Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation with Sharon Salzberg 08/21/2019

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

The Rubin Museum of Art presents a weekly 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 recorded in front of a live audience, and includes an opening talk, a 20-minute sitting session, and a closing discussion. The guided meditation begins at 15:50. If you would like to attend Mindfulness Meditation sessions in person or learn more, please visit our website at RubinMuseum.org/meditation. This program is presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. Sharon Salzberg led this meditation session on August 21, 2019. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: https://rubinmuseum.org/mediacenter/sharon-salzberg-08-21-2019-podcast If you’re enjoying this podcast, you can listen to more recorded events at the Rubin, such as the conversation by Black American Buddhist leaders on activism and community, with DaRa Williams, Kamilah Majied, and Willie Mukei Smith. You can find it at: https://rubinmuseum.org/mediacenter/black-american-buddhists-on-activism-and-community

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. 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. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and our weekly mindfulness meditation session. My name is Zaley Lewis. I'm filling in for Dawn today. She's out. I'm an apprentice museum educator here at the Rubin,

and for the past several months, I have been working on our mindfulness program, picking your artworks, scheduling your teachers, and since today is my last day here with all of you, thank you, I just wanted to take a quick minute to say how wonderful it has been to get to know some of you from week to week, and I look forward to joining you in the audience someday. I'm also very excited to be here to join you for our final discussion of fear. So for the past few weeks, we have been talking about fear as this emotion that brings about very complex responses for all of us, whether that's psychologically, physiologically, or behaviorally. All of these

responses center on our aversion to pain in some way. And so our aversion and these responses impact the ways in which we interact with the people in the world around us. And I wanted to talk about the difference there between the good fear and the bad fear. And so the good fear is the stuff that keeps us safe. It keeps us from getting in trouble as we move through the world. But the bad fear are the things that prevent us from reaching our goals, that prevent us from acting in compassionate ways with the people in which we're community with. So this bad fear that I'm talking about is the cause of much of the suffering that we see in the world around us. And that is because a number of schools of thought say it's because ego and our desire to control our lives and the things that are happening around us

thrives on our fear. And this is what leads us to act in ways that are not compassionate to others and that cause the suffering that we see. And so we wanted to talk about fear this year during our power year at the Rubin because power and fear are so intricately related. As we experience fear or are fearful in different situations, we tend to seek control in whatever way we can get that. And that often looks like finding power over others. And so the artwork that I picked for us to talk about today is Hatha Daya. It is from Nepal in the 16th century, and it's part of our Masterworks collection, which is on the third floor. So this mask, which is rather monumental in size, depicts the fierce form of the Hindu god

Shiva. It's also known as Bhairava, or the terrifying one. And as we look at this piece, we can see it looks quite scary, just from the surface. So he's got this broad face, very bulging eyes. His hair stands straight out on end. If you look very closely, he's got a fiery goatee around his gaping mouth. And he's got a crown that has a number of skulls placed around it. skulls placed around it. And so Bhairava is the embodiment of Shiva's destructive power in the universe. And Bhairava is petitioned with this power to eliminate ignorance and ego. And as I mentioned earlier, that ego is really what's driving and thriving on our fear and impacting how we interact with this world.

And so one of these iconographic pieces that really speaks directly to this issue of ego and fear is the snake that's very small and very closely to the top of the crown. Does everyone see that? Okay. So this snake in many tellings represents the ego or fear that needs to be overcome in our lives. And I can think about this very literally. I hate snakes. I'm afraid of them. So if I were, in theory, to put one on my crown, I would very literally need to check my ego and get over that fear. And so while this piece looks very fear-inducing and might scare us, Bhairava exists to help us move through fear or to improve our lives. And so that asks me to reflect on how these fear-inducing things I might be experiencing in my life are actually there to help me more in the long run. And so to help us discuss this concept a little further is our wonderful teacher, Sharon Salzberg. And as many of you know, Sharon is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barrie, Massachusetts.

She's been studying and teaching for many years, and she is also the author of a great number of books, another one to come at some point soon. But her books include Real Love, The Art of Mindful Connection, and Real Happiness, The Power of Meditation, both of which can be found upstairs in our shop. And Sharon is also a regular contributor to publications such as On Being and The Huffington Post. So please join me in welcoming Sharon. She's scary looking.

Hello. Yes, all my book titles have real in them now. Scary. That's scary too. So hi, what a topic. It's so great. So different types of fear, it's true. That fear is considered like a signal emotion, it signals us that something has arised, something

might be dangerous, something is threatening, something needs to be cautioned against, or something like that. And yet, you know, sometimes it's a true reflection of what's arising, what we're confronting. And sometimes it is a construct in the mind. And some people try to use the word anxiety to distinguish it from a kind of appropriate fear or useful fear when it is just that construct like, oh, no, what if there's a storm and I can't get home? There's people waiting for me, you know, and then and then and then what if my umbrella breaks on top of everything else? You know know so the way I like to think of it

actually is is encapsulated in a story that one of my own teachers this Tibetan teacher named Sukhne Rinpoche tells often he has a book which might be upstairs as well, I'm not sure. And his name is T-S-O-K-N-Y-I. Remember Che, if you look for the book, I can't totally remember the name of the book. But he tells a story about being in, I believe it's Malaysia. You can tell me. It's Singapore and Malaysia. Some place that has these two enormous high buildings that are connected by

like a sky bridge. Singapore. Okay. So he's in Singapore and it's a very, very high bridge. And he had a companion with him who just blithely walked across to get to the other building. just blithely walked across to get to the other building. And he himself, the Tibetan Lama, took a few steps and he panicked. And he stepped back. And he talks about and has written about what he tried to do to address the fear. Because what we're actually looking for, the gap we're looking for, is not between what we're actually feeling and what we think we should feel. The gap is between what we're feeling and how we act. You know, you may see somebody's beautiful shawl and get

filled with desire. And that's different than kind of like sneaking your hand out when they're not looking and stealing it, right? So we blame ourselves so badly sometimes for what we're feeling. And yet the gap really that's most crucial is later, you know, because we learn different ways of dealing with our feelings so that we have more clarity, we have more space, we have a sense of choice. Do I want to carry this out? Is this something I more want to let go?

