What does it look like to put what we’ve learned about non-attachment into practice? In this episode, all the guests in the series share their practices for working through their attachments and moving toward a more open relationship to oneself and life as a whole. Ultimately, it’s not about having no attachments—that’s almost impossible—but bringing presence and awareness to each moment.
AWAKEN Season 4 is hosted by actress and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini. Guests featured in this episode include poet and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar, chef Reem Assil, Founder and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Founder and Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc. Dr. Richie Davidson, contemplative social scientist Eve Ekman, poet and essayist Ross Gay, artist and writer Jenny Odell, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism Annabella Pitkin, author and transformational thought leader Sonya Renee Taylor, teacher and meditation master in the Bon Buddhist tradition Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong. The Tibetan at the start of the episode is spoken by Tashi Chodron.
Creators & Guests
What is Awaken?
AWAKEN is a Webby Honoree podcast about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” Throughout the series we dive into the personal stories of guests who share how they’ve experienced a shift in their awareness, and as a result, their perspective on life.
Tashi Chodron:
འདུས་བྱས་ཐམས་ཅད་མི་རྟག་ཅེས། གང་ཚེ་ཤེས་རབ་ཀྱིས་མཐོང་ན། སྡུག་བསྔལ་དག་གིས་ ཚུགས་མི་འགྱུར། འདི་ནི་རྣམ་དག་ལམ་ཡིན་ནོ།
Isabella Rossellini:
All compounded things are impermanent. When through wisdom this is realized, one cannot then be harmed by suffering. This is the path of purity.
Annabella Pitkin:
Everybody lives in a world of processes that involve working with attachment. And so another way to think about working with attachment is to ask how one could work with attachment more skillfully. How could one be aware of one's attachments and how they come up in our lives?
Eve Ekman:
When we really see and recognize that so much of how we experience the world is our projection, our perception—which is so beautifully described in contemporary psychology and so intuitively understood in Buddhist psychology—we don’t see the world as it is; we see the world filtered through all our perceptions. As such, it’s delusional, and then we believe in that delusion, and then we’re surprised when it doesn’t work out the way we want.
Dr. Richie Davidson:
The way we can nourish our mind is by using our mind intentionally rather than leaving the state of our mind willy-nilly to the forces around us.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
It’s not about having a lot of strategies, 12-step to five-step. Sometimes it seems like very simple.
Eve Ekman:
It’s just that simple, kind of mental hygiene of becoming aware and developing an understanding of our emotions and their influence on us that I think you can really see woven throughout a lot of the practices of Buddhism.
Isabella Rossellini:
Welcome to season 4 of AWAKEN, a podcast from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I am Isabella Rossellini, an actress, filmmaker, and your host for this season of AWAKEN, where we are exploring a fundamental concept in Buddhist thinking and philosophy: attachment.
Himalayan art has long been a pathway to insights and awakening, and in this season, we will look at objects from the Rubin’s collection as a way to better understand attachment and its counterpoint, non-attachment, which translates to openness, or seeing things as they truly are. With stories and wisdom from artists, writers, poets, Buddhist teachers, psychologists, scholars, and others we will explore the meaning of attachment and how it shows up in different parts of our lives.
In this episode: The Path. We have spent the last six episodes talking about attachment and non-attachment in relation to the ego, love, interdependence, and freedom, but what does it actually look like to put what we’ve learned into practice? In this episode, we hear from all the guests in the series, who share their practices for working with attachment and moving toward a more open relationship with oneself and life as a whole. Ultimately, it’s not about having no attachments—that’s almost impossible.
Dr. Richie Davidson:
Much of the time, our awareness is captured. So it's literally captured by stuff around us as well as stuff inside of us—internal thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations—and we're like a ping pong ball.
Isabella Rossellini:
Psychologist Dr. Richie Davidson, Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Founder & Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc.
Dr. Richie Davidson:
We're just reacting to this or that, and our minds are being captured. There's another mode in which we can use our mind. To use a kind of technical jargon, we would say we can endogenously control our mind rather than having it be exogenously driven. All that means is that we're using intention to control our mind.
When we talk about practices to cultivate well-being, we are inviting people to switch from a mode of having their mind be passively captured, to using the mind intentionally. And when we use the mind intentionally in that way, we can nourish it, and nourish it in the sense of strengthening connections and strengthening pathways that are actually well-being promoting.
