Hello, my name is Dr. Mark Epstein. I'm a psychiatrist and writer who had the good fortune to discover Buddhism and meditation before I went to medical school to become a therapist.
I'd like to invite you into MoMA’s sculpture garden, a unique resting place, an invigorating oasis for the senses for a short period of guided meditation.
Come into the garden. The physical space, or into your own mental garden. Come into the garden and find a spot, a comfortable spot where you can settle into yourself. Sitting or standing. You can meditate in any posture.
Find a spot for yourself, settle into your body, close your eyes, and feel how special it is to be here, alive, in possession of your senses, in a human body that’s capable of so much joy.
With your eyes closed, or downcast just a bit, become aware of your posture. Feel the places of contact with the earth. Your feet on the ground, your seat on the chair, your back on the bench. Feel the support of gravity. Your body, held by the earth.
Notice, whatever sensations arise in your body. Just watch them as they come and go. Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It doesn't matter. Try to leave the body alone. Let the feelings do what they will. Don't get too involved, but don't get spaced out either. Just stay attentive, watchful, and relaxed.
Now, bring this same kind of relaxed attention to your mental space, to your mind.
That vast space of imagination. An infinite space in which the mind can travel, in which thoughts arise and pass away like clouds in the sky.
Let your mind rest in your body the way the body rests on the bench, on the cushion, on the floor. Let the mind open and rest. Let your thoughts come and go. Be restful, alert, relaxed and attentive, noticing any bits of discomfort or uncertainty, but not letting them take you over. Let yourself be here in this garden, this special place, and let the garden be in you. Let it come in through your senses and up into your mind.
Now bring your attention to what we call the ear door. To the sounds that surround us, hear them in 360 degrees. Hear everything. Try to hear it all as music. The sounds of nature. The sounds of the city. The people moving and talking. Let it all wash through you, hearing it with bare attention, with naked attention. A clear and single minded awareness of what's happened to you in you and around you at the successive moments of attention.
Let the unpleasant sounds mix with the pleasant ones, let them mix with the silent sounds. Don't push away the unpleasant don't cling to the pleasant. Let the sounds take their natural course. Allow them to speak for themselves. Simply listen, don't bother about keeping anything in mind.
There's a famous Japanese haiku that describes how to listen in this way:
The old pond, a frog jumps in. Plop
The old pond is like your mind. The frog is like the sound. The thought, the feeling, plop. The reverberations inside you. Just let them be.
With this in mind, open your eyes, and let the visual information come to you. Don't look around too much at first. Just let whatever you see, color, shape, line, empty space. People, trees, clouds, skies, sculpture. Let it come to your eye door. Behold it all. The outer landscape becoming your inner landscape. Your inner-self reaching out to touch and feel the world around you.
We'll close with some words from the composer, musician, and artist John Cage, known for a famous outdoor performance of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence in 1952, the year before this sculpture garden took its present form. The silent performance was far from silent. There were sounds everywhere. Cage was inviting his audience to enter the gardens of their own minds, but they had a hard time with it. As he later described it, “they missed the point,” he said. “There's no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence because they didn't know how to listen is full of accidental sounds. You could hear the winds stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof. And during the third, the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” As Cage used to say, in Zen they say if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty two, and so on. Eventually, one discovers that it's not boring at all, but very interesting.
Give yourself this final moment to hear the music. To see the art. To feel yourself in this special place. This body. This garden.This city. This earth.