Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 12/28/2016 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 28, 2016. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://bit.ly/2mbep0o

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 for today, I'd like to welcome Tracy Cochran back here. Tracy is the editorial director of Parabola magazine. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Oprah magazine, Boston Globe, Boston Review, New York Magazine, and other publications. Her stories have been included in anthologies, including the best spiritual writing series, Writing for Their Lives and Sacred Voices, Essential Women's Wisdom Through the Ages. She's a teacher at the New York Insight Meditation Center and the founder of Tarrytown Insight, a weekly meditation group in Westchester, New York.

Tracy teaches mindfulness meditation and mindful writing classes and retreats throughout the greater New York area. She also meets with individuals and with groups. And you can find her Parabola magazine upstairs in the gift shop as well. So please help me welcome Tracy.

Thank you. See, I always discover every time I come here that none of us are alone. That when I sit with you and I have friends here now who wave to me, somebody greeted me on the street, that the very first thing I have to be grateful for is this two-way exchange. So 2016 is almost over and most people I read and hear from and I see hand gestures right now indicating what a relief, what a relief. I'm so glad that it's over. What a year. There's been so much loss. And just yesterday, we lost Princess Leia, the leader of the resistance. Beloved Princess Leia, my contemporary, our hero.

So it can be hard at times to remember what we can be grateful for right now. It's so easy to feel bereft and in darkness. And it's a dark time. We talked about that last week. And a friend of mine said it's not just dark in the north and the west, but in Asia they call this a time of deep yin, a time of coziness. There too, it's not just in Denmark. To be cozy, to draw in, to thank ourselves for all we've done to keep going.

So in times like this, it's quite wonderful to think small, very, very small. Another thing I saw from a friend on the Internet is that I can't believe a whole year has passed since I failed to become a better and more peaceful person. Maybe you can relate. So said, notice your exhale right now. Notice and allow the exhale to just vanish completely. We can do it even before we sit. And notice how life comes back in with the inhale. It just comes to us. There's something in us that strives to know, the thinking mind really wants to know. It can't stand uncertainty and it wants to know it will be okay. It's quite natural.

But we discover when we sit down, which we'll surely do together, that when we let go of this ordinary thinking, this striving to know right now, there's something deeper in us a luminous quality in the heart that heals us that heals us and so there are deeper truths truths that don't have words to them

that come to us almost as a last resort truths that don't have words to them, that come to us almost as a last resort when we can't know. One reason I love the picture from the manuscript is because it looks like a story. It's not finished yet. There can be all kinds of surprising twists. And this isn't just wishful thinking, but something we discover when we sit down and let go

and we begin to remember all we are and all we have. are and all we have. And often it takes just this state of feeling bereft to be open to that. When I was in England a couple of weeks ago, my daughter took me to the studios where they filmed Harry Potter, which was quite a wonder. I wouldn't have chosen this adventure, but it was wonderful. They had Hogwarts in the snow. They had all the sets. They had the common room at Gryffindor and on and on the train. Immense care went into this.

And I remember that J.K. Rowling once gave a commencement address at Harvard where she said failure was the bedrock that she built Harry Potter on. Failure and loss and bereavement have a way of taking us down to what's essential. It strips away all the extra stuff. And the Buddha knew this too. In the story of the Buddha's life, there came a point when he was completely bereft. bereft. He left his yogi brothers. He felt that everything was lost. And he lay on a riverbank, starving, hopeless, not knowing which way to go. And according to the great legend, a young woman came along and offered him a little bit of food. And he was so wild in his grief that he took it.

You weren't supposed to take any food, especially from a woman. So he was open in a new way, just because he was in the state of uncertainty. he was in the state of uncertainty. And the first thing he thought of was a memory from childhood. It wasn't anything big and fancy. It wasn't some abstruse formula. It was a simple memory of feeling safe and okay just to be still and watch his father and other people plow a field.

Simple life coming to him. The simple basic feeling of being safe and alive, receiving life. And he remembered, as we remember every time we sit down, that life is always offering itself to us. Our own deepest experience is waiting to be received by us. Last week and a few times when I've come here since Thanksgiving, I've talked about feeling grateful to the ancestors, the way Native people always are. Grateful for these bodies that came to us from them. Grateful to the land. Grateful to our spiritual ancestors, to the Buddha, to Gandhi, to MLK, to Princess Leia,

to all our inspirations. But today, I want to add that it's wonderful and so, so supportive to also remember to say thank you to ourselves. For what, you might ask? For our capacity to love? Not being loved, but our willingness to open to love. Our willingness to show up in a room like this, to sit down and to open up, to experience life in a new way.

The list goes on. For our capacity to be with what's unknown. As Rilke said, be patient with all that's unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves because experiencing life is the point. The truth comes as it came to the Buddha, as it came to J.K. Rowling, as she watched Harry Potter remember his magical potential, as we remember one breath at a time how much we are and how much we have, and that none of us are alone here.

All of us live in a web of life that's constantly waiting to give itself. So I'll allow you to experience this for yourselves now. So we take a comfortable seat, rooted to the floor, really, really allowing yourself to give the body a full welcome. It's welcome to be here. Allowing the eyes to close if we feel safe with closed eyes, otherwise averted on the floor in front of us.

otherwise averted on the floor in front of us. And we turn our attention to this body, this heart, and this mind without demanding anything of it or expecting anything, we gently bring the attention home to this life, to this breath, allowing ourselves to experience each breath where we feel it most strongly today, either at the nostrils or in the rise and fall of the chest or the diaphragm. Without seeking to change it, we just gently ride the attention, ride the breath with our attention, noticing how it feels to be here right now. Allowing ourselves to feel grateful for this being who breathes, who hears, who feels, who aspires. When thinking happens, we gently notice this, and without judgment, we bring the attention home again to the breathing and the experience of being here in this body. Thank you. Sati, mindfulness means to remember, to remember to come home to the breathing and the living experience of this moment, this life. Thank you. Noticing when we stray how it feels to be welcomed home without judgment. Thank you.... And as we begin to relax, to soften and feel safe under the gaze of our own attention, the vibrancy inside us and a light of awareness that is not thinking but receptivity. Thank you. 1.5 Takk for ating med. When we drift off into sleep or into thinking or to remembering images of things, we gently notice this and come home again to the light and warmth of the present moment, allowing ourselves to be what we are without judgment. Thank you. Thank you.... Noticing that in stillness we're with life. It comes in. It goes out. Thank you. Meditation is a practice of allowing, letting be. Thank you. Thank you. When we feel lost, when we find ourselves taken, we gently come home to this light of awareness and the vibrant sensation of being here. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing that this stillness is not loneliness but non-resistanceistance openness to life. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Gullu, the Thank you so much.

I'll actually have the pleasure of being back on January 18th to talk about beginning again. So I wish you all a very happy new year. Thank you. Thank you. 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