Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 12/21/2016 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 December 21, 2016.

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 great to have Tracy Cochran back, back from her travels. And she, as many of you know, she's the editorial director of Parabola, which is a quarterly magazine that for 40 years has focused on the world's wisdom traditions. And she's a writer as well, and a teacher and practitioner of meditation. And you can find her at the New York Insight Meditation Center, as well

as here at the Rubin. please welcome her back Tracy Cochran hi I'm I'm delighted to be back I just returned from a trip to England and then Denmark which is the motherland it's my mother's land and it's even darker than here. And because it's so dark at this time of year, they relish coziness and that's a word that doesn't really do it justice, but a way of coming together with friends and loved ones and finding warmth together and light together. So it feels very cozy to be here with you. So today, December 21st, is winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.

This is the day when the North Pole in the whole of the North is tipped as far from the Sun as it can be. It's the darkest day and starting tomorrow it'll grow lighter. So I wanted to share with you something that I find quite amazing about solstice. There was discovered, in ancient times actually, so it's not a new discovery, a wonderful and mysterious monument in Ireland named Newgrange. It's in Newgrange, so it's not the name of it. It's the place. No one knows for sure what Newgrange was for.

Maybe rituals, maybe a tomb. But it had one extraordinary feature. It was designed so that exactly at sunrise on December 21st on the solstice, sunlight would pour through a special opening over the entryway and flood a passageway and fill a chamber. And on the wall, there was a particular etching that no one really decodes up till now of three spirals and it would illuminate that. So what I wanted to offer is that this monument was discovered to be 5,000 years old. It was

built before the pyramids in Gaza, before Stonehenge. It was a marvel of engineering and observation and sheer noticing. Can you imagine that? To design something so precisely that exactly at the moment of sunrise, sunlight floods a particular chamber. And it reminds me often when we've met together, we've talked about how we can take refuge in this body,

in this body, a body that came to us from ancient ancestors, and there are observatories like this all over the world, not just in Ireland, and it reminds us that this body, this heart, this mind is endowed with these same capacities that built that place. Same heart that beats, same breath that we can follow, same ability to see. So, you know, people speculate, what was this for? What was this for?

And they speculate, oh, it was for capturing the sun on the shortest day. Capturing the sun on the shortest day. And honestly, we tend to think of our earliest ancestors as if they were children or as if they were primitive. But what if we didn't do that? What if we realized that they were noticing the moment when things changed, when they shifted, when the days went from growing darker to slightly lighter, and they marked that moment of turning.

What if we realize that because it's really true nobody else has written that but it struck me when I read descriptions of this marvelous place so what we do when we sit down here first of all when we come together we find a place of stillness, just like those ancient ancestors in Ireland found when they came together in this place. They had the same power of interconnection when they sat down. And when we sit down and we let ourselves be still and we return to this body that came to us from them, we begin to remember powers of wisdom and compassion that we forget forget we have not in great sweeping strokes but in tiny little moments of softening so this sounds well and good and I want to tell you a very short story about what I mean so I took this trip it was a little bit on the long side. And travel, I find, is a little bit rough these days.

I don't know if you've noticed, as someone told me, economy class is getting a lot harder and first class is getting a lot better. And I was definitely in economy. And I was definitely an economy. And I heard from a friend who recently flew first class and was given warm nuts. Can you imagine that? No warm nuts where I was sitting. if rich trip for a lot of reasons and I finally got off the plane at JFK feeling like a battered but enriched warrior and I pictured climbing into the car like I had survived this long and intriguing battle only to discover that my wallet was stolen yeah Yeah, in JFK. It was horrible. Not my passport, but my wallet. And so I sat in the car.

And the first thing I did is what most human beings would do. I freaked out. I freaked out. And I quickly cycled through all the reactions you have of just pain and panic and outrage and that feeling of being completely violated and bereft, like I was alone in this dark universe,

subject to all kinds of dark forces. And it went on and on, lamenting, lamenting, why, why, why. And I was lying in bed, jet lagged, wrestling with that dark angel, blaming myself. It's a kind of preemptive strike, as though it can protect you from pain. Spacey, Tracy, all of this. I'll never carry a backpack again, ever. On and on. So I began to grow tired and finally at 1 in the morning I had my iPhone on the bedside table there was a band of light that came across the iPhone at the dark and it was my daughter in England saying I'm so so sorry this happened to you this tiny little moment of kindness and I realized

if it had been broad daylight and everything had been well and I had been the competent world traveler I fantasized being, a few kind words would have meant almost nothing to me. I would have thought, oh, polite little words, how nice. But in the darkness of my turmoil and suffering, that tiny little moment of kindness meant something to me and it invited a response in me I softened up a little bit instead of feeling isolated in the story of loss I realized I could just relax with it I could let be things happen I began to remember because I was awake jet-lagged and I go from the story to the softening the story to the softening which is very much what our practice is like.

