Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 9/13/2017 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: September 15, 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 September 13, 2017. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/tracy-cochran-09-13-2017

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. Welcome. Welcome to the Rubin to our weekly practice. My name is Dawn Eshelman. Anybody here for the first time? Welcome. Great to have you. And as always, great to have the rest of you back.

We are talking this month about community. And certainly that's what we are here. I feel that, having been a wage for just a week and returning to you, that sense of community. So looking forward to exploring that a little bit more today with Tracy Cochran, our teacher. And we are looking at an artwork that depicts an aspect of community. Here we have main figure that we're looking at here is a lama. And this is a lama performing a long life ritual. This is a tanka from a painting from 19th century. And the long life ritual is a very common ritual that's practiced in Buddhist tradition. He is seated and holding in his right hand a vajra or a scepter, which is

often used as a ritual instrument. And then in his left hand hand holding a vase that symbolizes long life. And as a holder of tradition, this lama, this teacher, is really a focal point for community to gather around, kind of like a hearth, and really historically forms the center of communities with an influence extending beyond sort of religious subjects and into the very fabric of the lives of the people in that community. And so, of course, I can't help but think of our own teacher today, Tracy Cochran, and what a warming kind of hearth she is for us here, and how lucky we are to gather together, all of us, and with her as well. So Tracy Cochran is a writer and the editorial director of Parabola Magazine,

which you can find online and also upstairs at the shop. And it's a beautiful, beautiful little publication. She's been a student of meditation and other spiritual practices for decades. And in addition to the Rubin, she currently teaches at the New York Insight and every Sunday at Tarrytown Insight. And her writings and teaching schedule can be found online on Parabola, Facebook, Twitter, and TracyCochran.org. Please welcome her back, Tracy Cochran.

I'm delighted to be back. I'm tempted to ask you all how your week was. Because I was here last week, so it's a great pleasure to be back so soon. I love this beautiful illustration, but I couldn't help but remember that when my daughter, who's now 27, was a baby, one-year-old, I was in a long-life ceremony officiated by the Dalai Lama, and child care had completely broken down, completely broken down. So I had this wild baby covered with mashed-up graham crackers and grape juice, and the Tibetans were like, bring the baby in, bring the baby in.

They were completely relaxed about this chaos. And have the baby eat. There was some kind of magical yogurt. Have the baby eat the yogurt. My point is that they were accepting everything that came, welcoming it. And when I come here, I always so look forward to coming here. I'm reminded of that story, Stone Soup, where the impoverished soldier is in town

and no one in the village trusts him. So he sets up a kettle and builds a fire and says he's making the most delicious stone soup and he invites everyone to bring something. And they do. They're so excited to see how delicious it will be with their potatoes and their carrots, their onions. delicious it will be with their potatoes and their carrots, their onions. And I feel that when we come together in this room, it's like stone soup. We each bring something. You might be feeling very happy today and loving the weather.

And for some of us, this weather is shot through with a kind of poignancy, because it's autumn, and we're very aware of the passage of time. I had my sister here for a couple of days because she's from Florida, and she was avoiding the hurricane. So I took her apple picking to cheer her up because apple picking is very available where I live. It's a long trip down here but if you want to go to a farm, it's very close. And I realized when we went to the orchard, inevitably, as beautiful as it was, there was that poignancy of the leaves changing, of another year passing.

So being a student of meditation for 40 years, the first thing I did was medicate my feelings with apple cider donuts. I did. I did. I couldn't help it. It was like a natural human reflex. And while I was eating these donuts, because they were so incredibly fresh, it seemed completely fulfilling

and the perfect way to stop time. But that moment passed. I tried apple pie later. That moment passed. So the Buddha said, as he lay dying, to his most beloved attendant, Ananda, to his most beloved attendant, Ananda. He said, Ananda, be an island unto yourself.

Be a refuge unto yourself. Some of you know this passage as be a light or a lamp, but this is another translation, be an island. And they think it's an even earlier translation. So what does this have to do with being in community? It doesn't mean go and make a little bunker for yourself. I think it means dare to touch the earth of your living experience right now. And I mentioned last week there are times when our experience of life and of others is so painful. We can feel so wronged or unseen. The root of the word from the expression kith and kin means to be known.

We can feel so unknown. The only place to go is down, into our felt experience, right here, right now, being with the earth of how it feels to be sitting here breathing. And all around us time and life is rushing by. It can be a flood, literally a flood, Houston, the Caribbean, Florida, or an emotional flood. I have a friend who describes emotions as being like pirates swarming over the ship, which is pretty good.

But sometimes it's even more than pirates. Sometimes it's a flood of rawness or pain, sorrow, anxiety. And what we can do in those moments is touch the earth, is touch the earth. Come back to the body. And there we discover, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, they call it basic goodness, or Trungpa coined the phrase for Westerners, basic goodness. We remember that no matter what we think we are

in any given moment and we can just give up on ourselves sometimes even when we think we're this or we think we're that we discover that we can still feel the sun we can still feel the sun. We can still feel the warmth of this September day. We still feel our breath.

