YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE:
In Buddhism, what we call the fundamental quality of our mind, which is unborn.
FALU:
Buddhist teacher and author Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE:
So the fundamental quality of mind is unborn, so you cannot really die.
CHELLA MAN:
I believe that I’m born every single day, to be honest.
FALU:
Artist, director, and author Chella Man.
CHELLA MAN:
My best friend and I often say to each other we believe that we’re living and dying every day.
FALU:
Welcome to AWAKEN, a podcast from the Rubin Museum of Art about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I am singer and songwriter Falu. At the Rubin, a museum largely dedicated to art from the Himalayas, we believe art can nurture awakening. This season, we delve into the notion of life after—those big transitional moments throughout our lives that propel us into the unknown. We’ve gathered artists, writers, scientists, poets, Buddhist teachers, and others to explore the key events and characteristics of a human life—from birth to death and everything in between—as well as grapple with the ultimate mystery: the afterlife.
Their stories offer insights on how to approach change with openness, even amid possible grief or joy, fear or excitement. And with art from the Rubin Museum as the connecting thread woven into the conversations, we can make even better sense of those changes. Because art has the ability to wake us up to what is possible.
In this episode: Birth. It’s thought that it all starts here, the moment we are born, when we emerge out of the womb and out into the world. But as we heard at the top of this episode, we are in a constant cycle of birth, aging, and death: Cells are born and die, synapses, emotions, ideas, everything is endlessly in the process of rebirth. And those moments of rebirth can relate to all kinds of transitions—of identities, of personal growth, of emotional challenges and spiritual awakenings.
KAY TYE:
The brain develops, a lot of it obviously happens in utero.
FALU:
Neuroscientist Dr. Kay Tye has been studying the brain and emotions for over a decade. She is a professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego and her lab focuses on identifying connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.
KAY TYE:
And there are signals that are sent—that guide axons to different targets, and they find their ways kind of approximately to the right place. And then a lot of neural pathways or synapse formation is dependent on plasticity and experience.
FALU:
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a highly respected Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher and author of several books including Turning Confusion Into Clarity and Joyful Wisdom. He also teaches all over the globe. We will be hearing from him throughout the series.
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE:
In Buddhism, there’s some kind of like, the baby just being born, there’s some kind of pattern…which is…is kind of like little bit dull and unconscious state, which is based on habitual patterns and mental imprint.
KAY TYE:
Some of it is hard-wired and everybody gets a blueprint, but a lot of it is experience dependent, environmentally dependent.
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE:
And then, it’s awakened. Every day. It’s coming—all this seed is growing from there. So, these traits, these imprints, are always there.
And of course, these imprints connected with the body and mind. The mind and the body always go together, like what we call cup and water. Water is the mind; cup is the body.
KAY TYE:
The idea is that actions repeated many times can become habits, when you’re just doing it not even for the same motivation.
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE:
Normally, what we call mind is beyond five senses. You cannot see, so it’s not matter. You cannot hear, smell, taste. You cannot touch. But, mind-body interdependent, they work together. So even this body dies, the subtle body, like the body in the dream, what we call subtle body, and that body comes in the afterlife, what we call bardo, big bardo, the biggest bardo, in between this life and the next life. Similar body as in the dream. And these carry this pattern, the imprint. So baby comes, with a pattern. With habitual—some kind of like—personality.
MICHELLE TEA:
The mystery of a person being born is so profound.
FALU:
Michelle Tea, the author of over a dozen books including Knocking Myself Up, Against Memoir, and Valencia.
MICHELLE TEA:
I mean, why this child, with these particular quirks? And intricacies. And why not—why do they not have different quirks and intricacies? And what about the embryo that was implanted that didn’t take? Was that also him? Or what about the miscarriage I had? Was that him, or was that another spirit? Like it’s just—we don’t know.
And we could think about it forever. It’s really wild.
FALU:
It is wild, not only that initial birth and who we are when we come out, but the rebirths that happen throughout. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor experienced a particularly dramatic one. She was a neuroscientist at Harvard when she awoke one day to a stroke, one that she observed happening to her over the course of four hours. She lost every ability to do anything, no communication, no movement, but she was still alive and still conscious. She wrote about the experience in her New York Times bestseller, My Stroke of Insight, and gave a TED Talk that has been watched over 29 million times. Here she talks about the rebirth sparked by her stroke.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR:
I was artistic and creative and musical and athletic, and very in the present. Then I went to college and I fell in love with the subject of anatomy. And then, it was like, “Oh my god, I want to know everything there is about the body, everything there is about the brain, everything about the tissues, everything about the cells, everything.”
So then I did that and I started climbing the academic ladder. Then I made it to Harvard, and I was teaching and performing research at Harvard Medical School, and then, I woke up and I had this hemorrhage, in the left hemisphere. And over four hours, that whole academic world that had turned on, got turned off! But I was still okay! I had spent the first 20 years of my life being okay not being an academic.
FALU:
It took eight years for Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor to recover completely and she really had to be reborn, re-learn everything she had since she was an infant.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR:
So, I was okay. My poor mother, you know, she mourned [laughs] about the Harvard ladder. And I have to laugh about it, because it’s like, well, you know, at least I was up there to fall down. But she was very gracious. She never expected me to become whom I had been before. It was, “Okay, this experience has now happened. You can’t walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of your life. So you’re probably not going back to teaching and performing research at Harvard. So who are you going to be now?”
And we actually grieved the loss of the woman I had been. We needed to do that, because we needed to let that part of me go, because I wasn’t gonna go back to being who she was, more than likely. And so once we did that, then I was free to just kind of rebuild my brain again, rebuild circuits. And lo and behold, I’m still fascinated with anatomy. You gotta play the hand you’re dealt. And this is the hand I’m dealt, and I’m playin it.
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE:
So then now the important—what your question is—coming and going and being born and die; in between that, in between these moments, in what happen, we are getting close to that, the inner quality, the luminous mind.
FALU:
Listening to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speak, one is struck by what she did in that in-between moment, the one between losing brain function and gaining a certain consciousness. By some miracle, the part of the brain that experienced the stroke was where fear resides so as this was happening, the fear was slipping away. So often we get scared when there is change and it can cloud the moment of transition. So what happens when we take the fear away and bring in the curiosity or gratitude.
CHELLA MAN:
Recently I have just been reframing a lot of things that are happening in my life from, “Oh, I have to do this” to “I can do this, and I have the chance to do this.”
FALU:
Chella Man is an Asian American actor, model, artist, YouTuber, and LGBTQ activist known for sharing his experiences as a transgender, deaf, Asian, and Jewish person of color.
CHELLA MAN:
And so I think I’ve been leaning into the birth of gratitude more than ever.
FALU:
Something that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor felt so often throughout her recovery.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR:
There’s no perception of individuation. I, Jill Bolte Taylor—I, the individual—exist—my ego—in my left hemisphere. And in the absence of the ego, I’m still conscious, I’m still aware, I’m still alive, I’m still okay, but my perception of myself is that I’m now a big energy ball surrounding this massive organization of 50 trillion cells. I’m this organic life, and there’s no end to the energy of my consciousness.
FALU:
There was a sense of full surrender and presence in Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience. In that moment, she wasn’t trying to fix anything, she was just awake to the experience.
Our awakening, our openness to what is, as it’s happening, moment by moment is a kind of birth.
Chella Man is familiar with discovering new parts of himself. And while he has done this in so many external ways, he has also given birth to many things internally as well, through the process of observing his thoughts, through meditation.
CHELLA MAN:
Two years ago I started meditating very intensely and would do 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night. And for me, being someone who grew up experiencing a lot of different traumas, just sitting still was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done in my life. It really just allowed me to get to know myself better, and from that, so many things were born, one of them being this ability to understand where the root—what thought is at the root of my emotions.