Eve Ekman:
The way we quantify well-being, even having to quantify it and make it the same for many people is tricky. But often we’re kind of looking at how do we downregulate what feels bad?
Isabella Rossellini:
Contemplative social scientist Eve Ekman.
Eve Ekman:
How do we upregulate what feels good? That is this kind of acquisition mode. If I get these things I’ll feel good. Right? If I get the right job, the right partner, the right place to live, I’ll be happy. And I should really focus on how to attain those needs and increase my experience of positive or enjoyable emotions. All of that is wonderful, it’s great. And none of it is sustainable. Right? Our partner comes home in a bad mood, we get a new neighbor who’s really loud, all of a sudden at work we’re put on a project that we think is boring or pointless or run in a bad way. And then where is our happiness? This whole fundamental philosophy of bringing a sense of wellbeing into something much deeper within oneself, it's kind of core.
Dr. Richie Davidson:
That's really what we're talking about when we talk about “nourish the mind.” And we have these four pillars of well-being—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose—we can engage in practices in each of those pillars intentionally to nourish those qualities of our mind.
And in order to flourish, we need all four of these. So it's not just mindfulness, but it's all of these that we need to really truly flourish.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
It’s true that I am identifying with something so strongly; this is the cause of suffering.
Isabella Rossellini:
Teacher and meditation master in the Bon Buddhist tradition Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
And this identity is not me. I’m angry, but anger is not me. I feel lost but I’m not lost. I feel weak but I am not weakness. So this sense of recognition, of your experiences is not you. Your thought is not you. Your feelings are not you.
Annabella Pitkin:
And so something like a practice of awareness, and also meditation practices for cultivating loving kindness, generosity, the wish for other beings to be happy, practices that involve wishing for others to have the good things or the happy feeling that one is having oneself right now, all of those are things that slowly wear away at the self-cherishing kind of ego that's the root of attachment.
Isabella Rossellini:
Annabella Pitkin, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism.
Annabella Pitkin:
And over time, it can radically change how people experience the material possessions they have, the way they show up in relationships, the way they relate to their own sources of pleasure, not in the sense of being puritanical or joy-denying, but more in the sense, again, of this word "generosity," which is the foundational Buddhist perfection.
Eve Ekman:
So much of Buddhist practice and meditation is remembering. The same is true in contemporary psychology. A lot of the ways we manage our difficult emotional experiences are what’s called cognitive reappraisal, an ability to remember and reflect upon in this moment that it’s okay. No matter what our stress is, no matter what the acuity is, as long as our basic needs are met, we are not under immediate harm and threat, we can kind of make whatever is happening workable.
But remembering that, not getting caught, not getting hijacked, by our emotions—it’s incomparably important.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
First of all, I think it’s good to know right from the beginning—when you're closer, it heals. When you're distance away, it stays longer, or intensify more. That awareness should be solid rock ground. You need to know that. And if you know that, then you will go closer. You will not go farther away.
Isabella Rossellini:
Again, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
Just being with it, feeling it, allowing to feel it, I think more, I think that will help our detachment. And allowing other people to—listen to more other people, feel more other people. What’s going on with them? What they're saying. What their needs are. If you can really be interested in hearing them, feeling them, understanding them, their needs, more, I think will already help. Because that will open up your heart. You'll understand someone more. You will see their pain.
When you see their pain, you will open up. You will not compete with them. You will let go of your pain, because you understand what that pain looks like or feels like. So some sense of a little bit less attachment to your identity.
Isabella Rossellini:
Not being attached to your identity, how the world perceives you or how you perceive the world is a constant practice. Chef Reem Assil.
Reem Assil:
It does come up in my life, of this not getting too attached to when you're super happy, or you're on what you consider a height of a slope in your life, and not getting too attached when you're in the demise. The equanimity of riding the wave, so to speak, of the ebbs and flows of life. And that's really helped me be able to take risks and stay humble when there's a lot of attention on me.
Although certainly I've caught myself in that human feeling of attachment to that and wanting a certain outcome, but I've been through enough iterations where I'm like, "Oh, I've been here before. Don't get too attached. This is just part of the ebbs and flows of life."