And we can feel when we come in this room, there's still a basic innocence. We're happy to be here. I'm not going to speak for everybody. There might be some people right now who think they've made a terrible mistake. But I'm asking for your patience. Because as Trungpa said, in Tibetan there's no word for patience. It's just being with. Being with. Not that usual anticipatory dread that we all live with, I can't wait till this is over. But just being with in a softer way. And when I was preparing for today, I was thinking that when you see an image of a lama or the Buddha,

you can feel like there's so much you have to leave outside the door to sit in circumstances like that. You're not maybe feeling positive. Maybe you're feeling very, very negative. positive. Maybe you are feeling very, very negative. What would it be like if you were completely welcome to be exactly as you are? I always say that in the instructions. What if that was really, really true? And it really, really is. In preparing for today, I was reminded of a little story that was included in Parabola years ago that was Inuit, Inuit story, about a fisherman who went out on the water and he was fishing, he was dealing with difficult circumstances already,

but he cast his net and up into his net came a tangle came to be a pile of bones alone in the water that his first response, as any of our response would be, would be to recoil. He wanted to cast that net back into the depths and not look at it. It was too awful. But that innate human warmth that we all have got the better of him. And he reeled in the net and he took it back to his little home, and he very carefully laid the bones aright, the way they would be for a human. And it's interesting because that word sati, remember, to remember ourselves,

he was literally remembering the shape of this woman for her. And he did it very gently and very respectfully. And as he did, she came back to life and became a beautiful, warm, living woman. And company, community, I just added that part. But in a way what we do here is we bring this gentle attention to what we find, not judging it unlovely or lovely, just being with, being with ourselves in the safety of this community.

And as we do, we come back to life. And I wanted to add one more thing before we start. Some people asked me a practical tip last week for dealing with anxiety when it arises. Sometimes we can be gripped with fear or anxiety, and this works for pain. And I'm not speaking as a therapist, I'm speaking as a human being and a long-time meditator. It can be very helpful to breathe in slowly and breathe out more slowly, feet planted firmly on the ground. Now I will repeat those instructions, and we've heard them, but I'm inviting you to trust that this is something that's well known about human bodies, that if we breathe in slowly

and we breathe out a little more slowly, we can accompany ourselves, even in difficult states. So that said, I'm going to invite all of us to sit with our feet planted firmly on the floor and our backs as straight as they can be. And we're not just sitting with good posture, we're inviting ourselves to really take up space here. We're touching the earth as the Buddha did and asking the earth to bear witness to our right to be sitting here right now in the company of this lama and the Buddhas and each other. And we begin to notice how simply bringing our attention to the body begins to soften it.

And as the body begins to soften, we don't ask great results of it, we let it be. But as we detect it beginning to relax, we allow the attention to come to rest on the experience of breathing. experience of breathing, allowing the breath to manifest exactly as we find it, noting it either in the rise and fall of the chest or diaphragm or as a sensation of air at the nostrils, picking one focus for this sitting. And immediately, especially if we're new to the practice, we're going to notice thinking and sensing and memories and judgments and all kinds of things arising. And we allow everything to happen to us with no judgment. And when we notice we're tangled up in thinking, we gently bring the attention home to the

breath and to the sensation of being in this body right now, breathing. Breathing. Noticing the vibrancy in the body, the life in it. awareness in us that's not separate from the sensation of sitting here. This awareness isn't thinking, but a light that receives without judgment. Thank you.... Noticing that as we practice this movement of sati, of remembering, returning to the body and the breath and the moment, we are not closing down but opening, opening to life. Thank you. Takk for ating med.... Noticing that there is a stillness in the room that isn't rigid but soft, welcoming. It's an invitation to return. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing that even if you've fallen asleep or drifted into thinking, arguing, difficult emotions. You can gently notice this and come home and feel completely welcome, met by a light of attention that has no judgment. Thank you. Thank you. Takk for ating med. 1. Thank you. When we find ourselves drifting, we share this life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing how alive we can feel in stillness. How present and open. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing that as we make this movement of remembering, coming more together, we can and awareness of the present moment. Thank you. Noticing as we end that we may feel accompanied, not alone. May all beings everywhere, without exception, including ourselves, be safe from all inner and outer harm and danger, all storms and floods and dislocations and fear. May all beings everywhere, without exception, near and far, be well, as well as they can be. May they be happy. May their good potential and purposes be fulfilled. May they live with ease and be free.

Thank you. That concludes this week's practice. If you'd like to attend in person, please check out our website rubenmuseum.org slash meditation to learn more. Sessions are free to Ruben Museum members, just one of the many benefits of membership. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day.