Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 12/05/2018 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

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 17:30. 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 supported in part by the Hemera Foundation with thanks to our presenting partners Sharon Salzberg, the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. Tracy Cochran led this meditation session on December 5, 2018. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/tracy-cochran-12-05-2018

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. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and to our weekly mindfulness meditation practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. I'm head of programs here. It's great to have you all here. And happy Hanukkah, for those of you who celebrate. We're looking at a kind of candle today.

This is a butter lamp. Looks a little bit like a chalice, right? And in fact, it does hold liquid. It traditionally holds yak butter, which is burned, and gives off a very memorable scent. But other types of oil and ghee are typically used now. And the butter lamp that we are looking at today lives in our shrine room up on the fourth floor.

It is one of many different types of offerings that practitioners will give upon entering the shrine room, including some other offerings include small bowls of rice and water. And it is this spirit of generosity that we are exploring this month during December and thinking about what the essence of generosity is and what the instinct to give an offering like this might be. So in this realm, in the Tibetan Buddhist context, the lamp, this butter lamp symbolizes, of course, the awakening, so light into darkness. And it also serves as a kind of focal point or a bit of company for a person who is meditating in this environment. So you can imagine that sort of flickering presence of a butter lamp. Also in the shrine room,

often an entry point into experiencing that space will be through the senses. So what are you hearing, smelling, feeling? It is a very multi-sensory space. And that's something that we can also utilize in our practice as a grounding tool, just through our senses arriving in the present moment. And that is indeed one of the ways that the butter lamp can aid a meditation practitioner in their kind of arrival into that space. So Tracy Cochran is here with us today. And she's a writer and the editorial director of the quarterly magazine Parabola, which can be found online at parabola.org and in the Rubin gift shop in case you're looking for a little gift. Might I suggest a subscription? I was just sitting next to someone who says, I have every parabola from since 1980 something.

She said, each one is brilliant. Tracy has been a student of meditation and other spiritual practices for decades and in addition to teaching here at the Rubin she currently teaches at New York Insight and every Sunday at Hudson River Sangha in Tarrytown New York she has a workshop coming up in January at New York Insight and her writings and teaching schedule can be found online via Parabola on Facebook and Twitter and TracyCochran.org. Please welcome her back, Tracy Cochran. Thank you.

I am very, very happy to be back, and especially in Hanukkah, and also in the Christian calendar, this is Advent, and also in the pagan world, this is the time when they wait and watch for the sun all of these holidays have to do with light in Hanukkah first of all

it's wonderful to remember that what we're doing right here, right now is going inside a temple that what we're doing right here, right now, is going inside a temple. The word contemplate means to go inside a temple. And I think it's quite natural for everybody here to worry that they don't have quite enough light, that you might be tired or distracted, and you like being here to be bathed in this soft, restful atmosphere,

especially on a cold, gray day. a cold gray day, but you in particular might be a little bit too tired or distracted or full of torturing thoughts, you can't quite give yourself to the practice, but you're willing to try to open just a little bit. I think all of us feel that way. And it's interesting to remember that in the Buddhist tradition, the word generosity doesn't just mean to give, which it does. It also means to renounce or to relinquish, to let go of your ideas about who you are

or your limitations or your endless preoccupations, what separates you. Okay, so, okay, that might sound good in theory, but you still might feel the way you feel, right? You might just, you just can't help it, you are who you are, and you have to worry about what you have to worry about. And I just want to invite you to consider that an interesting approach is to remember how it feels to be really young. Really young.

And I'm talking about how it feels. And when you're really young, you care about being warm and having something good to eat and feeling safe. Right? So things very close to the body, feeling at ease. But when you're young, you're also a little bit more willing to open, to be open to the idea that there is more to you than what you think you are. That you may be capable of greatness or magic or potentials that you can't even picture.

And related to that is the very real recognition that you belong to life. You belong here. You're not separate from it. So I did a little research for today, and I want to tell you something about Santa Claus that you might not know. I know, I know, some of you might cringe at the very mention of the word, because we're drowning in the images of Santas at the mall and Santas stuffing all kinds of plastic stuff down chimneys. And it's become very oppressive. But this is a practice of recovery, of recovering a deeper truth.

And I discovered, much to my delight, that among the Sami people, an indigenous tribe in northern Finland, yes, it's true, there are indigenous people in Scandinavia. And also among Siberian indigenous people. There was a figure long before St. Nicholas who dressed in red and white fur with black boots. Does that sound familiar? And he was, or she was, a shaman, a healer.