Isabella Rossellini:
The Buddha was born into a royal family and had everything a person could wish for, yet his exposure to the true condition of life and the suffering of the world, drove him to feel unsatisfied and leave his palace, renouncing his identity, wealth, prestige, and family. By letting go of his attachments and going out into the world, he was able to see things as they truly are and he became enlightened. A painting from the Rubin’s collection, Stories of the Previous Lives of The Buddha, suggests how this practice of openness might be available to all of us, no matter our place in the world. Take a moment to look at the painting at rubinmuseum.org/awaken. Scholar of Tibetan Buddhism Annabella Pitkin explains:
Annabella Pitkin:
The central image is the Buddha with a rainbow halo around him. And the lotus seat that he's sitting on is both white and red. It glows with a reddish light. And then there's an enormous amount of greenery in the image around the Buddha. There's so many forests. the kind of richness and beauty of those mountain forests really comes through.
And the kind of love of the land, the kind of greenery of the natural world in which the small, detailed vignettes of people with often red clothing, often they're monastics, or they're lay people, but they have a kind of touch of red in their clothing, kind of stand out. So the sense of humans in this more-than-human world really comes through very strongly just in the visual
language of this painting. And then there are beautiful architectural forms as well. There are buildings, and the buildings are kind of nestled within the greenery of the forest and the grassland, giving a sense of human culture and human flourishing embedded in a natural world of the more-than-human that's also flourishing at the same time.
So even before we jump to thinking about any questions about Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist practices, there's a kind of vision of a harmony in the world, a harmony of culture, a harmony of relationship, and a harmony of other modes of being, plant life or animal life or the weather, as well as the imagination. So it's a kind of touchstone that encapsulates multiple meanings of liberation and wholeness in one visual expanse.
We certainly see in this painting images of people who seem, by their clothing, to be monastics, to be monks or nuns, to be people who've made it their life's work to engage in intentional practices to support non-attachment, and generosity, meditation, wisdom, compassion, and loving kindness. But we also see people doing all kinds of other things, and the possibility for cultivating non-attachment in one's place of business, while one's traveling for work, while one's traveling for work and also stopping off to do something that might be spiritual or that might be visiting an old friend or someone who's ill, just to show them a little kindness.
So always combining the ordinary work of our lives with opportunities for generosity or for some kind of loving activity, that's really visually integrated into this painting, that the opportunities to free oneself from the tyranny of the self and the attachment to the self, and to open oneself up to the generosity and freedom that the central Buddha figure encapsulates, those opportunities are everywhere, and it doesn't necessarily require a special place or a special kind of clothing or a special name or a special time. One could just do them where one is.
Isabella Rossellini:
The ordinary becomes extraordinary when we bring awareness and generosity to it. And there are many ways to do this. Artists bring this level of depth and attention to their work. Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong, whose novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous won the American Book Award.
Ocean Vuong:
The final goal for me as a writer is not to just amass a body of work, but that the work becomes almost a byproduct of deep consideration, which is what all writing demands. Nobody writes a good sentence by accident. It takes a tremendous amount of obsession and care. So, could it be that for a writer's life, the destination, the final goal, the telos is not a body of work, but rather how that body of works creates a mind that could think and look at the world more keenly? That's the greatest gift at the end of all this. Maybe I write eight books, maybe I write six books, maybe twenty, but at the end of all that, I would hope that when I put down the pen, I can say, "Wow, my books have taught me how to see." That's the ultimate gift to the self. It's the ultimate achievement, I think.
This is the thing that I tell my students: Don't fall into the trap of just saying, "I'm going to break the rules." That's very cool; you say that, everyone will clap. But what rules are you breaking? In order to break them, you have to know them. You have to even master them to break them meaningfully. You have to recreate the wall to know where the cracks are. You have to study that wall. It's an old wall, but you have to be an apprentice of those methods to see that this is where the cracks are, this is where you can break through and make something new. And the culture loves that too. "Oh look, it's like nothing we've ever seen before. It breaks all the rules."
It likes that kind of quick, radical shift, but you're absolutely right: to break rules meaningfully.
And that last word is the key. Meaningfully is to first be a student of all of them.
Isabella Rossellini:
Poet and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar.
Fatimah Asghar:
For me, it's so much about cultivating really deep, intentional, and strong community. I'm so always bowled over by the way that community is the antidote to all of this. And community work—sometimes when people talk about community, people kind of have their little fairy eyes on, and they're like, "Community!" And it can get a little ungrounded. But community work is hard work. It's actually a lot of deep learning and conversations about repair work.