That we can find our way not by reaching up and out, but by being with ourselves in a gentler and kinder way. That we can go from one moment of kindness or openness or softness to the next and find our way that way in the dark, that we can remember we're more than one particular story of who we are and there were more than any loss. So I thought I was particularly struck then when I read about New Grange and this marvelous observatory because imagine what it's like in a world that's lit only by fire. Imagine how dark it is. And to see that sunrise flooding the chamber.

Imagine the gratitude they would feel. It's extraordinary to us. And we don't have the same connection to outer nature that our earliest ancestors did. But we do have the same availability to our own nature, to how we are, because we're also part of nature. So remember and notice how it feels when you're lying in the dark and you're stressed out or you're freaked out or you're lonely or you're feeling vulnerable or you're feeling like something just can't be solved, what it's like to feel yourself begin to relax for a moment. It might be out of sheer exhaustion.

I recommend exhausting yourself with worry because then you can really notice and relish what it's like to begin to let go. And notice the action it has on you when someone smiles or says something kind, or some words touch you that feel sincere. And notice how you respond with openness, that there's something in you that's willing to be kind in turn and trust in turn and realize that this is no small thing. That's why my Danish ancestors were so into coziness. They were on to something.

ancestors were so into coziness they were on to something that when Camus said in the midst of winter I felt inside myself an invincible summer and that made me glad that made me happy I think was the exact quote because I realized that no matter how hard life was pushing against me, there was something in me that was stronger. But realize that that stronger thing isn't some mighty inviolate force or flash of brilliance. It's those small moments many times and that tiny moment of willingness to soften to receive. It's strong. It's strong.

There's a light that's born in the heart of darkness. And when we read that or we hear that somewhere, we think it's rare. But I'm here to tell you it's something we can feel every day. And you don't even have to lose your wallet like I did. We can do it starting now by sitting down together. So we take a comfortable seat. And we do it today with special gratitude for our common ancestors. Every one of us is sitting in a body that was given given bodies that have hearts that

beat and that perceive the value in things, that can meet life with kindness and compassion, bodies that are sensitive. We notice when the light lasts a little bit longer. We don't have to do anything. We notice. And we have this breathing that we can gently bring our attention to now. that we can gently bring our attention to now. Realizing that the rhythm of this breath was given to us by life that has gone on and on and on through all kinds of conditions.

And we gently bring the attention to the breathing, allowing this body to be exactly as it is, with an attitude of welcome and gratitude. How wonderful it is to have this body. To be here, right now. So we allow everything to happen just exactly as it is. The thinking, sensation, pictures in the mind and when we notice we're being taken we gently bring the attention back to the rhythm of the breath where we feel it most strongly today either the rise and fall of the chest or diaphragm or at the nostrils,

the sensation of the air, the body begins to settle down and relax, to soften. Thank you. When we get taken by thinking, we gently come home to breathing, to the sensation of being here. Thank you. And we may notice as we begin to relax that when we make the movement home to the breath, We find a light of awareness that isn't thinking. And that its nature is kind, accepting, excluding nothing. Thank you. Thank you. When we fall asleep or get lost, we come home again noticing that this light of awareness waits for us, welcomes us without judgment and without comment. Thank you. Gå in. Thank you.... Noticing how it feels to come home to this light, to be received, seen, held by an awareness without judgment. Thank you.... We can begin again at any moment with the next breath. home to the light of our own awareness, our own deeper wisdom and compassion. Thank you. Thank you. Mm-hmm. And noticing as I come home to this light of awareness that it feels as if it's not just mine, but something I receive, something shared. shared Thank you. Thank you. As I go on making this movement of return, I begin to remember that I'm part of life, part of the world that isn't just darkness but also full of light. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing that this light is always waiting for us. That there are no words to it, but it is not separate from wisdom, not separate from compassion. Its action is wise and kind. Thank you. It feels brighter already. and we offer gratitude for this practice and for our presence here together in this beautiful space

and we don't keep it we give it away freely to all beings everywhere without a single exception may all beings everywhere be safe from all inner and outer harm and danger. May all beings everywhere be as well as they can be. May they be happy and at ease and be free.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I wish you all a very, very cozy holiday. 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. you