Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 12/27/2017 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: December 28, 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 27, 2017. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/tracy-cochran-12-27-2017

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. And now, please enjoy your practice. Good afternoon. Welcome to the mindfulness meditation here at the Rubin Museum. In partnership with Sharon Salzberg, New York Inside Meditation Center, the Interdependence Project, Shambhala Center, Parabola Magazine, and Himera Foundation.

My name is Tashi Chodron. I am the Assistant Manager to Himalayan Cultural Programs and Partnership. I host a monthly program called Himalayan Heritage Meetup. It's a platform for Himalayan community to share their living culture to the friends of the Himalayas. And that is all of you here and many more. So this week's theme is refuge. It's wonderful to have this amazing refuge place that we can all come together in this amazing city called New York City. And in the heart of New York City, we have this oasis where

we can all come together, middle of the week, middle of the day, for something beautiful. So the art connection for this session is a mandala, as you see here. It's squares and circles. So mandala is a perfect universe. It's in Tibetan. It's called gil kor. Basically, that means perfect center and circle. It's a visualization aid to reach your goal. And the goal is enlightenment, you know, the awakened and the wisdom that each of us are born with. And so mandala, this is a mandala, you know, our Wednesday mindful meditation mandala as well. So that's the art connection. It's a beautiful Hevajra in the central deity here. And Hevajra is one of the very important yidam, which means meditational deity. So it's used for meditational aid for a very, you know, major empowerment. It's very hard to remember each and every deities and entourage. So often there are these Dilkor or the mandala

that is created to help the practitioners reach the goal. And so for this afternoon, our teacher is Tracy Cochran, and Tracy is a writer and senior editor at the quarterly magazine Parabola, which can be found online at parabola.org and also in the Rubin gift shop upstairs. Tracy has been a student of meditation and other spiritual practices for decades. In addition to Rubin, Tracy currently teaches at New York Insight and every Sunday at Tarrytown Insight, Tarrytown, New York. Tracy's writings and teaching schedule can be found online via Parabola, on Facebook, Twitter, and on TracyCochran.org. Please help me welcome Tracy back. Thank you. I'm delighted to be back here. And I picked the mandala because it looked to me like a blueprint of a fort,

of a fortress, or a walled city. So there are wonderful art tours here after these sittings, but it's interesting sometimes to feel our way into the artwork. and most of us associate a refuge with a fortress or with a walled city, some place that we can flee to to be perfectly safe, don't we? And yet I find in my reasonably long life that I can never get things quite squared away. Don't you hate that?

You think at a certain age everything would be peaceful and secure. Wouldn't you think? And all would be well. And just when you think you're on the cusp of having such stability, something happens. Have you found that? Something happens. And you can find yourself completely overwhelmed. And I wanted to share a little story from my life about that. I used to live in Brooklyn and when my daughter was younger, in the wake of this holiday season, which in itself can be so overwhelming, I wanted very much to instill another kind of, not even just a value, but another kind of trust in this little girl.

So in Brooklyn, as in most cities and towns, the custom when you want to recycle something is to put it on the street. And she had this little purple bicycle that she had outgrown. So I encouraged her to make a big sign and tape it to the seat that said, free bicycle, take me, enjoy me, something like that with a smiley face. And we put the bicycle out on the street with great excitement and she went to bed in her little loft bed and woke up the next morning and with the same kind of excitement as Christmas morning, threw open the drapes, looked out on the street and said, Mommy, the bicycle's gone. And I was full of this kind of radiant joy for a moment that I had this little

Buddhist child right in the middle of Brooklyn. And then she turned to me with a big smile and said, now when do I get something back? Because I'd explained that when we give, when we give, I'd explain that when we give, when we give, we receive something, right? But the reason there's laughter in this room is because this is the way we feel. This is the way we live. Our minds are conditioned. The thinking mind says, I've done everything right. I meditate. I have a practice. I've lived my life well. I've done everything right. I meditate.

I have a practice. I've lived my life well. I haven't killed anyone. We've just come out of our holidays. We haven't killed our parents or our children. When do we get something back? This is the way the mind works. It's quite natural.

Why is this happening to me? I'm trying so hard. The nature of the thinking mind, it's like Houdini. It wants to find a way out of those chains before you sink. It wants to find a solution, right? And even when we have a practice, we want to do it. We want to do it well. So the really encouraging thing to hear, really encouraging thing to hear, we can't hear this enough, in itself it's a refuge, is that we're not here to do. We're here to see. We're not here to do anything. We're here to see how we are. And again and again, there's an ancient sutra of the Buddha, I don't know if the mandala is still up, I think it is, of the Buddha sitting

in the center of the city, open to all those big gates. And the gates are all the things that can arise in your life. They're also your own thoughts. They're also your own emotional reactions. And the Buddha sat there and was present for everything that arises. The interesting thing to also know is that it's not our thoughts that are the problem, none of them, even our most dark thoughts or emotions. It's our attachment to them.

