Mindfulness Meditation · Gratitude
This week’s meditation session is led by Kaira Jewel Lingo and the theme is Gratitude. The guided meditation begins at 19:12.
Prayer Beads; Tibet; 19th century; Turquoise, bone, and silver; 27 5/8 × 3 5/8 × 1 1/4 in.; Rubin Museum of Art; Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, Gift of Anne Breckenridge Dorsey; C2012.6.13
In Tibetan Buddhism prayer beads are used to count the recitations of prayers and devotional invocations (mantras), a process that allows the practitioner to accumulate merit—the more recitations, the more merit accrued. This strand has a standard 108 beads, an auspicious number rooted in early Buddhist literature on prayer beads and pre-Buddhist Indian beliefs but also symbolic of purifying the 108 causes of negative karma.
Prayer beads are religious objects of a particularly personal nature, and so the materials often reflect both the status and taste of the beads’ owner. This set, with its precious stone and metal and intricately carved bone, once belonged to a princess of Derge in southeastern Tibet.
Kaira Jewel Lingo is a dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in blending spirituality with social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhist movement developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ stories and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel 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: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption from Parallax Press.
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