Mindfulness Meditation With Jon Aaron 08/03/2023

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 practice begins at 12:18.

Transcript

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, Tashi Chodron. Every Thursday, 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 in-person practice. 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 Inside Meditation Center, The Interdependence Project and Parabola magazine and supported by the Frederic P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism. And now, Please enjoy your practice. Good afternoon, Everyone, And Tashi Delek. Welcome. Welcome to the Mindfulness Meditation at the Rubin Museum of Art. I am Tashi Chodron, Himalayan Programs and Communities Ambassador, And I'm so happy to be your host today. We are a global hub for Himalayan art with a home base in New York City, And we are so glad to have all of you join us for this weekly program where we combine art and meditation. From our collection, We will first take a look at work of art from our collection. We will then hear a brief talk from our teacher, John Aaron, And then we will have a short sit, 15 to 20 minutes, For the meditation guided by him. Now let's take a look at today's theme and artwork. The theme this month is acceptance, And the artwork for this session is this beautiful Shakyamuni and the scenes from his life. This is from the origin, Tsang Province, Central Tibet, Dated 14th century, Mineral pigment on cloth, And it's about 30 x 23 x 1 4 inches. This is a beautiful Thangka painting, Mineral pigment on cloth. And the connection to the theme is this work of art reflects the theme of acceptance. It depicts the Buddha's ability to confront and overcome obstacles, Which are symbolized by Mara and his army on the path to enlightenment. This beautiful Thangka painting features many characteristics of early Tibetan painting. This detailed representation of the Buddha's life is based on a composition derived from northeastern India. At the center of the painting is a depiction of the Buddha's awakening. Here we see Mara, A personification of evil, And Mara's army attempting to stop the Buddha from reaching enlightenment. How are they doing this? By sending him illusions of beautiful women? That didn't work. By sending in an army with slings and arrows of monstrous distraction? That didn't work. Then finally, By challenging his aspiration, By what authority did a mere human have to reach enlightenment, And that is when Siddhartha reached down to touch the earth, To bear witness to his ultimate insight, Which is within each of us the seed that is basic goodness, The wisdom, And the session that we are meeting every week is to awaken that seed so that we can remove and tame the afflictive emotions, Which are anger, Hatred, Jealousy. Now let's bring on our teacher for today. Our teacher is John Aaron. John Aaron is well known as a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR, As well as a trainer of new teachers of this seminal eight-week curriculum. Among his primary interests are the use of meditation and somatic work in healing trauma and working with individuals with chronic pain and grief. When the pandemic hit, Along with his partner, He co-founded Space to Meditate, An online community of meditators that is still going strong six days a week. John, Thank you so much for being here. Please help me in welcoming John Aaron. Thank you so much. Always good to be here. And acceptance. Wow. I could talk about that all afternoon, But I only have a few minutes. So one of the qualities of the heart, One of the four divine abodes is upekkha or equanimity or equipose. And equanimity is, I wouldn't say it's synonymous with acceptance, But it's certainly a major one who is equanimous, Is able to be in balance with whatever is being thrown at them. So going back to this image of the Buddha being attacked by Mara with the dancing ladies and with the arrows and everything else that Mara wanted to throw at him, He sat in equipose. He wasn't moved by any of this, Which doesn't mean he was ignoring it, Right? It just meant that whatever was being thrown, He was aware of it, But he wasn't reactive to it. And this is a quality of Buddha nature. This is a quality of the awakened heart. And it doesn't mean, And this is really important, It doesn't mean because we are accepting things as they are that we don't want them to change. It depends on what it is, Obviously. And so on an individual level, If we're suffering from pain or if we're suffering from a noisy neighbor or if we're suffering on the way down here, The subway was meticulously noisy and there was actually somebody smoking in the car that I was in. So rather than confront the person, I decided to move cars. So I made a change rather than accepting the smoke that was being, You know, Infusing the room and infusing the car. So these, You know, We change things if we can, If it's appropriate and if it doesn't harm anybody. And we can think about acceptance on a number of levels, Right? So there's individual acceptance, Stuff that is happening to me, How do I work with that? Whether it's physical pain, Emotional pain, Any sort of challenge in my life, How do I work with that? There's acceptance of other people, Right? So, You know, We may have resentment or hatred for somebody's actions, Have to work with that. And then there's, You know, The most challenging thing is acceptance of the nature of the world, Especially as it is right now. I'm not going to get into that one. I have a class coming up in the fall, If you'd like to ask me about it, That's more relevant to that. Right now, I just want to talk about primarily accepting emotional pain, Accepting physical pain and being able to work with that. We have a formula that we often put out, Which is pain times resistance equals suffering. Pain times resistance equals suffering. Pain times acceptance equals freedom, At least freedom from that suffering. So some of you may know, In early January I had heart surgery, Open heart surgery, Which was a unique experience for any of you that have ever experienced it. And the week or so after the surgery, When they mend your sternum together with titanium bands, Whenever you cough or whenever you laugh, And sometimes just whenever, You feel this shooting pain that's arising from the bands and just the healing itself. And I could have said, I don't like this, I don't want this, But I had no choice, Right? It was just there. So the way I was able to work with it, And it was really interesting, Was being curious about it. So what is the sensation that I'm labeling as pain? What is that? Right? It's a lot of different things, But the habitual mind just labels it as pain and