It's a lot of deep things about harm. It's a lot of deep things about understanding what happens when trust is broken or betrayal happens in community. It's a lot about seeing how we all exist together, so the safety of our entire community is important for the safety of all of us. But in order to really know and affirm that, that sometimes means that we have to really check and rethink things in our own sense of hyper-individualism or in our own ego, and we have to change.
Dr. Richie Davidson:
I think that part of it, if it's done authentically, is a genuine expression of generosity, where we recognize that every human being has the same wish to be happy and to be free of suffering, and we're wishing another well.
Isabella Rossellini:
That said…
Fatimah Asghar:
Sometimes I get nervous when we speak about things like freedom and non-attachment and things, when we're also not really considering things, or not actively talking about things like structural policy, structural racism, and structural privilege. Because I think it's easier for folks who have access to a lot to basically have the ability to cultivate these principles within themselves; whereas if you're living in systems of scarcity, it's a lot more difficult to cultivate things like nonattachment when you're like, "I actually am reliant upon certain people and certain things for my safety. And I'm reliant upon things like the family structure or certain things in community, whether that's toxic or not, because I need it in order to survive and in order to live."
Isabella Rossellini:
Even in the most difficult moments, awareness and presence can really help support us in moving through, in not staying attached, in being able to see things as they truly are, and in becoming empowered to take action when needed. Presence can be the antidote to suffering.
Eve Ekman:
I do think some of the seeds we can plant to avoid that clinging, the first and most simple one is to fully inhabit the moment that we are in. Because there’s so much richness and we miss it. And when we miss it, we seek something else. We want something else. We need something else. But almost every single moment with our full curiosity is like mind-blowingly amazing.
You might not think it’s very fun. So, unfortunately—and I wish it was easier—a lot of these practices are not about a one-time thing, but the cultivation, the deliberate cultivation of, “How do I make space for enjoying this present moment, like really savoring and enjoying?” Then I think another way of cultivating that sense of enrichment and enjoyment, you can do that at the end of the day, reflecting on the day. Highlighting the ways in which you felt satisfaction and savoring, even relief.
Ross Gay:
Notice. Just notice. Which turns out is a skill.
Isabella Rossellini:
Poet and essayist Ross Gay, whose book, The Book of Delights, was a New York Times Bestseller.
Ross Gay:
I was with a class recently. I was at a school visiting the school, and me and this teacher and this class were going out for a walk. They were going to read a little bit, and I was just kind of with them. And the teacher stopped the class and said, "Wait, wait! Look, look! House swallow! House swallow!" And they all stopped, got very silent, and watched this house swallow, and watched this guy watching this house swallow. And it was probably like two minutes or something, watching this.
And it would kind of swoop by him. It was swooping near, and he gave a little bit of information about the house swallow. But to me, it was this beautiful moment about teaching, maybe for two reasons. The first one is that he was showing you how you pay attention, how you notice things, and also how you notice things with a kind of reverence, to be unabashedly reverent for the house swallow. That felt so moving and beautiful to me not only because he did it, but because he did it in the presence of all these young people. And the other thing is that he was very obviously pointing to what he found beautiful, sort of sharing what he found beautiful. He wanted these kids to have the opportunity to love what he loved, and that felt like a kind of attention, too. Like, without that kind of attention, there's a deficit of that sharing of what we love.
Jenny Odell:
When I was teaching at Stanford, there would always be a moment where, every season, I would be hurrying to class with all of my various bags that I was schlepping after having taken two hours of public transportation, and thinking about all the things I haven't prepared well enough for in my class; and I would see the first warbler, let's say, of the season, or the first of some species that I haven't seen in a while.
Isabella Rossellini:
Artist and author of How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell.
Jenny Odell:
And it's not even that I would forget, just myself; I would forget the entire spatial-temporal context that I was in. All of my perception narrows to just watching this bird. And again, I have to stress that's not a decision that I made—like, I see a bird and I decide I'm going to drop all my bags and pay attention to this bird for five minutes. I just basically don't know what hit me in that moment.
