Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 01/18/2017 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: January 26, 2017

Every Wednesday, the Rubin Museum of Art presents a meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area. This podcast is a recording of the weekly practice. If you would like to attend in person, please visit our website at RubinMuseum.org/meditation to learn more. Presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg and the New York Insight Meditation Center. Tracy Cochran led this meditation session on January 18, 2017. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://bit.ly/2mXS7h6

Welcome to the Mindfulness Meditation Podcast. I'm your host, Dawn Eshelman. Every Wednesday at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea, we present a meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area. This podcast is a recording of our weekly practice. If you would like to join us in person, please visit our website at rubinmuseum.org slash meditation. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and the teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center. In the description for each episode, you will find information about the theme for that week's session, including an image of a related artwork chosen from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection.

And now, please enjoy your practice. Tracy is the editorial director of Parabola, which is a quarterly magazine that for 40 years has explored the wisdom traditions of the world. And it's for sale up in the shop if you'd like to take a look at it. Please welcome her back, Tracy Cochran. So I was inspired, especially because Parabola covers fairy tales and myths from all over the world, to share one other little story. And then I'll say why we're telling stories on a week like this. Why of all times are we not focusing on here

and now. I'll tell you why. But first the story from Western tradition and it's a story that many of you probably know, of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnow. So Sir Gawain was the most noble of King Arthur's knights. And so King Arthur one day went hunting in an enchanted forest, and he shot a deer. And he was dressed like a simple hunter. He wasn't wearing his armor or any kind of sign of his majesty, just a simple outfit, but a mysterious knight instantly appeared and said, Arthur, you've wandered into a forbidden forest, and you've killed one of my deer, and I will kill you. And Arthur said, no, please, I don't have my armor, I don't have my weapons. It would not be noble for you to kill me here.

So the knight said, all right, come back in one year on this day with the answer to this question, and I will spare your life, or I will kill you. So the question was, what do women want? I'm serious, it was. And I believe Sigmund Freud asked the same question. And the story was composed before the Women's March that will be happening in a few days, and we will find out what women want. But indeed the question was so deep that we could extend it to be what does everyone really want? But Arthur was at a complete loss and he went back to his court and he looked completely distraught. And Sir Gawain, of all the knights, noticed how upset and preoccupied he was and said,

Arthur, Arthur, what's wrong? And he said, I have to solve this impossible question. What do women want? And of course, Sir Gawain had no clue either. Because in those days, it was a man's world unlike now so they hunted high and low looking for someone who might know finally in despair arthur ventured back into the forbidden forest and came upon a horrible hag, as she was called, a woman as ugly as the man in this story that you heard from Dawn. And Arthur, because she looked like a witch,

approached her and said, I bet you can answer my question and spare my life. And the terrible hag said, I will, but you have to give me Sir Gawain in marriage. So Arthur, banking on the nobility of Sir Gawain, instantly agreed. He did. And the woman said to him, women want sovereignty. Aha, thought Arthur. So he handed Sir Gawain over, who did nobly agree, and there was a grotesque wedding where this woman proved not only to be physically unattractive, but she went out of her way to be as offensive as she could possibly be in the way she ate, in the way she spoke to people but Sir Gawain was noble and he stood by her side

and then they retired to the bed chamber yes they did and then she said well perhaps you could at least give me a little kiss assuming that they would retire to separate bedrooms. And he said, my lady, you are my wife, and I will do far more than kiss you. And at that, he looked up and beheld the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. and beheld the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. And she said, Gawain, would you like me to look like this for you at night, and look like the woman you married the rest of the time? Or would you rather I look like a witch at night

and be beautiful in the eyes of all the world? And Gawain said, my lady, you choose. And at that, at that gift of sovereignty, she became beautiful all the time and according to the great myth she only lived another five years and he mourned her all his days so this is a nice story but what does it mean? it means that he gave her the gift of his attention, his pure, loving, whole attention

without judgment. When we speak of sovereignty, we usually think of a sovereign nation, a nation that isn't dictated to from outside. What we usually do to ourselves is dictate to ourselves from outside, don't we? When we think about how we should be or how our lives should be going, we're full of thoughts about how it should be, full of cruel judgments. There's always something wrong with us, always. And our work is piling up, or we're too old, or we're too young, or we don't like how much we weigh, or we don't like how we look, the list is just endless. And when we come in here together

to sit down, the first thing we feel when we get to shut our eyes is this feeling of sovereignty, is this feeling of sovereignty, which is the feeling of dropping into the experience of who you are, not what you think you are. And I don't have to describe it because we're going to get to experience it in just a minute. But what we find is the most amazing thing. We start to find out that we're the frog we have to kiss. We are.

