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 Insight Meditation Center,
The Interdependence Project and Parabola magazine and supported by the Frederick P.
Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism.
And now,
Please enjoy your practice.
Good afternoon,
Everyone.
Tashi Delek and welcome.
Welcome to the Return of Mindfulness Meditation with Rubin Museum of Art.
I'm Tashi Chodron,
Programs Manager and Communities Ambassador and Himalayan Programs.
And I'm so happy to be your host today.
So wonderful to see so many familiar faces and I see new faces as well.
This is wonderful.
So we are a museum of Himalayan art and ideas in New York City.
And we are so glad to have all of you join us for this session where we combine art and meditation inspired from our collection.
We will take a look at work of art from our collection.
We will then hear a brief talk from our teacher.
And we are so happy to have Kaira Jwelingo in person.
Kaira has led many online sessions during the pandemic and we are so happy to have Kaira in person.
And then we will have a short sit,
About 15 to 20 minutes for the meditation guided by her.
And let's take a look at today's theme and artwork.
We've been exploring on the theme of unity.
So this month and today is the last Friday of this month,
Right?
As you recall,
We had this wonderful connection to the unity,
Which is the wisdom and compassion.
So the last session was the union of wisdom and compassion.
And the art connection for today's session that is handpicked by our teacher,
Kaira Jwelingo,
Is this beautiful painting,
Mineral Pigment on Cloth of Shakyamuni Buddha.
In Tibetan,
He's known as Sangye Shachatupa,
The enlightened one of Shakya clan.
And this painting is from central Tibet.
It's the 18th century.
And the dimension of this painting is about 28 and a half into 18 and a half.
It's the rough estimate.
And a beautiful painting on the mineral pigment and cloth of Shakyamuni Buddha.
The painting is actually based on wood carved block print,
Carved at Dergye Parkang in the early half of the 20th century.
The original painting and design is attributed to the Dukpa Kagyuk teacher and artist Khamtul Rinpoche from Tashi Jong in Kham,
Tibet.
And the Dergye Parkang is one of the oldest printing block house in eastern part of Tibet.
So this composition was later carved at the Dergye printing house and added to the Shakyamuni Buddha life story set of depiction.
Seated on the side of the vulture's peak,
As you see here,
Discoursing on the Lotus Sutra,
Buddha holds upraised in the right hand a single lotus flower.
As you see here,
Usually we see Shakyamuni Buddha sitting in an earth-touching gesture where his left hand is in open meditation and right hand palm facing the knees,
Fingers pointing towards the earth,
Right?
But this is a very unique and a beautiful painting where the Buddha's right hand is holding a single lotus blossom signifying the unique and the beautiful nature of the wisdom of emptiness.
You see various Buddhas and arhats and monks gathered above and at the sides here.
And then at the bottom,
As you see here,
Is one of the long life Buddha,
Often female Buddha,
In fact,
Is White Tara.
She associates with longevity or long life.
So now let's bring on our teacher for today.
Kaira Jwalingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in blending spirituality with social justice.
After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh's monastic community,
Kaira Jwal now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition as well as in secular mindfulness at the intersection of racial,
Climate,
And social justice with a focus on activists,
Black,
Indigenous,
People of color,
Artists,
Educators,
Families,
And youth.
Based in New York,
She offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is the author of We Were Made for These Times,
10 Lessons in Moving Through Change,
Loss,
And Disruption from Parallax Press.
For more information,
Please visit kairajwal.
Com.
Please help me in welcoming Kaira Jwalingo.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
Wonderful to see you all and to be here in person.
I have really enjoyed offering these sessions online over about a year or so,
But it's lovely to be here with you in person all the way from Long Island.
Had an adventurous subway ride.
So our theme today is unity,
And I was thinking about this in terms of three different aspects.
And one is unity with ourselves,
Unifying the different parts of ourselves,
How essential that is to really have a life worth living,
Right?
Then secondly,
Unity in relationships and communities,
Like the importance of being part of something larger than our own individual cares.