Ross Gay:
There are simple things, like give oneself the task of noticing X number of things that one finds beautiful, or delightful, or that they love. I don't know; it's simple like that, but I do think there's something really beautiful about—and I found this out: people have told me that they would read The Delights and get with a friend and be like, "Oh, let's take a delights walk." So, there is something social about it, not at all that it needs to be, because obviously it's just wonderful to be walking around and be like, "Whoa!" Blown away by oneself, too. By oneself, it's different when you're being blown away by beautiful stuff; you're with, with, with.
But there's something. Yeah, there is something nice and lovely and fortifying and energizing, probably, about being like, "And what did you love today?" "What did you see that you loved today? Oh, I might love that too!"
Jenny Odell:
I think artists in particular, or people who have to make things and be inspired, you kind of have to have these almost like an artifice for yourself.
And it could be something very small, like you could literally just say, "Tomorrow, I'm going to look out for things that are red." Like, if you're just doing your normal routine, and because it's a routine, your mind thinks that you already know what everything is that you're looking at, which of course you don't. And just introducing this little rule—or like a game, basically—it will cause you to notice different things.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Start with how am I in an intentional relationship with what is actually alive?
Isabella Rossellini:
Author and transformational thought leader Sonya Renee Taylor.
Sonya Renee Taylor:
Go outside and touch a tree. Water a plant. Make a child giggle today. Go do something that actually connects you with actual existence. Right? And then—and find moments every day to cultivate that. And also, find it within yourself. You! First thing you have a relationship with that is actually alive is you! So, what does it mean to have an intentional time every day where you are in a relationship with just you? In relationship with your breath. Where you take a moment and you actually feel your heartbeat. Right? Where you actually feel air filling up your lungs.
Where you actually feel your feet on soil, if that’s available to you. Whatever it Is that’s like this is how life is moving through me right now, can I be in an intentional relationship with that as a daily practice? Can I start there? That’s a daily practice, an intentional relationship with this life. And then, intentional relationship with expansive life beyond corporeal being, right? And weaving that. Those are the small moments. Like, life is not your job. There are lives at your job There are people there. There is organic life there. But your job itself is a concept that humans made up. It’s not a real thing. It’s a made-up thing that, thank God, provides bills and does all sorts of things inside of the constructions we’ve made, but it itself is not a real thing. But there are real things there.
So how bout go be in relationship with the real things there and see how it changes the construction? That’s— you know, I think that we— we have the order of operations mixed up, right? We’re like, I’m gonna go interact with the illusionary thing and then hope it makes the real things better. No. Go interact with the real things and see how it improves the illusion, or at least helps it fall away, right? I feel like that’s the invitation. And so if we’re talking about small, practical ways, go find some living things and be present with them. First yourself and then some other living things. And make that an actual practice. And then just see what happens next. Just see what happens next.
Isabella Rossellini:
Take a chance, experiment with yourself and see what happens when the quality of your awareness changes. It might seem like a small shift, but it has the potential to be completely transformative.
You just heard the voices of Fatimah Asghar, Reem Assil, Dr. Richie Davidson, Eve Ekman, Ross Gay, Jenny Odell, Annabella Pitkin, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and Ocean Vuong.
I am Isabella Rosselini, your host.
To see the artwork discussed in this episode, go to rubinmuseum.org/awaken.
If you're enjoying the podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more stories and news from the Rubin, follow us on Instagram @rubinmuseum and sign up for our newsletter at rubinmuseum.org.
AWAKEN Season 4 is an eight-part series from the Rubin.
AWAKEN is produced by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art with Tenzin Gelek, Jamie Lawyer, Kimon Keramidas, Gracie Marotta, Christina Watson, and Sarah Zabrodski in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC including Tania Ketenjian, Philip Wood, Alessandro Santoro, and Jeremiah Moore.
Original music has been produced by Hannis Brown with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
AWAKEN Season 4 and Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now are supported by Bob and Lois Baylis, Barbara Bowman, Daphne Hoch Cunningham and John Cunningham, Noah P. Dorsky, Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), Mimi Gardner Gates, Fred Eychaner, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Jack Lampl, Dan Gimbel of NEPC, LLC, Agnes Gund, New York Life, Matt and Ann Nimetz, Namita and Arun Saraf, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Eileen Caulfield Schwab, Taipei Cultural Center in New York, and UOVO.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
The Rubin Museum's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts
Thanks for listening.