FALU:
Being able to understand and see our thoughts can give us access to their roots, where they started, their birth. And we’re given the chance to not be so taken by our mind. Meditation is one of the best ways to capture that in-between moment, and set a new path.
CHELLA MAN:
Being able to understand when I can rewire has been so beneficial and has definitely been—has led me to give birth to a lot of different new ways of thinking. It’s definitely not this like perfect thing that I can always pull off. But it helps, at least. I feel like it’s a tool that I can like unroll sometimes to try to tap into.
FALU:
One of the many ways to change our perception is through art and in each episode, we invited our guests to reflect on an artwork from the Rubin Museum’s collection. For Birth, Michelle Tea and Chella Man looked at a painting of the Birth of the Buddha in Lumbini, which is situated in present-day Nepal. This painting is usually part of a set of 12 paintings depicting the life story of Buddha. Buddhist scholars describe the Buddha’s birth as the beginning of a new era, marking a significant change in the Indic religious tradition. Most Indian religious traditions in the pre-Buddhist period believed in the creator or God. Buddha started to teach in a way that puts the responsibility of individual action at the center of our destiny, future, and karma, rather than someone else driving it for you. The Buddha’s birth symbolizes this shift, a beginning of a new era.
MICHELLE TEA:
My first reaction looking at this work is, it feels very joyful. It feels like—it makes me think of Tarot, because I think—I read Tarot every single day, and so it is an art form that I’m interacting with every day, so it’s a big reference point and influence.
And it makes—so, there’s so much iconography in Tarot, as there is in this piece. And there’s a lot of like—the Tarot, the suits of the Tarot run one through ten, and there’s a lot of these like culmination cards towards the end of the suit, like the nines and the tens. Especially like the ten of disks, the ten of cups, where it’s this joyful—like everything—“We made it. We made it from the one all the way here. We’ve achieved everything. And it’s about to be a new era, and we’re celebrating.” And it has that kind of energy. Like it’s so busy. There’s so much going on. But there’s this sense that like all is as it should be, and it’s all the accomplishment of like great works, is sort of happening, all throughout the piece.
CHELLA MAN:
I don’t believe in individualism. I believe we’re all connected and community is a huge part. Even if I do something successfully, there are so many dominos of support I’ve received from other people that play into me being able to accomplish that. Someone had to raise me. Someone had to—I had to get my food from somewhere where someone collected the tomato. You know, it’s just like—it’s impossible to say you have done something alone. It’s just not true.
It’s definitely the kind of piece where you could sit in front of it and just see something new. I know if I hung that on my wall in my house, like the third year that rolls around, I would notice something different.
FALU:
Chella Man has been reborn in many ways, not least of which being his gender, but there are so many other ways as well and he explores these through his art, writing, performance, and social media. Most recently, he has been thinking about what it might be like for him to become a parent as a trans man.
CHELLA MAN:
I know my physical body can bear it, but I’m not sure if my mental capacity can bear it.
FALU:
So to explore this further, personally and publicly, Chella did a performance piece in New York.
CHELLA MAN:
That piece was titled, “Is It Worth It?” And essentially it has been a question of my life, whether or not I want children, which is something that comes up for a lot of people. But as a trans individual and as a deaf individual, there is more aspects that a lot of people don’t have to think about. When I was younger, I never could connect with this idea of motherhood or being a mom. I felt like it wasn’t on my path. When I transitioned, I was like, “Oh, a dad?” Like I—I actually felt like I had more brain space to consider the possibility. There was less hesitation there. The performance for Performance Space New York was titled, “Is It Worth It?” And it’s a live meditation of me oscillating between the performance of various gender roles, and also considering whether or not I would want to stop my testosterone treatment, which is something all transmasculine people have to do in order to get pregnant, but it can catalyze a lot of dysphoria, and so there’s just a lot of—just like anyone getting pregnant, even cisgender women, there’s a lot of mental hurdles you have to go through.
So in that piece, I’m wearing many layers of white, and all of the layers are stereotypically gendered masculine clothing. And one by one—the whole piece is silent, and I don’t wear my cochlear implant, so I can’t hear anything, essentially—one by one, I take off my masculine clothes and fold them.
