as the legend goes, the Bodhisattva became the Buddha, became fully enlightened at the appearance of the first morning star. And then he was sitting under a tree, as we know, according to the legend, and he stayed in the vicinity of the tree for 49 days, which, interestingly enough, is the same length of time as depicted in Tibetan Buddhism as the Bardo, the in-between period after the death of a physical body before rebirth into a

new form, which that in-between period can last up to 49 days. So I just thought that was interesting that the Buddha had his own kind of bardo before he re-emerged into the world. And he did various things during those 49 days. He spent, they say, seven days doing walking meditation, seven days happily contemplating causality or dependent origination. He spent seven days gazing at the tree in gratitude for having sheltered him in his night of endeavor. And then he got up and he went to walk to a nearby town where he was going to be reunited

with some of the people he had been on a spiritual journey with earlier. And it said that the first person he encountered was like a merchant who came upon him. So here's the Buddha just 49 days after this immense enlightenment experience, the repercussions of which we are still feeling today. And the man, the merchant, was so struck by his radiance, by his presence, that he said to him, who are you? Like, what are you? Are you some kind of heavenly being, some kind of celestial being? Are you a human being?

What are you? And it said in the response, the Buddha replied, I am awake. I am an awakened one. And that's one of the reasons that I have a fascination with that term, because it is an interesting choice. He might have said, as we say, I'm enlightened. And that apparently was true. But as I think about it, when I say, not that it's true for me, but were I to say I'm enlightened, there is a kind of almost a stagnant quality, like something happened back then and I'm carrying it around with me, or it's somehow solidifying or reifying an experience, rather than it being fully alive and recreated, reborn in every moment.

Whereas awake, to me, more has that sense. I'm awake because of this tremendous opening that set me in a direction where I can manifest that, bring that to life, breathe life into it in every single moment? What does that kind of wakefulness, that awakeness imply? It implies not looking back at something that happened, as extraordinary as it might have been, looking back at something that happened as extraordinary as it might have been, but the immediate presence of all that was contained there. And for me, as I imagine that kind of awakening, that kind of awakeness, I think about being awake

to and connected to and cognizant of the tremendous depth and range and intensity of suffering in this world. that is not contoured by conditions, that is not limited or inhibited by circumstance, that isn't defined by that kind of full-on recognition or encounter. So I think about being awake in terms of many directions or many elements at the same time. If we're only awake to a kind of wondrous experience that we have, I mean, it's hard to find language. I don't know that I would call it an experience really,

but let's just say where we feel a kind of boundless love and awareness no matter what's just say, where we feel a kind of boundless love and awareness, no matter what's going on, but it cannot take in what so many people go through every day, then that's its own weird kind of limitation where we're removed or where there's something, there's some border there that isn't allowing us the full kind of awakeness. And if we are only aware of, say, the suffering and the turmoil and the distress and the uneasiness and the uncertainty of life that we or others are facing, the conditions of life. And there is no sense of, let's say, a place within us that can be at peace or can find energy outside of the normal duality of success and failure. I made it all go away by Tuesday, or I didn't, therefore I failed.

Something that can bring a vision of possibility that isn't occluded by the current circumstance, that remembers the power of love, say, even in awful, awful circumstance, something like that. If we don't have that, then we care, and that's a good thing. But as so many people are experiencing, we burn out. are experiencing, we burn out. It's a massive overload just to take in the difficulty and the pain and the strife and so on. So I think about being awake and having a really, really big consciousness and a sense of possibility and an ability to connect to many sides of many things.

That's how I imagine the Buddha walking off to continue his journey, which became a journey of teaching and serving and offering. Just as almost a side note, they say that as the merchant confronted the Buddha, like, who are you? What are you? And the Buddha said, I am awake. I'm an awakened one. The guy said, yeah, maybe, and he walked away. So that's often used as an example of unskillful kind of doubt. There's a very skillful kind of doubt, which we also need to honor. The willingness to ask questions, to wonder, to investigate, even to challenge, to find out for ourselves what's true. And I sometimes call what that merchant did, which is more like, maybe these days we'd call it cynicism or something like that. I call it walk away doubt. Because he had a choice, actually. He had an option, which would have been

to hang in there with the Buddha, who he found so radiant and immensely impressive, and say, what do you mean you're awake? What does awake mean? How'd you get there? Can anybody get there? Can I be awake? And you don't have to be credulous and you don't have to just take things for granted or believe everything, but there's a way of asking questions because we really want to understand where we're hanging in there kind of doubt, which is really, really important. And so I love the fact that there's the opportunity here to say, what does awake mean to you? Which is almost like taking up the mantle of a

more skillful kind of doubt or questioning or wondering. So let's sit together. You can sit comfortably, close your eyes or not. Just relax. And start by listening to sound, which could be the sound of my voice or other sounds. And unless you are responsible for responding to the sound in some way. See if you can just let it wash through you. 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. Let it come, let it go. Thank you. And bring your attention to the feeling of your body sitting, whatever sensations you

discover. See if you can feel the earth touching you. You have to flip into a kind of receptive mode because space is already touching us. It's always touching us. Now we can feel it. Thank you. Bring your attention to your hands. And see if you can make this shift from the more conceptual level, like your fingers, to the world of direct sensation. Picking up, pulsing, throbbing, pressure, whatever it might be.

You don't have to name these things, but feel them. You can rest your attention in feeling those sensations. Thank you. And bring your attention to the feeling of your breath, on the same level of feeling the sensations. Just the normal natural breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly, most strongly. Maybe that's at the nostrils or the chest or the abdomen. You can find that place. Bring your attention there and just rest. See if you can very next breath.

Just this one. If you like, you can use a very quiet mental notation like in, out, or rising, falling to help support the awareness of the breath, but very quiet if you use it at all. So your attention is really going to feeling the breath, one breath at a time. Thank you. If images or sounds or sensations or emotions should arise, but they're not very strong, if you can stay connected to the feeling of the breath, just let them flow on by. You're breathing. It's just one breath. If something is strong and it just like picks you up and whirls you away, you get lost in thought, you get spun out in a fantasy, or you fall asleep, don't worry about it. It's okay.

We say the most important moment is the next moment after you've been gone. Because in that moment, we can practice gently letting go of whatever is taking you away and with some kindness towards yourself begin again return your attention to the feeling of the breath we let go and we begin again no matter how many times you have to do it, it's fine. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And when you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze and we'll end the meditation. Thank you, Sharon, as always. Such a treat. That concludes this week's practice.

If you would like to support the Ruben and this meditation series, we invite you to become a member. Thank you for listening.