As a response to recent violent events, the series of “Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room” care sessions was expanded to include a weekly guided meditation in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Tea was served in the exhibition’s apothecary during each session.

All meditation sessions were free and open to the public. All sessions were led by Mona Chopra, except for those occurring on July 23, August 27, and September 17, which were led by Aimee Meredith Cox. There was no guided meditation session on September 3.

Chopra writes: “In these sessions, participants will be led through meditation practices rooted in the Buddhist tradition to help in settling, soothing, and healing our stressed hearts, minds, and bodies. By cultivating patience, calmness, and clarity of thinking, we can, as Pema Chödrön notes, ‘soften what is rigid in our hearts.’ By helping to bring us closer in touch with our own humanity and the humanity of others, meditation enables us to be sources of increasing peace in the world.”

Mona Chopra is a board-certified and licensed acupuncturist who integrates hypnosis, yoga, and meditation into her therapeutic work. Chopra is also a meditation instructor at the Interdependence Project, a multi-lineage, secular Buddhist center in New York. She believes that getting to know the nature of our minds and continually working to soften and open our hearts are among the most powerful strategies we have available to us to bring about deep healing and enduring freedom.

Aimee Meredith Cox’s professional dance experience includes performing and leading master classes as a member of Ailey II. A tenured professor at Fordham University, where she teaches courses in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology, she is the author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015), which is based on eight years of fieldwork at a Detroit shelter for women and girls. Cox trained with the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and is also a certified Stott Pilates advanced mat instructor.