And then the third aspect is unity with all of life.
And so I'll share a little bit about these three aspects of unity and how they are all unified as well,
How they interact and are influencing each other.
So when I think of the Buddha's whole project of coming into awakening and sharing that awakening in the world,
It was addressing all the ways we are divided within ourselves and from each other and from life,
From the earth.
So just like the word yoga,
It means unity.
The path of practice,
The path of spiritual development is a path of unity,
Of bringing together the different parts of ourselves that have become alienated,
Have become exiled even.
So,
So often we go through our lives,
I know this is the case for me,
Forgetting that we have a body.
Has that ever happened to you?
You're running from one thing to the next to the next.
Maybe we forget to eat.
Maybe we don't even realize how tired we are,
How we just actually need a break and just to take a few breaths.
Sometimes it can be on the computer or our devices and even forget we have to go to the bathroom,
Right?
Like this separation of our mind and body where we get so caught up in our mind reality that we really aren't embodied.
It's like we live from the neck up.
And so one way of experiencing unity in ourselves is to return to occupy this whole body.
And so the breath is a wonderful doorway to this unity of mind and body,
Of heart and soul,
The feelings.
Just taking one breath.
We could take a breath together now,
Just feeling the in-breath,
Feeling the out-breath.
Just one breath is enough to return mind to body,
To re-humanize ourselves.
There are many other doorways to bringing mind and body back together.
Sound is a doorway.
Body sensations.
Whatever is happening in the present moment is a way to deeply connect to the reality of our aliveness,
Of our having a body,
Right?
So that's one way we can be unified.
And I love that my teacher's name,
Thich Nhat Hanh,
It means one action.
That was what he wanted his life to be about,
Was unifying himself so that whenever he took an action,
It was done with the fullest presence,
The fullest power that's accessible to each of us as humans,
Right?
One action.
It's so often when we're not embodied,
Our energy is going out in all these different directions,
Right?
We're dispersed.
We're trying to do this thing,
But half of ourselves are over here or over there,
Or we're,
You know,
Planning this while we're talking on the phone,
Or we're,
You know,
Meeting with someone,
But we're thinking about what happened yesterday.
Like we're all spread out in many different directions.
So when we do something in that dispersed state,
It doesn't have the kind of effect that it could if we were really all united in one place,
Doing one action,
Right?
So that's the first element of unity.
The second one is,
You know,
When we have this practice of being fully ourselves,
When we relate to others,
We relate with much more capacity.
We are really present for them.
And that interaction has much more life and power and skillfulness than if we are relating to someone else,
Not in a unified state ourself.
So Dan Siegel has written a book about the teen brain,
And he said that the single most powerful indicator of a caretaker or parent's ability to connect with their teen is their own self-knowledge,
Right?
Their own unified state,
Their ability to bring all these different parts of themselves together to know what's happening inside.
We can only know what's happening inside if we bring ourselves together,
Right?
Then we can actually have a meaningful connection with someone else,
Right?
And he talks about in this book how as we practice unifying ourselves,
Our brains actually change and the fibers in the brain that connect the different parts of the brain to each other,
They thicken,
They become more robust.
So we're actually able to use all the different parts of our brain much better.
They've observed this enlargening of these integrative fibers of the brain.
And then we're actually able to,
You know,
Be a full human being when we relate to our teenager or whoever it is,
Right?
So this is an interpersonal relationship.
We want to be united.
We want to be together in ourselves and really able to take in who they are fully,
But it's also in our communities,
Right?
It's the African proverb says,
If you want to go fast,
Go alone,
But if you want to go far,
Go together with others,
Right?
So if we really want to do something of significance,
We need to be united with others,
With community.
That's why we have the third of the three refuges,
The sangha,
Is community,
Is because we can do so much more when we are united with others,
When we are in harmony with others also.
This doesn't mean that we dissolve ourselves into a collective.
We actually,
The more we can be united in ourselves,
The more distinct we actually are,
The more we have to offer to the collective,
Right?
