Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 03/06/2019 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: March 8, 2019

The Rubin Museum of Art presents a weekly meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area, with each session focusing on a specific work of art. This podcast is recorded in front of a live audience, and includes an opening talk, a 20-minute sitting session, and a closing discussion. The guided meditation begins at 15:00. If you would like to attend Mindfulness Meditation sessions in person or learn more, please visit our website at RubinMuseum.org/meditation. This program is presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. Tracy Cochran led this meditation session on March 6, 2019. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/tracy-cochran-03-06-2019

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 meditation. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and 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. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and to our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. Great to have you all here. Anybody here for the first time? Welcome.

Great. And who comes almost every week or every week if they can? Great. And in between? can. Great. And in between. Yeah. Great. So nice to have all of you here. And shout out to our podcast listeners.

So if you ever miss, you know, you can just pick up the podcast. It's free on our website. And just also just wanting to say hello to those people listening on podcast who aren't here physically with us, but who are really part of this community too. So we have been talking a lot about intention and the power of intention lately. And this month we're going to kind of talk about the other side of that coin, the power of a reflective practice. So the incorporating reflective thinking and just that quality of gentle consideration into our meditation practice and this aspect contributing to a really holistic type of awareness. I don't know how many of you have seen or actually been able to use the wheel of intention, which is sitting right smack in the middle of our spiral lobby as you come in. Has

anybody entered in an intention? Excellent. And has anybody just had a glance? Yes, a few. Okay. just had a glance? Yes, a few. Okay. Well, we've been looking at images of this object and intentions that people have entered into it as we've been sitting here. And you can also just take a look at it outside after our session today. Jeremy will take you up on a free tour and give you a little bit more information about it, but it's also just there in our free space for people to access whenever they would like. And this is a concept that the Rubin asked two different organizations, Potion and the artist Ben Rubin, no relation, to work on and execute. And so we now have this kind of fun, almost like spaceship-looking thing that you can type your intention into,

and then it gets sent up into the galaxy, meaning it gets projected onto the bottom of that spiral staircase, and it actually physically makes its way up to the fourth floor, where it is gathered in the entry point of the exhibition called The Power of Intention. So you can walk up there and see yours and many other intentions that are being, you know, this sort of beginning point, entry point

into this exhibition all about intention setting, about prayer wheels. And that also includes some contemporary artists who work very powerfully with this idea of intention. But again, there's this other side of the coin to intention setting, and that is reflective practice. So reflecting upon our intentions and actions and evaluating and learning from them. Now, this is such a different thing. I just want to note then, then grasping, then sort of thinking obsessively about the past and why didn't I do this, that, and the other thing. And, oh, that intention was horrible. and, oh, I just never follow through with anything, right? This is not reflective thinking.

This is the voice we are sometimes fighting or learning to love in our meditative practice. So it's just a different approach in terms of quality reflective practice and something that could be interesting to think about in our meditative practice as well. So we will hear from Tracy Cochran today, our beloved teacher, and she'll talk to us a little bit more about intention and reflective practice. And as many of you know, Tracy is a writer and the editorial director of the quarterly magazine Parabola, which is right here this month in this quarter, is Change and the Changeless. And you can find this at our shop and a lot of Tracy's writing online.

And Parabola online as well, parabola.org. Tracy's been a student of meditation and other spiritual practices for many years. And in addition to the Rubin, she teaches at New York Insight, where she'll be leading a workshop, I believe, on March 30th, right? And she also teaches every Sunday at Hudson River Sangha in Tarrytown, New York. You can find her writings and teaching schedule online at tracycochran.org, parabola, Facebook, Twitter, online at TracyCochran.org, Bravola, Facebook, Twitter, and TracyCochran.org. That's it.

Please welcome her back, Tracy Cochran. Hi. I'm so glad to be back. And I feel warm in your presence. And I just wanted to share that I recently heard that you should always listen to your elders, which I am in the practice, not because they're right, but because they have so much experience being wrong. And I tell you from the bottom of my heart, I am very qualified to speak to you.

