Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 11/30/2016 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: January 4, 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 November 23, 2016. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://bit.ly/2nhUv3f

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. So we're here with Tracy Cochran today, and she's going to talk to us a little bit more about gratitude. Tracy is the editorial director of Parabola, which for over 40 years has delved into the world's wisdom traditions and been a source of literary and spiritual inspiration. She has been a student and a teacher of meditation for some decades and currently teaches at the New York Insight Meditation Center, with whom we partner to bring this program to you.

And her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Psychology Today, many magazines and anthologies. Please welcome her back, Teresa Cochran. I'm very grateful to be back with you today. And I'm enchanted by this example that Don just brought of 100,000 mini stupas of people, families, cultivating this kind of gratitude and this sense of connection to greater forces and greater ideas. So I just have to share that it's difficult to induce this in a child just by an explanation alone. When my daughter was a little girl and we lived in Brooklyn,

it was around this time of year and a lot of consumption was starting to happen. And in Brooklyn, as in many places, it was the custom, if you didn't want something like a bike, to put it out on the street and someone would come along and take the bike or the chair. So she had this tiny little bike with training wheels and I, being a good Buddhist mother, I inspired her to make a sign that said, please take this bike. It's freely given and enjoy it or something like that with crayons. So she made the sign and taped it to the bike, and we put it out on the street, and she went to sleep, and in the morning threw the drapes aside

and looked at me with a sense of magic and said, the bike is gone. It's gone. Somebody took it. the bike is gone. It's gone. Somebody took it. And I thought, oh, I've really, I've instilled the great idea of interdependence in this child. I felt so good about myself. And she turned and leveled the gaze at me and said, now when do I get something back? I'm serious. I'm serious. It was, she had a sense of transaction, not a notion of trust.

And so what this brings up is that this idea of gratitude, and it's such a great idea to dedicate a whole month to it, because it's one of those things that seems very small, something we know that actually turns out to be mysterious. It's an action. It's a way of opening to the world. It's a way of not transaction, but trust, not blind trust, but trust in a sense of being willing to see, to observe, to be patient, and to see what arises. And the thing about it that I love so much is that it can start with an action so tiny it feels like nothing at all. This morning, for example, I was preparing to come here, so I was sitting on a couch in my living room, and it was dark. I don't know if you, I'm sure you've

noticed it's a very dark time of year and it's going to be getting darker for the next few weeks. So I sat there and I had an intention to be sincere when I came so I meditated and during the time that I meditated, the sky went from dark to a slate color to a misty gray. And it looked so enchanting to see all these trees in the rain, dark. So I got up and I started walking around the house

opening blinds and drapes and then I saw the sunrise and it was just breathtaking. Pink and blue and I noticed that there was something inside my heart and my body that was opening up in response to the sunrise. It's like there's something below the thinking that doesn't forget that we're part of a larger world, that we're part of larger cycles and forces and it responds to it, not in a mechanical way, but with real gratitude and joy. Oh, the sun is back. It's like there was something in my body that didn't quite trust that this was going to happen. And there it was. And I was so happy. And I realized that very often in the grip of a shock or something disrupts our usual narrative, our usual thinking, suddenly we notice

very, very basic things like the sun coming up again, like the goodness of being alive. But what's wonderful is that we also notice this in this practice. When we sit down together in a space like this, we drop below our usual thinking, which kind of seals us off from living, from the living experience of being present moment by moment. And when we do that, all kinds of little micro impressions come back to us. How good it feels to be breathing and sitting together and being still.

And what's extraordinary is that when that relaxation, that symbol process that's going to happen in just a few minutes starts to happen, other kinds of feelings start to appear naturally. We don't have to school ourselves. It's like they're waiting and among them is gratitude. Because gratitude is another word for recognizing that we live in a world of giving and receiving all the time. When we sit with other people, we feel how it is to sit with other people. When we stop in the momentum of our day, we feel how that is, and we feel grateful.

