Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 10/26/16 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: December 29, 2016

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 Interdependence Project. Tracy Cochran led this meditation session on October 26, 2016. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://bit.ly/2hwSSLE

Thank you. please visit our website at rubenmuseum.org. 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 Ruben Museum's permanent collection. And now, please enjoy your practice. It's such a delight to have Tracy Cochran back.

And she's the editorial director of Parabola, which is a quarterly magazine. And it has, for 40 years, drawn on the world's cultural and wisdom traditions. She has been a student of meditation and spiritual practices for decades and teaches at the New York Insight Meditation Center. Please welcome her back, Tracy Cochran. Thank you. Hi. I was very attracted to this image because when the Rubens sent it to me, the caption under it said that this is the lord of compassion.

But he's adopting the guise or the form of a mother whose only child is threatened or in danger. And I thought, that's interesting. It's interesting that this great bodhisattva of compassion can adopt a form like this, a fearsome form. I thought it was especially apt because it's almost Halloween. It's on Monday. And as I'm sure you may have heard, there's also an especially grim election coming up,

something frightening. And in Halloween, which in its ancient Celtic roots, it was linked to a festival called Samhain, which is sometimes called Celtic New Year, where they would welcome the coming of the dark time, the passing of the light, and the coming of the dark. Isn't it interesting to kind of tip your perspective so that you welcome or accept times of darkness or the unknown? And the Celts would call this the thin time, when spirits could rise up from other worlds. And people would dress up. They would adorn fearsome guises like that artwork

to ward off danger from harmful spirits. They would take a stand. So we don't talk about this very often in our mindfulness practice, but I wanted to tell you a short little real life story about what this can mean. A long, long time ago, I left a comfortable corporate job

and a comfortable, sunny studio apartment on the Upper West Side for the East Village. And it wasn't the East Village of today, which is quite chic and pretty safe. It was the East Village of the 80s. It was a different time. And I moved there for a lot of reasons, but underlying the practical reasons, there was a wish to draw closer to the fire of life. Somehow, I wasn't making contact. I wasn't embracing life the way I really wanted to. So I left my comfortable life and I moved into a tenement apartment on 6th Street and Avenue A. And there was a lot of fire going on. There was a lot of fire. There were fires in

trash cans. There was a riot. There were all kinds of clubs. And I would go to the clubs the pyramid club king tut's wah-wah-ha b-bar I did it trying to draw close and I tried to reinvent myself as a writer and I would write about the wildest edgiest things I could think of I visited a haunted apartment I followed the pickpocket patrol around New York City. I went to a Santeria ceremony in witness possession. So still, I would be gripped with this sense of being separate from life. There would be what they call in this tradition the hindrances, restlessness and worry. Am I cool enough for this neighborhood? Am I ever going to amount to anything?

And dullness, and doubt, and all the things that mean the sticky little fingers of the mind are thinking about me. So somewhere along the line, living in the East Village, I married and I had a baby. And everything began to change. So my mother, I remember, came to visit me in my apartment on 6th Street and Avenue A. And her advice to me was to never take the baby outside. And her advice to me was to never take the baby outside. Never leave this apartment until you can safely transport yourself to Brooklyn or someplace.

But naturally, I couldn't do this. So I put my baby in a sling, newborn baby. And she was very round and dimply and happy little baby. And I put her in a sling and I decided to take her for a walk. So down the steps we went and up Avenue A past the Pyramid Club and King Tut's Wawa Hut, the Odessa, and into Tompkins Square Park. And I kept telling myself that this was a park and that it wasn't still containing the ratty and dangerous remnants of a tent city that was full of junkies and drug dealers and who knows what other kinds of dangerous and desperate spirits. So I'm walking along in the park with my rosy little baby and out of nowhere this creature veers towards us with long, stringy, dirty blonde hair,

a big baggy coat, a terrible smile. He gets right in my face, and he said, I could get a lot of money for a cute baby like that. cute baby like that. So in that moment, all restlessness and worry was dispelled. All thinking about myself, all doubt. I felt this power surge up as though from Mother Earth herself, as if she was standing with me. Mind and body were one. I felt this extraordinary focus and preparedness. Nobody was going to hurt my baby.

Years later, I remember interviewing Gavin DeBecker, who's the world's expert on danger. He consults with our government, many governments, and he wrote, there is no animal more dangerous in any species than a mother defending her young. None. They've seen mild-mannered Westchester ladies suddenly and magically turn into ninjas. They have. It's quite amazing. So here's my point. I was never put to the test. He ran off. But that left an indelible impression on me, on what mindfulness can be. always something soft. It's something that has many qualities and many flavors. It includes in it wisdom, insight, and a fierce determination, a readiness to respond. The great Tibetan Buddhist teacher Trungpa, who taught many Westerners, said a lot of people don't like to talk about this aspect of mindfulness, but mindfulness is something that enables us to stand up to the most difficult things. Because it trains us to be one with the situation. That's the essence of compassion. The interesting thing is in that moment that I described, I wasn't just

pumped up on adrenaline and wishing to be violent. I was in the stance of a protector. There's a big difference. I was close to selfless compared to the way we usually are. As Mark Nepo, a spiritual writer I recently met, he writes for my magazine, said, at certain moments we shift from being a noun to a verb. From a noun to a verb. Instead of thinking and worrying and wondering what will come and wondering who we are and how we fit in,

what the election results will be, suddenly there we are, alive, in the moment. And it grants us a flexibility to be with what we meet, like the deity that was projected on the screen. Or like the ancient Celts who would be fierce if they needed to be. Or else if a spirit of the ancestor arose, welcome them home.

