Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 10/18/2017 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: October 19, 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 October 18, 2017. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/tracy-cochran-10-18-2017

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. The series is supported in part by the Hemera Foundation.

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. Hi, everyone. Happy Diwali. Diwali begins tomorrow. Celebrations start tonight. And it is really Diwali that we are honoring this month here in Mindfulness Meditation

as our theme is light and dark this month. So Diwali is the festival of lights and it is India's most important and celebrated holiday and is celebrated certainly throughout the Himalayan region by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains. And it gets its name from the little clay lamp, oil lamp, that is lit outside of people's homes around this time. And that light symbolizes the light within and the antidote for spiritual darkness. Now, throughout India, there are all kinds of legends that go along with this story from Vishnu, Krishna, Rama. And what they all have in common, really,

is this concept of light winning out over darkness. We've been talking all along throughout the month about how in many Himalayan traditions there is not necessarily this dichotomy set up, so to speak, about light and dark, and that really we see through the lens of these traditions that there is light and dark in everything. And we've heard from our teachers this month so far that we can think of light as the things that we know

and darkness as the things that we don't know or don't yet know. So that's one way of considering this concept of light and dark that I will offer to you. And today we are bringing you this beautiful sculpture of Ganapati, or Ganesh, or Ganesha. And Ganesh is majorly adored and worshipped deity in the Hindu tradition and others as well. And of course, he is this big, powerful elephant. And in fact, he is known for helping you remove obstacles and is kind of a trickster, in fact, and also can be known to place obstacles in your way if he isn't properly worshipped or actually to help you avoid things. And you can tell from

his large feet down below that he is a powerful figure who will kind of stomp, stomp, stomp and help those obstacles be removed for you. So of course, as always, you can take a closer look at this object with Jeremy after our meditation session. If you would like to do that, he'll meet you right outside and he'll tell you lots more about Ganesh and Diwali too. But first, of course, we will meditate and we will hear from our wonderful teacher today, Tracy Cochran, on this theme of light and dark and a little bit about Diwali, I think. of light and dark and about a little bit about Diwali, I think.

So Tracy Cochran is a writer and the editorial director of Parabola. And that is a quarterly magazine that can be found online at parabola.org or, of course, always upstairs at the shop. And she has been a student of meditation and other spiritual practices for decades. In addition to teaching at the Rubin, she teaches at New York Insight and every Sunday at Tarrytown Insight in Tarrytown, New York. And her writings and teaching schedule can be found online via Parabola on Facebook and Twitter and TracyCochran.org. Please welcome her I'm very happy to be back. I've missed you. And it's wonderful to sit under this magnificent elephant

who is known by various names, including in the West Horton. And so it's interesting, the Festival of Lights, So it's interesting, the festival of lights, because everything in me is leaning towards autumn, towards darkness. I don't know about you guys. But it's interesting because the dark days are coming. And yet so many people, including myself, say, this is my favorite time of year.

The changing leaves, they're not so bright this year. And it's not just the leaves and the pull of the apple cider donuts. It's something else, because the dark days are coming. But there's this little thrill of expectation. No matter how old you are or a scientific or a secular Buddhist, no matter what you know yourself to be, you also know that Halloween is coming, right? And that something marvelous might happen.

Something might come out of that darkness. It's like there's something in the body that stirs. So in ancient Celtic times, we're approaching the festival called Samhain, which is commonly linked to Halloween. And it's the festival that separates the light time of year from the dark time of year. time of year. And in ancient Scotland, I read, people, and not just in Scotland, but throughout Celtic lands, people would call this the thin time, the time of year when other presences from other realms and other worlds can make themselves known. This would not be foreign in India. Anyone celebrating the Festival of Lights would also welcome the possibility of this idea of something else breaking through. So in Scotland, people would welcome the ancestors in

benevolent presences and to ward off beings or presences or insights or forces they were afraid of, they would don fierce masks and costumes. Can you relate to that? I mean it. In preparing for this and thinking about how the light appears in the darkness, I'm thinking about lying in bed at night. Have you ever had a day where you're lying there and you're thinking back at the momentum of the day

and thinking, what was that about? What was that all about? You have this energetic experience of having gone from one thing to another thing to another thing, whipping along like a leaf on a stream. Have you ever felt that way? And somehow it all happened without you in a weird way. So you can be frenetically busy, but you have this haunted sense that it happened without you.

And you can get very panicky in that moment and very fierce. Or you can get, in my case also, kind of ferociously self-pitying as a defense. So you're lying there, if you're me, I'll use I statements, thinking my life sucks. I'm not saying you've ever felt this way, but I hate being this old. And I'm telling you, you can have that feeling when you're looking at turning 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or so on there's the same feeling that life is going by without your consent right that you did not agree to this. You did not agree to this turning, that this looming thing. And you can have this, you can either get up and start making lists, which some friends of mine wake up to post-it notes with thousands of things listed on it,

to Post-it notes with thousands of things listed on it that will somehow stop this feeling. Or else you can just lie there and elaborate, as I sometimes do. Or we try to use gifts from our meditative toolbox. So we'll try sometimes to practice gratitude. And I have been excellent at coming up with these grudging little lists of gratitude so it's like I'm so glad my house is not on fire

I'm so glad that I have light and water and you know there's this kind of grim, grudging quality to it. But the interesting thing is that sometimes in the midst of this, we can feel the momentum of our thoughts going around and around and around. And so often, there's something to be heard about, or something to be upset about, something somebody said to us or about us, or just time's passage, just the poignancy and sorrow of that, of people and things we have lost that won't come back. and things we have lost that won't come back. And right in the midst of that, we can feel a glow,

an inner light. And it can start with sheer exhaustion. Never underestimate the gift of exhaustion, that just for a moment you're not thinking, and you're lying there or you're sitting here just breathing, just listening. And just for a moment, in spite of all that thinking, you can feel as big as Ganesha. you can feel as big as Ganesha. I love that feeling when I sit, that one of the beautiful aspects of that elephant is his size or her size.

