ABOUT THE MEDITATION
This week’s meditation session led by Jon Aaron and the theme is: New Beginnings.
The guided meditation begins at 12:18
For centuries Himalayan practitioners have used meditation to quiet the mind, open the heart, calm the nervous system, and increase focus. Now Western scientists, business leaders, and the secular world have embraced meditation as a vital tool for brain health.
Whether you’re a beginner, a dabbler, or a skilled meditator seeking the company of others, join expert teachers in a forty-five-minute weekly program designed to fit into your lunch break. Each session will be inspired by a different work of art from the Rubin Museum’s collection and will include an opening talk, a twenty-minute meditation session, and a closing discussion.
RELATED ARTWORK
Buzzing with energy, this abstracted fierce figure is a contemporary twist on depictions of Buddhist deities who help practitioners transcend obstacles. The contemporary artist Shezad Dawood, born in London in 1974, blends cultural heritage with references to popular visual culture and materials—like the neon of this sculpture—to reexamine how we tell and perceive history.
Skull crowns often adorn the heads of wrathful deities. There are six small skulls and enveloping flames above the central figure’s elongated face. The glowing neon gives the sculpture a playful quality, and reveals the goodwill beneath the figure’s tough exterior.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jon Aaron teaches meditation, Buddhist dharma, and is a Somatic Experience Practitioner® in New York City. He 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. Recently he has been teaching for the New York Police Department in an eight-hour intervention called Cultivating Mindfulness: expanding the capacity of mind and body to work with stress, anxiety, and trauma. He is a co-founder of the MBSR Teacher Collaborative of Greater New York and a founding member of the Global Mindfulness Collaborative, and is a long-time teacher at New York Insight Meditation Center. When the pandemic hit, along with his partner he co-founded Space2Meditate, an online community of meditators that is still going strong six days a week. Learn more about Jon Aaron on his website.
This program 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.