And one of the beautiful things I love about reading about Halloween and Samhain, its ancient root, is that often they would, as part of their ritual of welcoming the darkness, everybody in a village would douse their own fire. And there would be a huge collective bonfire. And they would rekindle their light from this shared fire. And I found that beautiful because it's like what we do when we come here to sit down and be quiet. We dare to come out of our isolation, our thinking, and we sit together.

And it's like drawing from a common fire, from an awareness that's greater than our individual thinking, and from an intention to be with life that's been shared by the whole of humanity in their best moments. And another ritual that would sometimes happen, is that they would build two fires

and animals and people would walk through the fires as a way to be cleansed. And I think of this as a way, it's kind of a ritualized way to describe what it's like to walk through fire, which we all must do from time to time. Difficult situations come up. Frightening situations come up.

Dangerous situations come up. And we meet it by the light of this common fire. We meet it best when we're unified inside. When body and mind and heart come together. Which is what happens when we sit, which we're about to do in just a minute. It doesn't mean something abstract. It means letting go of thinking and remembering what it means to be in a body, alive. And you find in that moment an end to confusion and an end to fear, because suddenly you know what's good. The goodness of being alive. And you know there's a truth beneath all the words we're battered with all the time.

The truth of life. The truth of being aware. The truth of being here. So, why don't we try it? Don't take my word for it. Let's see. Let's see. So the first and most important instruction

is to take a comfortable seat with your feet planted firmly on the floor in front of you and your back straight. We're welcoming the body to be here. Allowing the eyes to close. And knowing that this body that's been through so much, the sheer stress of getting here, in every sense of the word, this sheer sense of all we've been through

is also strong. It comes to us from our ancestors. And it contains a capacity to sense, to perceive, and receive. So, when the body feels good and ready, we allow the attention to come to rest on the breath without seeking to change it or slow it down or do anything to it.

We just allow the attention to be carried by the breath, like a child on a swing, noting the in-breath and the out-breath, either at the nostrils or by the rise and fall of the chest and the diaphragm. and fall of the chest and the diaphragm. Pick one point of focus for this sitting. And immediately you notice all kinds of thinking and sensation, feelings. We allow everything to be there without judgment or comment. The whole of our experience is welcome. And when we notice we're taken, we gently bring the attention home again to the breathing and the experience of being in this body, in this moment.. Noticing how it feels to be welcome.

Nothing excluded. and being here. Thank you. Noticing as we practice this movement of return that there is a sensation of vibrancy in the body that we may have forgotten. Remember how it feels to be here. Takk for ating med. The movement of meditation is a movement of return, of letting thoughts be and coming home. At moments we glimpse an awareness that's greater than thought. It's a light in the body and the mind. Takk for ating mediet. Thank you.. relax that we can open to receive. It's as if this awareness is waiting for us. We don't we soften into it. Thank you. Takk for watching! As we soften, there a new kind of strength. Being present. Responsive. Available to life. Thank you.... As we relax, as we return, we begin to remember we are part of life, part of a greater whole. That there are energies and strength coming to us from outside. Thank you. Takk for watching! Thank you. With each breath, sharing in life, participating in it. Takk for ating med.. We continue this practice of return that we feel more together, head, body, feelings. This is a meaning of remembering, literally pulling our parts together, becoming one inside and with life. Thank you. We may have a feeling of remembering who we really are, which is not a particular character or thing,

but a feeling, a feeling of life, of being alive. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to add that Trungpa, Tibetan Buddhist teacher, called practitioners warriors. And he didn't mean violent or reactive or angry or defensive. He angry, or defensive, he meant. Vulnerable, available, ready to meet life, whatever came. Thank you so much again. So please join us for the final one minute session together. So we shut our eyes one last time and allow ourselves to come home again to touch the earth and to relax into a sense of the goodness of life, in our life. And our practice, and

the intention that guides our practice. And we put two hands together in our heart space the way people have been doing for 2,500 years. And we don't keep this practice and this intention to ourselves, but we give it away to the whole world without exception. May all beings everywhere be safe and protected from all inner and outer harm and danger. May all beings everywhere be as well as they can possibly be, given their conditions and causes. May all beings everywhere be happy and at ease and be free.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone, and happy Halloween. Thank you.