About this event

Access to Divine Immersion: A Meditative Journey for People with Disabilities with Mushim Patricia Ikeda

Participants registered in advance for the webinar:

https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GuTTOXa7RmGOPfKzr3gVpg

After registering, they received a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

This was a one-hour online, interactive mindfulness meditation experience for people with disabilities. Images, videos, and music from Divine Immersion: The Experiential Art of Nick Dong, which was on view at the USC Pacific Asia Museum from July 8 to October 3, were shared with participants who could attend in person. The museum deepened its commitment to accessibility through this online experience and other workshops and classes.

Mushim Patricia Ikeda is an internationally known mindfulness meditation teacher and a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. www.mushimikeda.com

The Zoom URL was shared a week before the event.

ASL and closed captioning were provided for the program.

Description for the photo above:

A man with dark hair, wearing black pants and a black t-shirt with white polka dots on it, sat on a white cushion in a mirrored enclosed room.

More about Mushim Patricia Ikeda:

Mushim Patricia Ikeda was a core teacher of mindfulness meditation and Buddhism at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. She was also a writer of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction published in various arts and Buddhist anthologies and journals. East Bay Meditation Center was based on a commitment to diversity, equity, social justice, and radical inclusivity for people of all abilities.

More about Divine Immersion: The Experiential Art of Nick Dong:

Humanity had just experienced an overwhelming amount of disorder and confusion. It was inside us. It was in our past. It weighed heavily in our present. It was in the unknowable future. To help us lay our burden down, artist Nick Dong extended an invitation to visitors ripe for this moment: “Bring all of your chaos to this exhibition.” His artwork met us in the middle with ordering principles. What we created together was both beautiful and hopeful.

Taiwanese-American and Oakland, CA-based artist Nick Dong (b. 1973) identified as a 21st-century continuation of Wen-ren, the Chinese cultural lineage of intellect-scholars. Each work was a quest for self-evolution, a vehicle for sharing philosophy. By carefully integrating scientific and handcrafted components, supernatural movements, light, sound, and interactive strategies, Dong’s artworks produced a fully immersive event, only complete when the viewer activated it with their energy. Dong formulated his work to be incomplete without the viewer for good reason: To ignite an encounter that opened up new perspectives about each other and the world, illuminated the beauty in our broken places, and thus created space for hope and healing.

Converging his training as an artist and engineer with thousands of years of Buddhist tradition, 21st-century technology, and all the chaos we could muster, Dong’s work nourished the transformative potential of this moment — toward human wholeness, imperfections encouraged and included.