We've just had a holiday, and sometimes people have a little bit of difficulty during the holidays. Sometimes family is present. Sometimes you come home and see your parents and register that they've deteriorated to a degree that you couldn't have anticipated. Or your children, out of control.

What did you do to deserve such children? So you're having these thoughts, so you're reacting. So that was the initial thought. And then this dark, like, oh my heavens, I'm so much darker than I thought I was. And the first thing we do is contract and separate ourselves and think there's something wrong with us or that something has to be suppressed or concealed. And it's usually a good idea not to say everything that we're thinking or feeling. But what we're really practicing is not attaching to what we think we are, to any of the thoughts that arise, that enormous feeling of vulnerability we have

where we don't know how things are going to work out. Have you ever been in such a place? I think everyone in this room has. I don't know what will happen. I'm afraid. I'm so afraid. And the mind pictures things of what will happen. What would it be like if we were in exactly that place of vulnerability and we didn't grab with the mind to know something, even something dark. If we just stayed present and open, this is arising.

Then we discover something extraordinary. There is a way of knowing that doesn't involve the thinking mind. That we can begin to feel it even as you are just listening to me, coming back to the world of the body. I don't mean anything spooky or remote, but just having a sensation of the body, sitting in the chair as you're listening. Keep the sensation. That's your refuge. The present moment. It's like this now. Maybe something unpleasant is happening. It's not about pleasant or unpleasant.

It's about this movement of return. I looked up the word refuge in English, and it comes from a Latin root that means to flee back to, to return to, come back and breathe. And if you just don't worry about doing anything, even not attaching to your thoughts, but just softening up to the notion that there is a way of being present at the mercy of your thinking. You are more than you think you are. And we're taking in, right now, an impression of how it feels to be here. The sensation on the skin, we'll

go into this more in a minute when we sit, but even when you have your eyes open, you realize that you don't have to be Houdini. You don't have to fight your way through life with your thinking or take a battle stance in your feeling. battle stance in your feeling, that you can also return to an impression of being present here and now, and discover that this is a way of knowing. It's a way of understanding. It sounds so unusual to say this. The thinking is not the best way to understand often. There's a way of returning to the living experience of being present and knowing there's more. Under the mind that's freaking out or panicking

or carried away with excitement, there's a deeper mind. There's a mind that we share that's made of attention and awareness of the present moment. And when we open to that, every time I teach I repeat this so I may as well repeat it before we sit. A Zen master was once asked, what is this thing enlightenment?

And he said, small moments, many times. So allowing that just for a small moment you can release, ungrip the fist of thought, that notion that this is it, this is what will be. Just let it open and let yourself just come back to the most simple and basic refuge, sitting here in a body breathing, opening to life.

So let's try it together. So we take a comfortable seat, paying special attention to allowing your feet to be firmly planted on the floor. Planted on the floor and your back straight and upright, as straight as you comfortably can. And allowing the eyes to close. Some people are not comfortable with closed eyes, in which case avert them And just take in a very simple impression of the body without thinking about it, without striving in any way, just notice the body. And immediately with that you'll notice different impressions. You might feel cool on your skin. You might have tension. Just notice it without comment or judgment, even about comments and judgments.

And notice how bringing attention to the body begins to soften it just a bit, warms it with attention. And as the body begins to relax, bring the attention to the breathing without seeking to change it in any way. Notice in-breath and out-breath. Noticing that perceptions of all kinds will continue, sensation, thoughts will bubble up. Allow everything to happen to you with no judgment. And when you notice you are beginning to be taken, carried away, gently bring the attention home again to the breath, into the experience of sitting here in a body, breathing, sensing.... Noticing as we begin this movement of return, sati, the word for mindfulness, means to remember, to come home to the body and the breath.

Notice as we turn our attention homeward, there's a vibrancy in the body. There is a light of awareness inside that isn't thinking. Thank you. 1.5 tbsps of butter. Thank you. When we begin to drift off into dreams or sleep or thinking and worrying, we notice with no judgment and gently come home to the body and the breath. Welcoming ourselves with kind acceptance. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing as we return to ourselves that we don't shut down, we open, we soften and open to life. We remember we're here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.. Even if your mind has been wandering all this time, you can come home and find acceptance. Kind attention. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You may find as you relax, you also open, you settle down and also open to a presence, an energy, an intelligence to thinking. Thank you. Thank you.... As we prepare to finish, you may notice a stillness in the room that we share, that's That's very alive. Thank you very much and Happy New Year. Thank you very much and Happy of membership. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day.