doesn't want it and wants to get rid of it. Whereas the mind that's been trained a bit is curious about it and actually holds it from a very different place. Like this is just the way it is right now. I know it's going to change, You know, I know it's only going to last a few seconds and it's really only going to last a few weeks, Maybe a month or so, Which is exactly what happened. So, You know, When we have these opportunities to work with, And I wouldn't have called that necessarily a small pain, But any kind of pain, You know, That gives us an opportunity to practice with curiosity and to practice with self-compassion. It's like, Yeah, This is how it is right now. It kind of sucks, But you know, I can, I can hold it. It's possible to hold it. And actually when we're in formal meditation practice, We have that opportunity all the time. Yeah. So we have little pains that come up as we're sitting. We may have itches that come up as we're sitting and these are all just opportunities to learn, To be curious about our reactivity. So that's the first thing that we notice or other sensations that are arising with it or just what is this sensation, You know? So as I guide the practice today, That's really what we'll kind of play with. Now, You know, Working with accepting others, Accepting others, Unskillful actions that may be aimed toward us. The only thing I'll say about that is this is where compassion also has a huge role as well as opening one's perspective because again, When somebody is offending us directly or indirectly, All we feel is the offense. We have no idea what that offense is a result of. We have no idea what conditions this person is coming from. We have no idea what the karmic conditions are behind it. There's all sorts of things that we have no knowledge of except the only knowledge is there is something else that we don't know. So we know that we don't know something and if we open that perspective up, Then we might be able to have compassion for that person who is offensive or causing harm. So again, This is an enormous topic and I'm just touching on a little bit right now in our practice today, We'll kind of play with this a bit. So I just invite you to find a comfortable posture. So you know, When we're talking about working with difficulty, We want to at least start from a posture that is comfortable. The wonderful teacher Ajahn Chah, Who was a teacher of many teachers in this tradition in this country, In the early Buddhist traditions, The Thai forest tradition, I have a quote here, He says, We're giving up the war against how things are, Otherwise we're just fighting a war the whole time. So when we talk about acceptance, We're giving up that war. We find other ways to make the changes versus like fighting. So when it comes to our own internal struggles, What is it like not to fight it, But to say, Okay, This is how it is. And what else? So you find your posture, Maybe taking a few very deep and deliberate breaths, Just aware now of how the body feels sitting here in this moment. And how is the breath just now? We don't have to do anything with the breath, Just allowing the body to breathe however it wants or needs to breathe in this moment. So we're aware of this physical body and the sensations arising and fading away here, What's present in the emotional frame and what's present in the thought realm. Perhaps there's some kind of ongoing repetitive thought rumination and fight the rumination or we can just recognize it for what it is, Just thought repeating itself. What's here now, Nothing needs to be done about it, Can just be present. What else is here? And when you find resistance arising to whatever happens to be present, Whether it's physical or emotional or something in the thought realm, Recognize the resistance. Don't resist the resistance, Care for the resistance just as you do for everything else. Resistance is a pushing away and we are practicing holding whatever is here, But holding it with care, Holding it with curiosity. And if some discomfort arises because of your posture, Again, Being curious about the sensations. Is it one sensation? Is it many sensations? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it moving? And if nothing changes and you can make an adjustment, Then by all means. If an itch arises, Inevitably they do, The habitual mind immediately scratches, But in practice it's an opportunity to recognize, Accept, Ah, This is arising just now, Be curious and see what happens. You might even find it helpful at times to visualize the Buddha sitting there with all the arrows being sent his way by Mara. What really happened was that those arrows were then turned into flowers, Flower petals, Or that's the story, But just that visualization that whatever may be aimed at you at this moment that you find challenging, Just allowing it to turn into a flower. One of the ways that people practice cultivating equanimity is to just repeat a phrase, I accept things as they are just now, Or may I accept things as they are just now. This is a poem by Lin Ungar. One morning you might wake up to realize that the knot in your stomach had loosened itself and slipped away and that the pit of unfulfilled longing in your heart had gradually and without you really noticing been filled in, Patched like a pothole, Not quite the same as it was, But good enough. In that moment, It might occur to you that your life, Though not the way you planned it and maybe not even entirely the way you wanted it, Is nonetheless persistently, Abundantly, Miraculously exactly the way it is. So one of the things one of my teachers always said was, And this will sound familiar to many of you, Accept the world just as it is now while making it the best place you can. So we accept things as they are now, But we do everything possible to make it the best place we can. And that's whether it's with us or with our others in our lives or the world as we see it right now, Which is a mess. Thank you. Thank you so much for that, John. That concludes this week's practice. To support The Rubin and this meditation series, We invite you to become a member at rubinmuseum. Org slash membership. If you are looking for more inspiring content, Please check out our other podcast, Awaken, Which uses art to explore the dynamic paths to enlightenment and what it means to wake up. Season two, Hosted by Raveena Arora, Is out now and explores the transformative power of emotions using a mandala as a guide, Available wherever you listen to podcasts. And to stay up to date with The Rubin Museum's virtual and in-person offerings, Sign up for a monthly newsletter at rubinmuseum. Org slash e-news. I am Tashi Chodron. Thank you so much for listening. Have a mindful day.