And this has everything to do with this subject of reflection and also intention. Because I was reflecting on how I can share something useful for you. And what I have come to is that a goal and many of the things we call intentions, even up here, like exercise more, are actually goals. And they're wonderful. But an intention in this practice is something different. A goal is what we want to accomplish. It's a picture in our head. is what we want to accomplish. It's a picture in our head. An intention is how we want to be as we go. has a quality of reflection in it,

of connecting to what's deeper. And just as you listen to me, let yourself be soft and just begin to open to why you came. And even before we sit, we begin to feel that there are impulses in us that are very innocent, very, very young. We want to be here. We want to be present, part of it, and feel safe, and feel we belong, and be in a state of exchange with other people. So even on your worst day,

even when you've decided that you have failed, or you're a bad person, and nothing has turned out right, first of all, speaking as an elder, nothing ever turns out right. It doesn't. Just forget it. But even in the grip of that kind of thinking, there's something else inside you. Embers.

So I wanted to tell you a story, just briefly. I was once a book reviewer and a journalist, and I secretly used it as a cover so I could ask people how to live and what the truth was. how to live and what the truth was. So this one time, I decided to interview a chef. And it was so much more fun than just books, you know, because food was involved.

But it turned out that he taught me a powerful lesson. Because at a certain point, this chef, who was full of goals, and he studied in France, and he lived in the big city, decided that he would follow his heart's intention instead. So he left the city and decided to let go of the thoughts that were constantly in his mind, that striving, that comparing, all that French stuff. And he, in this case, and he bought a place that was once a gas station and turned it into an inn in the countryside in Virginia.

And he let himself be guided by an impulse to share what he loved when he was young. Those basic tastes. In this case, American cuisine. But my daughter tells me it's the same plot as the cartoon movie Ratatouille. But this is true. This is true. He decided to draw on what he loved, the tastes he loved, the feelings he loved. And in the country, the impulse to just share, to share food, to share warmth, to share company. And I said, can you truly?

He said, chefs come and they try to figure out my food. And they can't because they miss a crucial ingredient, which is intention. And in this case, the intention is that authentic wish to belong. We were talking to each other like this. He wanted to know that he belonged to life, to his deeper nature, to great nature, and to transmit this. And he said, yes, I do believe that if you put that in the food or whatever you do, you can't help but taste it they couldn't say it they couldn't analyze it

but it's there so preparing for this talk I googled the guy and it turns out he just won his third Michelin star so I will never taste his food. But he shared this beautiful story.

His name is Patrick O'Connell and he has an inn at Little Washington. But the takeaway, what I want to impart, is that when we sit, we drop from our thinking and our goals to our deeper heart's aspiration, which is so simple. It doesn't have any words connected to it. It's a wish to be here, a wish to be present with each other, a wish not to harm, not to mess with or violate, but to be part of. It's something that happens when we let it happen.

So let's sit and see. So just let yourself feel how it feels to be here. And just see how it feels to grant yourself kindness. Kindness. Welcome. yourself, kindness, welcome, not judging anything that you find, not picking on yourself or you're feeling cold or old or anything, just welcome. and see that there is a light inside you, an attention that doesn't judge, that isn't separate from kindness. Du kan se det. See how it feels to be whole. Be with the whole of yourself. Gracias. See that you can begin again when you get taken. Come home. Thank you. Come to the breath. and see that you're connected to life.

It comes and it goes. Thank you.... See that you can let yourself be seen by an attention that doesn't judge you, that welcomes you Thank you. Let yourself come home and recall how it felt to be whole, just present, receptive. Receptive. Thank you for watching. Thank you. See that you can begin again. Come back. Come home. And see how it feels to be open to life. To be present with it. Thank you. Thank you. See how it feels to be soft, to be willing instead of willing, be willing. Just see. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing always welcome when you come home. Thank you. See that you're not alone. here that we share Thank you.... See that you're more than thinking, not just thinking. Thank you. Thank you. See how it feels to be completely accepted and acceptable. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your practice. Thank you for your practice. 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.