ABOUT THE MEDITATION
This week’s meditation session is led by Kimberly Brown and the theme is Self-Discovery.
The guided meditation begins at 7:37.
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 45-minute weekly program designed to fit into your lunch break. Each session is inspired by a different work of art from the Rubin Museum’s collection and includes an opening talk and a 20-minute meditation session.
RELATED ARTWORK
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 and also symbolic of purifying the 108 causes of negative karma.
Prayer beads are ritual objects of a particularly personal nature, and so the materials often reflect both the status and taste of the beads’ owner. These prayer beads are made out of sheep bone. Beads made out of carved bone are most suitable for practices related to wrathful deities.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Kimberly Brown is a meditation teacher and author. She leads classes and retreats that emphasize the power of compassion and kindness meditation to reconnect us to ourselves and others. Her teachings provide an approachable pathway to personal and collective well-being through effective and modern techniques based on traditional practices. She studies in both the Tibetan and Insight schools of Buddhism and is a certified mindfulness instructor. Her new book, Navigating Grief and Loss: 25 Buddhist Practices to Keep Your Heart Open to Yourself and Others, was published in November 2022, and an updated edition of Steady, Calm, and Brave was released in January 2023. Both are published by Prometheus Books. You can learn more about Kimberly on her 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.