We remember the size of this life, that we're breathing, that we're alive, that we're more than our stories. And we might remember our connection with other people. It's interesting, the great Zen sage Dogen spoke of this state called awakening or enlightenment as a dream and the state of sitting down together as a dream. Isn't that interesting? It seems like a paradox because we're sitting down to wake up. But when you think about it, sometimes we need the gift of a bigger dream to wake up from the spell of our smaller thoughts about who we are. Something like the story of the Buddha, say.

Or a memory from our own earlier life about who we are. Or Wonder Woman, you know, pick your myth. A larger story reminds us that we're more than we think. And one thing that touches me about Samhain and one way in which it relates directly with Diwali is that in ancient Scotland, as part of their festival of darkness, they would put out all the fires in the village. Just think about how dark it must have been in Scotland in a world lit completely by fire

completely dark and then they would build a common bonfire and everybody would relight their own fire from their common fire. Isn't that beautiful? And in a certain way, this isn't something far away. When we come into this room, there's a feeling, to me anyway, there's a feeling of a kind of enchantment, Dogen's dream,

when we sit down here together. Because we each come from our private lives that can be full of turmoil and loneliness and all that thinking. And we sit down together and we feel the momentum of that from the body even before we start to sit. We start to remember together this life in the present moment that we share. It's unknown to us most of the time. I remember when I was in high school, this is the last thing I'll share because you came here to sit and not listen to me. But I remember turning my bedroom into this psychedelic sanctum that I

wanted to be separate from the rest of the house. And I was born a little too late to actually be a hippie, which I mourned so much. So I got my father to get me a three-foot-long black light, which he very kindly installed, and so my room could be awash with this magical purpley glow. And I had all these Dayglo posters. Some of the older people in here might remember Dayglo.

And I had like trippy forests. And I had Jim Morrison beckoning to me in this kind of molten sunset colors. And I had mandalas, or what I thought were mandalas. me in this kind of molten sunset colors. And I had mandalas, or what I thought were mandalas. I had never seen one in northern New York. Things like they have in this gorgeous museum. And what I was hoping for was to kind of stage manage or create circumstances where I could take a journey to a place that was more than my mind, more connected.

So, of course, I read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, and very slowly, just leaving that there for now, in other ways, tried to find this place. Until I slowly, slowly, slowly came to realize that we find it when we sit down. When we sit down and we dare to drop out of our heads into the unknown of this moment, of our experience right now, alive and breathing. So let's take our seat and see for ourselves.

So we take a comfortable seat with our feet planted firmly on the floor and our backs straight, stretching upward. And we allow our eyes to close. Some people aren't comfortable with closed eyes so they can gaze at the floor in front of them. But closed eyes is a help if you can. to turn the gaze inward, to turn the attention to your own experience right now. So take an impression of this body, a global impression, without stressing or straining or trying to make it more or thinking about it. Just notice the body in the room as you find it today.

Allowing it to take up space, bringing a soft allowing attention to the experience of the body in this moment, to relax it, soften it. And as that begins to happen, allow the attention to come to rest on the breathing, noticing the in-breath and the out-breath without asking it to change in any way just noticing where you happen to experience it today either in the rise and fall of the chest and the abdomen or as a sensation of air entering and leaving the nostrils. Notice all kinds of sensations are happening and fleeting tensions, thoughts, pictures, all kinds of things, and we allow it to be exactly the way it is, without judgment and without comment, even about our judgments. And when we notice we are taken by a thought or a memory, we gently bring the attention home again to the breathing and to the experience of being here in this body right now. Thank you. Noticing as we begin to relax and make this movement of return to the breath and the sensation of being present, that there is a light of awareness in us

that isn't separate from the sensation of being here. It's a seeing, not thinking, a receiving. Thank you. Diolch. Thank you. Noticing how it feels to welcome yourself back into the light of your presence, your kind, receptive awareness. Thank you. Thank you. When we get lost, when we get taken by thinking or dreaming, we simply notice this and welcome ourselves home again to the light of an awareness that isn't thinking or judgment. Thank you. Thank you. As we continue to relax, we may begin to feel a stillness that isn't silence but openness, non-resistance to what is. We allow things to arise and pass away. Thank you. Noticing that we can keep coming back to the breath and the body and be open. Thank you. As we come home to the body, we remember we belong to life, supported by forces known and unknown. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing as we come towards the end of our sitting, that there is something we share, something That we can return to with the next breath. sensation of being here in this body. Noticing how sensitive we naturally are, how willing we are to receive, to respond to light. Feeling our own presence and the presence we share with others here. here, feeling grateful for this light inside this life. And we also feel generous. We are going to let it shine the way you can see Diwali from space. We are going to let this room be seen from space. We're going to let this room be seen from space. May we share our light with all beings everywhere without exception. May they all find refuge. May they all find peace and wellness and happiness and freedom.

Thank you. 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.