And this magical shaman would go out in the forest and pluck red and white mushrooms. Psychoactive mushrooms. I'm serious, magic mushrooms. Now, the Sami people in northern Scandinavia, not far from the North Pole, are also long associated with reindeer. And to this day, they have a special permission,

a protected right to work with reindeer. So it turns out that these reindeer also enjoy these magic mushrooms. They do. They go and search for them, especially in the winter. And one of the side effects of these mushrooms in humans, and we extrapolate also in reindeer, is that they make you feel like you can fly. I'm serious. I'm serious. So some of the research and scholarship on this shamanic indigenous Santa Claus is that he or she, it wasn't just one, and the

woman shaman is the one that's associated with the black boots and the white fur-trimmed outfit. They would dress like the mushrooms. They'd go out and they'd collect the mushrooms and they would gather them up in a big sack and they would go to the houses, which were yurts, which were buried in snow. So they would drop bundles of mushrooms down the chimney to dry.

And the people would very happily accept them and dry them. And sometimes when they collected the mushrooms, the shamans would put these beautiful speckled red and white mushrooms on evergreen trees to dry. And to this day, in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, people will get Christmas tree ornaments shaped like, and colored like red and white mushrooms. I just ordered one from Amazon. You get it. So I do have a point that's related to practice, that let's step back for a moment from this kind of amazing and rather delightful fact

that I invite you to verify for yourself. It's not fake news. That Santa Claus, and picture what it felt like to be in this bleak and barren and frigid and dark, above all dark, place and time. And the healer from your tribe was giving you some medicine where you could experience a sense of connectedness to a vibrant living world.

A childlike sense of wonder, because if you talk to any researcher, babies and children are basically tripping all the time. They have this willingness to connect, They have this willingness to connect, to open themselves to believe that they're part of a bigger whole. And this medicine is what we do when we meditate. If you look at any book on research with psychotropic drugs, they include meditation, not as a drug, but as a way to connect. So the challenge always is to go from what we think we are, the default network, the ego, the usual narrative, to a glimpse of another possibility.

So you may come into the room like Ebenezer Scrooge, just to throw in another Christmas, who is like closed, and Dickens describes him as solitary as an oyster, completely preoccupied with his job. Can anybody relate to that? Completely. And Marley comes in shaking his chains, trying to shock Scrooge into remembering that he's more than his job. That he belongs to life. That mankind is his business as Marley puts it.

That your job and who you think you are is just a drop in the ocean of your life. And he moans and he groans and he shakes his chains. And Scrooge still doesn't get him. So three spirits are sent. And again, just like with the shamanic Santa Claus, he needs a little help, a little bit of help remembering. This practice means to remember,

to remember his possibilities. And among the ghosts, there was a memory of the goodness of childhood, the warmth of it, the sense of possibility and magic that comes. So I invite us to do that right now. We take our seat and let your feet be firmly planted.

And let your back be straight and notice how it feels to be sitting here in this body and bring an attitude of kindness and generosity to the body. Let it be exactly the way you find it. Welcome it. And by the body, I also soften the body, warm it. And as this begins to happen, let the attention come to the breathing. and come to the breathing.

Without seeking to change, just let the breath come in and go out. And you notice thinking, sounds, sensations, let everything be okay, acceptable. And when you notice that you're taken, gently bring the attention home to the breath and to the sensation of sitting here right now. Notice that there's life and light inside you that isn't thinking. It's an attention that's like sunlight. It sees without judging. When you get taken by thinking, gently come back to the body and the breathing. Thank you. Notice that when you come home to the moment and the sensations,

to a light of attention that isn't just thinking and judging. Thank you. Noticing the vibrancy inside you and also outside. Thank you. When you get distracted, gently come back, feeling welcome, no judgments. Thank you. Noticing that silence doesn't mean being completely without words and cares. It means the stillness of relinquishing attachment to those thoughts. Coming home to the present moment. Thank you. Sati, the word for mindfulness means remember. Alive. Open. Thank you. Notice that this light of attention can let everything come through. No clinging, no pushing, just open to receive. Thank you. When When you get taken in any way, just come home. Come back to the sensation of being here in a body. Thank you. Notice how it feels to be at home in the world, at ease open to receive Thank you. No matter what comes up, let it come up, coming home can remind us that we belong to the life. That it supports us and lives through us. So, happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and I look forward to seeing you next year.

Thank you. Kwanzaa, and I look forward to seeing you next year. 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.