And another thing I notice at this time of year, when I have, because I do have this daily ritual of sitting on this couch, in fact, it sags at this particular end pretty steeply because I like to sit there and watch the light come back. Suddenly it seems amazing to me that our ancestors made note of the fact that it got darker and darker and darker. And then on one particular day, and I'll have the great pleasure of being back here on that day, December 21st, it starts to get lighter again. And it's remarkably touching to realize that they noticed this because I realized that left to my own devices, I never would. When we're alone, when we're in our own thinking, in fact, we tend to be quite pessimistic.

At least I do. I'm inclined to, there was an adage I once read and wrote down that said, it always gets darker until it's pitch black. This is a very dark sentiment. But our ancestors lived closer to nature. And interestingly, being closer to nature brings with it a kind of trust. They notice the sun returns.

They notice the seasons shift and it gets warmer again. And this is our humanity. This is our birthright. And we don't have to go to an extraordinary place to discover it. We remember this when we sit down. That we have been given these bodies by ancestors and by life.

Thich Nhat Hanh always said, if you want to remember the cosmos, if you want to understand it, turn to the body. Because it came to you from the cosmos. If you want to understand it, turn to the body. Because it came to you from the cosmos. It was given to you. So we inhabit these bodies and these hearts and these minds that are vessels, exquisitely sensitive vessels,

for reminding us that we can trust life. That there will be more. That we have a place in this world. And so gratitude is an action. It's not a thought or a sentiment. Tennessee Williams once famously said, the world is a burning building. It's perpetually burning. And what we're called upon to save again and again, all the time, is love.

We rush into the building. And what we come out with aren't particular things. They're not particular narratives. aren't particular things. They're not particular narratives. They're not the triumph of having everything turn out exactly the way we wanted it to. They're qualities of heart, like gratitude.

And before we sit, since this is a podcast, I wanna add about my daughter from that long ago day on the street. We take in our own impressions, and our gratitude blossoms, and so is hers. Because Friday, I'm going to visit her in England, and she has surprised me with a trip to Denmark, which is my mother's land, the motherland. I'm so grateful. What a great kid.

So we grow in gratitude when we sit. So let's sit together. So we put our feet firmly on the floor and we let our backs be straight and we let our eyes close. We let ourselves be. This is the way. We practice allowing, giving ourselves the gift of our own non-judgmental attention. Noticing how that feels. to be completely acceptable, completely allowed to be as you are. And as the body begins to relax, to soften from getting here, from the effort of listening, we allow the attention

to come to rest on the breathing. Without asking it to change in any way, we allow the attention to be carried by the in-breath and the out-breath. Choosing the nostrils or the movement at the chest for this sitting. One focus. And almost immediately we notice that we're thinking, we're sensing, we're listening. And we allow all of that to happen, just as it's happening.

And when we notice that we're taken, we bring the attention home again to the breathing in this moment. Noticing how it feels to descend from the thinking mind into the experience of being Thank you.... Noticing that it can feel almost like thawing, softening. So that we remember sati, the word for mindfulness means to remember. That there's a light of awareness in the body. And there's a life to it, a warmth. An openness to receive. Notice that even if we get distracted, we can gently bring the attention home again to the breathing and the experience of being in this body now. And that each time there is a feeling of welcome. No judgment. Thank you. Notice as we continue making this movement of return that there is so much more to the That it's full of light, of awareness, of vibranening and opening a bit. Takk for ating med. As we relax and make this movement of return, we remember we're alive, we're part of life. We can feel energies coming in, going out. Takk for ating med. Thank you. Noticing as we relax and offer ourselves a chance to return, as we bask in the light of our own awareness, we may also have a feeling or feelings, we don't need to put words to, but a feeling Thank you. When we get lost or drift, we come home again and are met by a light of awareness that waits without judgment. and that we are supported by it, that we give and receive. Thank you for watching! Thank you. Thank you. Takk for ating med. Noticing our own capacity for stillness, which doesn't mean perfect quiet, but letting be.

Being softer. Takk for ating med. Thank you. Takk for ating med.... And as we begin to practice this way, we begin to remember we really are grateful. There's a feeling of being glad to be home. Thank you.. We begin to remember what trust can be. To our own awareness. Satsang with Mooji Thank you. Very grateful. 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.