That we have this experience, and then we give it the embrace of our own attention. The gift of the jewel of this practice, which is a practice of returning to our experience in the moment, to our breath and to our body, beginning again. Through this action of seeing, and seeing is an action. And seeing is an action. We leave the thinking and we begin to experience ourselves in a new way. So that breath by breath, even things that we find ugly about ourselves, and that can include our wish to please, our wish to be loved,

our kind of desperate edge of needing recognition. All kinds of things that we find as we gently invite ourselves home to see this without judgment. We can see the beauty under it, the wish to be loved, to participate in life, to be part of it. So breath by breath, sitting by sitting, we perform this magic of transformation, self-transformation. And this is a story that will pop up all over the world. And I do encourage you to read Parabola, everyone out here. Because another story we shared about that was a native story from the Inuit Eskimos, where an Inuit fisherman pulled up in his

net a skeleton that had been a woman. And now she was a tangled mess of bones. And at first he was horrified by the sight. And he just wanted to cut the net loose. But he didn't. Something in his humanity made him stop. So he collected these bones and he took them home and very gently, with slow and careful attention he set them right and there on the bed was a living breathing woman beautiful he too had granted her sovereignty being sovereignty, being. And it was beautiful. And this isn't a story for long ago and far away. This is a story for today, for this week,

for everything that's to come. We give ourselves the gift of our own attention to turn and look and see again, to begin again, to see who we are and all we have. So now we'll sit. So take a comfortable seat. It's the most important instruction in this practice. You take a very comfortable seat, giving yourself, your body,

the gift of your kind attention. So we shut our eyes. If you can't shut your eyes, have them on the floor, but it's best to close them if you can. And we have the back straight, straight as we can, noticing how it feels to grant yourself space and we're allowing the body its sovereignty let it relax at his or her pace without prodding it. Just noticing how it begins to happen, we bring the attention to rest on the breathing. Without forcing it to change in any way with the most gentle attention, we allow ourselves to remember the breathing and the experience of being And at the same time that you begin to do this, you notice thinking, sensation, it might

be cold in the room for you, it might be hot, you notice all kinds of things and you practice allowing them. Let it be. And when you notice you're taken, carried away by thinking, you gently bring the attention home again to the body and the sense as we do this. We remember the vibrancy inside, the sensitivity in the body, the way it receives impressions of all kinds without thinking. Thank you. Noticing that we can begin again at any moment with the next breath we can come home to the body and the moment. Thank you. And as we begin to relax, we notice a light of awareness that's not thinking. It's inside the body and the mind and it can feel as if it surrounds us also, as if we Thank you. When we get taken, we gently notice this without any judgment. Welcoming all of ourselves rejection or comment of any kind. Thank you. Sati, the word for mindfulness means to remember. We remember we're open to life, to forces, air, awareness. We are not alone Awareness. We are not alone the way we think. Thank you. So Noticing how it feels to have presence. And open. Thank you. If we fall asleep or get carried away by thinking, notice how it feels to be completely welcome Welcome back. Thank you. Noticing that this light of awareness has an energy, a presence, a kindness, a sense A kindness. Thank you. When we get lost we come back to this simple experience of breathing and being in a body, allowing ourselves to be safe exactly as we are. Thank you. Thank you. And noticing how it feels in the body to be accepted, completely accepted and accepting. Thank you. Thank you. Knowing as we prepare to finish that we can begin again with the next breath and always And always find welcome. Acceptance.... Thank you. That concludes this week's practice. If you'd like to attend in person,

please check out our website, rubinmuseum.org slash meditation to learn more. Sessions are free to Rubin Museum members, just one of the many benefits of membership. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day.