So there he was, taking a few steps, panicking, and coming back. And he tried many things to not have the fear. He could see his friend over in the other building waving to him. So he was really embarrassed. And he tried suppressing it. It didn't work. He tried talking himself out of it. He'd look at two people walking across. And he'd say to himself, well, they're two. I'm just one. It doesn't crumble under them. It's not going to crumble under me. Nothing worked. And he tried and tried all these different things. At one point, he said he thought he was going to have to go all the way down the

million flights of stairs, cross on the road, and go all the way up to meet his friends. So what he finally did that was successful was he, as he started taking some steps and felt the fear arise, he said to himself, it's real, but it's not true. It's real in that I am actually feeling this. I don't have to pretend I'm not. I don't have to disparage the arising of the feeling. It's real. And yet it's not true. It's not reflecting a truth. It's something that is disconnected from reality. from reality. And I sometimes use that saying. I find it very interesting.

It's real. Like, this is what I feel. And the huge amount of effort we sometimes undertake to try to pretend otherwise is useless. You know, we don't have to feel ashamed of our feeling, and we don't have to identify with of our feeling and we don't have to

identify with it like this is all I'll ever feel for the rest of my life. But it's genuine. It's authentic. It's now. It's happening. And yet, does it reflect some kind of truth or not. And sometimes it does, like, let's get out of here. Or sometimes it really doesn't. And we can have the discernment often to be able to tell if we just step back a little bit and look. So that's the role of mindfulness. It's not to make what we're feeling disappear or annihilate some part or element of our experience, but to be able to know more clearly for ourselves, is this reflecting a greater truth? Or you know how it is? I mean, this is even harder to catch sometimes.

When you meet someone and some assumption about them just comes up in your mind. And we're so in it, we don't necessarily stop to look at that assumption. Like does that bear any relationship to the truth? But we can. You know, even if it's just moving to a place of, you know, actually, I don't know. I am working on another book, except I'm sitting here with you all. And I'm telling a story in that book that I actually told in real love. So you're the only people who know that. Until it comes out.

And it's about that kind of thing, which isn't really fear, but it's about an assumption where I have, and it's a story I tell to really disguise the people involved, so it takes me a moment usually. I have a friend who's a writer who was on tour, like in the Midwest somewhere, and he gave his talk about his book, and somewhere in the talk he mentioned that when he'd been younger, he was very influenced by reading Proust, The Remembrances of Things Past. And he gave the talk, he went out to dinner, and this group of people came into the restaurant. And he glanced over at them, and this one woman kind of separated herself from the

and he glanced over at them, and this one woman kind of separated herself from the group and came closer to him, and he thought, well, she looks really kind of dull, uneducated. He just made that snap assumption about her. And then she came up to him, and she said, I was at your talk. So his heart sank. He thought, oh, what could she possibly have understood? And then she said something like, I really liked what you said about Proust, but I find that I get much more out of reading him in the original French.

Which was quite a moment for him. It was like, oh, right. So it's the same thing with the fear arises. We just want to step back a bit. You know, it's not to disparage what we're feeling again. It's not to, you know, feel bad, like we should be better, we should be fearless, whatever our image is. But just step back a little bit so that we can ask, is it true?

Does it seem actually connected to anything that I'm facing? Or is this a relic? Is something old gotten activated? Or is this just some assumption that's working in me in a way that I'm not catching? And that's what we need, to have a greater sense of balance, because what we're looking for, in contrast to thinking we have to eradicate the feeling, we're looking for that gap so that we can then decide, okay, I think I will go downstairs in

the elevator and maybe go up the other side or not. And then we're empowered, even with the arising of a very strong feeling like fear. Okay, let's sit together. See if you can sit comfortably. You can close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease. Let your attention settle on the feeling of the breath. Wherever you feel the breath most distinctly,

the nostrils, the chest, or the abdomen. Thank you. If you like, you can use a quiet mental notation like in, out, or rising, falling to help support the awareness of the breath. So the breath is like our refuge. This is our ground. Something comes up, imagery, thinking, sound, emotion, whatever it might be. If it's not very strong, if you can stay connected to the feeling of the breath, just let it flow on by your breathing. But if it is strong and it pulls you away, you get lost in thought, you fall asleep,

really don't worry about it. See if you can just recognize oh this is the experience this is what has pulled me away and then see if you can let go and bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

That concludes this week's practice. If you would like to attend in person please check out our website rubenmuseum.org meditation to learn more if you're enjoying this podcast you can listen to more recordings from gatherings at the ruben such as the conversation by black american buddhist leaders on activism and community with dara william Camila Majeed, and Willie Mukay Smith. You can find it at rubinmuseum.org slash media center. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day. you