Mindfulness Meditation · Impermanence
This week’s meditation session is led by Kate Johnson and the theme is Impermanence. The guided meditation begins at 14:20.
Christine Sun Kim, The Sound of a Waiting Room (detail), 2017.
Korean American artist Christine Sun Kim has been deaf since birth. Though she started in visual mediums, her work increasingly incorporates sound in an attempt to use her unique perspective to break down the cultural “rules” surrounding auditory experiences. Her series using dynamic markings from Western musical notation to express the “sound” of particular scenes or emotions was on display at the Rubin Museum in 2017. In The Sound of Obsessing, a blank canvas bearing the marking “p,” stands for “piano” and indicates a quiet sound. “Pp” stands for “pianissimo,” which means even more quiet. Reading the piece from left to right and top to bottom, the “p” markings begin to run together toward the end, indicating the quiet intensity that obsession can cause.
Kate Johnson works at the intersections of spiritual practice, social action, and creativity. She has been practicing Buddhist meditation in the Western Insight/Theravada tradition since her early twenties and is empowered to teach through Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She holds a BFA in dance from the Alvin Ailey School/Fordham University, and MA in performance studies from NYU.
Kate is a core faculty member of MIT’s Presencing Institute, and has trained hundreds of leaders and change-makers in using Social Presencing Theater, a mindfulness and dance improvisation methodology used to inform strategic planning and systems change in our complex world.
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