The more powerful that collective is when each person,
Each individual in that collective is united in themselves,
Knowing themselves,
The more we have to bring.
And then when we have basically healthy communities made up of healthy individuals practicing this unity in ourselves and between us,
Then we can actually turn towards all of life and experience unity with all of life,
Which is the reality always,
But it's,
We can,
We can relate to the life around us in a healthy way,
In a meaningful way when these other aspects of unity are being practiced and experienced.
And we see what,
We see the results of us not doing this all around us,
Right?
We see how,
How suffering is there in all,
In the oceans,
In the quality of air and the quality of water,
You know,
The Philadelphia water crisis this past weekend and school shootings and biodiversity loss and climate change.
All these things are a reflection of us not knowing our unity with all of life,
Right?
So it is possible to heal these relationships as we heal our relationship to ourselves,
As we heal our relationship to those with whom we're in community and family and,
You know,
Nations with,
And,
And it's possible then to turn towards the living world,
The more than human world with a great love,
Great respect and humility,
Right?
To know that we are kin with all of life.
We're not above other life forms.
We belong to this web of,
Of life.
So I'll,
I'll just read you a beautiful quote from a Catholic nun,
Sister Wendy.
Some of you may know of her.
I'm happy to bring her into this space because she,
Her whole life was about bringing the sacred into art.
And so she spent her whole life describing and connecting people to great works of art as a spiritual practice.
So very connected to what we're doing here today.
So this is from a book,
Dear Sister Wendy,
A Surprising Story of Faith and Friendship by Wendy Beckett and Robert Ellsberg.
So this is from Sister Wendy,
Their letters back and forth.
So this is Wendy writing to Robert.
Dearest Robert,
I don't have the exciting narrative dreams that you have,
But I did have a beautiful dream early this week.
It was really in three parts.
First I was looking at magnificent pictures of lakes.
Then I was actually walking beside these lakes,
Seeing them in their full reality.
And then the lakes were inside me.
I was containing the lakes.
But the significant point is that when I was walking beside the lakes,
I realized that there was something wrong.
The lakes were being damaged,
Poisoned perhaps.
And it was my great sorrow over this and my desire to purify them that carried me into the third stage.
Because in my own self,
The lakes were being changed and purified.
I suppose this is an image of what being a Christian means.
In Jesus,
We take the whole wounded world into ourselves and suffer with it,
Holding it out all the time to His holiness.
So you see,
This was a deep and beautiful dream,
A dream that enlarged me and made me feel a part of His redemptive suffering,
Which of course is true of all of us.
That's why we live still and don't flit off to heaven.
His lakes need us.
So let's do a short practice together,
Embodying this unity,
Connecting to your body,
Feeling your feet on the floor,
Feeling your seat in the chair,
Noticing your hands,
Your torso,
Your face,
Taking a few deeper breaths all the way down into the belly,
If that feels good.
With the out-breath,
Perhaps releasing tension,
Letting go of whatever strain or stress you don't need,
Letting your breathing return to its normal rhythm,
Just inviting the various parts of yourself to come together now,
Like bringing everyone under one roof.
Whenever you notice parts of yourself that may be somewhere else,
See if you can just gently invite them back to be here,
Letting the breathing bring you back to this moment,
To this place,
Allowing yourself to rest in your fundamental unity,
The essence of who each of us is,
Is unity.
You could also see it as coming home to ourselves,
Inviting all the parts of ourselves home.
And one last step in this practice is to bring to mind a person or a group or a place and to allow yourself to experience your unity,
Your embeddedness,
Your connection with this person.
It could also be an animal,
A group or a place on the planet,
Maybe the planet herself.
Breathing and letting yourself connect with this reality of your,
Our unity with this or these other beings,
With this manifestation of life and know this unity in your body.
Feel in your body now the sensation of belonging to others,
Being connected to others,
How you matter to others and how they matter to you.
Thank you so much for that beautiful session,
Kaya Jewel.
.
.
.
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 to 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.