And it’s this oscillation between like wearing all this masculinity yet like folding it the way my mom taught me, and the way I’ve seen her do laundry so many times. And essentially when I’m stripped down, it reveals I’m actually wearing a fake pregnancy belly underneath, to try to like understand the experience of that. And so once all the clothes are folded to the right of me, I take off the pregnancy belly, and I turn to the left side of me, which has all the ingredients to do my testosterone shot. And I do my shot, in front of the audience, and—wearing these shoes I fabricated that basically are upheld by empty testosterone bottles. So it’s a visual metaphor, essentially, of how testosterone has both literally and figuratively upheld me in so many aspects of my life.
So while I’m wearing those shoes, I do the shot, and just consider and think about how it’s something I would have to give up, for a long time, to be able to bear a child. Following the shot, I move back over to the belly and the clothes, and I put the belly on. And this was improvised but—I felt in the moment on stage that I just wanted to like hold this belly, and when I do that, the light—the light shifted, from medicalized industrial lighting to golden hour. And I actually—I don’t know if it was audible or not, but I started crying, which is something that’s rare for me, and does not happen easily.
FALU:
Throughout this performance, various parts of Chella are born and die and he viscerally explores them. What would it feel like to be pregnant, how would it affect him if he stopped taking testosterone, a hormone that allows him to be himself? What would he let go of? Through this, he could see how intertwined birth and death are, how a part of us dies when a new part is born. And, for him, art is a profound way to understand this part of himself.
Alex and Allyson Grey are artists and the co-founders of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. They are both deeply familiar with the power of art.
ALEX GREY:
I think the lens of art can allow us to develop a relationship with that sort of divine radiance that we see reflected in art. That’s why you make art, you know, is because it’s beyond words.
ALLYSON GREY:
And, for the liberation through seeing. You know, the concept of liberation through seeing is to be an artist, and to create something that someone might have a revelation around, so that you can share, transmit, your own spiritual inspiration, through your art.
CHELLA MAN:
I’m dying, and I’m being born, all at the same time, and it’s all happening in this like one second of me standing in my kitchen alone at night. I know a lot of people who experience trauma and discrimination have to develop their own coping mechanisms, have this moment, where all at once, they’re dying and they’re being born, because they’re choosing who they can be, and they’re choosing this new reality. And that’s the one that I feel like I’m grateful to be able to have the perspective to identify now. Grieving and celebrating, and everything. Just everything, everywhere, all at once.
FALU:
Yes, it’s so true, it’s all happening all at once, dying and being born, in so many ways, all the time. And that’s just what being alive is, something dies and from that something grows. Often something more wondrous than we could have imagined. We will be exploring these kinds of big transitions in the episodes to come. Can you think of a moment where you had to let something go so something new could be born? Sit with it for a while. Breathe into it. And remember that with every ending also comes new possibilities.
You just heard the voices of Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Chella Man, Yongey Mingyor Rinpoche, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Michelle Tea, Dr. Kay Tye, and me, Falu. To see the artwork discussed in this episode, go to rubinmuseum.org/awakenpod.
You can continue the conversation by following us on Instagram @rubinmuseum. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and tell your friends.
AWAKEN Season 3 is an eight-part series from the Rubin Museum. Come visit us in New York City, or explore rubinmuseum.org to learn more about the Museum and about art, cultures, and ideas from the Himalayan region.
AWAKEN is produced by the Rubin Museum of Art with Jamie Lawyer, Sarah Zabrodski, Christina Watson, Gracie Marotta, and Tenzin Gelek in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC including Tania Ketenjian, Sarah Conlisk, Philip Wood, Alessandro Santoro, and Jeremiah Moore.
Original music has been produced by Hannis Brown with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
AWAKEN Season 3 and the exhibition Death Is Not the End are supported by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Ellen Bayard Weedon Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, and The Prospect Hill Foundation. 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. Death Is Not the End is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Thank you for listening.