Laurie Anderson is a renowned multimedia artist, Grammy Award-winning musician, composer, filmmaker, poet, and photographer. She is also a meditator, and a decades-long IMS yogi and donor. On December 20, 2020, Laurie performed A Solstice Eve Sound Meditation, a free online event benefitting IMS and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.
This spring, Laurie talked about her practice with the Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment podcast, describing how she discovered meditation and first came to Barre on a ten-day retreat in 1977, just a year after we’d opened. Reflecting on her first IMS retreat, she says:
“…It’s painful to sit there for 18 hours a day. Your left arm feels like it’s going to fall off. So when it does, you focus on that left arm and you find many emotions in there… And at the end of that particular 10-day period, one of the things I noticed was that I had, after that period of time, incredible peripheral vision. And I was doing a lot of sculpture then and I was very excited by this idea that I could feel the space around me, above me, behind me. And it was an absolute thrill.
“So it wasn’t the space that is the I-space of ‘I see that in front of me, I look at it, I want it,’ that sort of vision of desire, but a vision of experience, of being in space.” Read more here.
Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz
