Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 9/26/2018 with Tracy Cochran

Episode Date: September 28, 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 20:00. 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 September 26, 2018. To view a related artwork for this week's session, please visit: http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/tracy-cochran-09-26-2018

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. Welcome to our weekly mindfulness meditation here at the Rubin Museum in partnership with Humira Foundation, presenting partners Sharon Salzberg,

the Interdependence Project, and Parabola Magazine. My name is Tashi Chodron, and we're still continuing with the theme ritual. And I just want to share that ritual objects plays a very important role in Tibetan Buddhism. We believe that the power of Buddha can be experienced through statues and other spiritual objects like thangka paintings and stuff that you see in the shrine room. So with that in mind what you see here is this beautiful sculpture of Padmasambhava or Guru Rinpoche in Tibetan, precious teacher. This is connecting to the sixth floor, the second Buddha, master of time. And I'm pretty much hoping that all of you may have visited the

sixth floor. How many of you have not visited the sixth floor? Oh, my goodness. You are really missing it. So the sixth floor, the whole theme and the year-round theme of future, all of that is connected to the sixth floor exhibition that has been going on since January, I think, of this year. So we still have a few more months, but don't wait. Keep going there, because for us Tibetans, just being in the presence there,

we believe it purifies all of our obscurations. It's considered very, very, very auspicious and very fortunate. So, you know, very, very auspicious and very fortunate. So, you know, yeah, I totally believe that just by being in the museum, we do get the blessing. But please do visit the sixth floor. It takes a village, and we all work so hard to make things meaningful and, you know, beautiful and interesting, all of that.

So Padmasambhava is one of the greatest, greatest teacher that came to Tibet from India, flourished Buddhism, revived and flourished Buddhism. So until this day that you hear Tibetan Buddhism is from Padmasambhava who flourished, who revived and flourished, coming to Tibet from India in the 8th century. And hid many treasures to benefit beings from that time and moving forward in the future. And so this is a beautiful sculpture that is selected for this ritual. Just by, as I mentioned, being in front of the statue, one can feel the experience.

Okay? So all of that is ritual, what you see in the shrine room, the statue, all the offerings, the fact that we are all meeting here every Wednesday. And then we have amazing teachers that come, and I'm very, very fortunate to introduce Tracy Cochran back here at the Rubin Museum. Tracy is a writer and editorial director of the quarterly magazine Parabola which can be found online at parabola.org and in the Rubin Museum gift shop. She has been a student and a meditation teacher and other spiritual practices for decades. In addition to

the Rubin, Tracy currently teaches at New York Insight and every Sunday at Hudson River Sangha in Tarrytown, New York. Tracy's writings and teaching schedule can be found online via Parabola on Facebook and Twitter

and on TracyCochran.org So please help me in welcoming Tracy. Some of you were here last week when I told the story about being lost in the woods. So a full disclosure, I must confess that two days ago I was once again lost in the woods. I was at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York with a group of Dharma teachers from New York Insight and I had the inspired idea for four of us to take a nice long hike in the woods because some of the people there were

city people and it just seemed like a wonderful way to bond. So off we went and there was one man who took the lead right away. He was very nimble, and he had really cool hiking boots, and he seemed to know what he was doing. So we were all kind of chatting away and walking behind him and having all kinds of interesting little pauses where we noticed the trees and these interesting little huts everywhere that we guessed that children had built in some wilderness course. And then after about an hour or so, he said, wait a minute, does anybody see a trail?

Wait a minute. Does anybody see a trail? There was no trail. And then he said, I'm colorblind, so I can't see the spots on the trees. Can I? And so this flurry of reactions went through me, the first of which was I actually barked out, you're kidding me. Have you noticed that that's the first reaction people have, even if you tell them something

really horrible, you know, as if you'd be kidding about that. And then a flurry of reactions of fear and of course there was the beginning of fury and blame like, why were you leading if you're color blind? But then instantly I had the thought, why was I following? Why was I just following along? And this instant little burst of self-criticism, you'd think I would have learned something from my last time lost in the woods. You would expect that I would at least be looking around. No. But what was touching in that moment is I realized that,

first of all, we were all Dharma teachers, so there was a check on how reactive we could be, how much profanity we could use. But I was also touched by this kind of, this mutual softening, like, let's just take stock. What can we do? What can we do? So it was decided that we would retr first of all, it is a gift. It's a gift from ancient Tibet and from ancient India.

And it's extraordinary to remember that, that many people in this room did Tashi is Tibetan, but many of us didn't grow up with these rituals and the great story that these rituals are connected to. But in a way, even if we're coming in here for a little bit of de-stressing meditation, we're still connecting to this great story of the Buddhas waking up and of Padmasambhava bringing this tradition to the people of Tibet.

So I could feel that in the most humble way as a softening, coming home to myself, coming home to the body, letting go of the thinking and dreaming, being present for my reactions as they bubbled up, which is what the Buddha did when he first sat down under the tree. He didn't sit down all woken up. He sat down to woken up. He sat down to find his way, to take stock of what was present.

So that's what we did. And leaving my color blind friend in the back, we made our way back to the trees and the spots and we found our way home. And I was thinking, how can we, we're in a space where we're invited to be in front of sacred objects, like Tashi said. So if you come to this completely new, how can we approach? And I took the idea of lotus-born, he was lotus-born, Padmasambhava, according to the story, he was found as an eight-year-old floating in a lotus in the water by a king who immediately recognized his special quality, his radiance.

He was like a little human jewel floating inside this flower. So the first reaction is, I am definitely not lotus-born. I'm pretty sure. But closer inspection, I thought, maybe in a sense, we are. I thought, maybe in a sense we are. Because I remember hearing Thich Nhat Hanh teach that lotuses grow up out of the mud. This beautiful flower comes out of mud and difficulty and not being able to see.

You can't see in the mud. And then something blooms sometimes. Like when I was standing in the woods two days ago, something tiny but momentous happened, right in the wake of my thinking, not again. And you've got to be kidding. And all the rest of it,

there was a tiny little micro decision to be soft with it, to be easy with it, to be easy with it. And I saw the other people around me also making a similar decision to just relax with the situation. And I took heart from that. And I took heart from that. And in the tiniest possible way, something new bloomed. I went from just happily marching through the woods, chattering away, to stopping and being aware.

And also being aware of the tiny little acts of courage and patience and softness that the people with me were engaged in. So that's a way of being lotus-born, just for a single moment. And another quality of this great being, Padmasambhava, is that he can come to you, even though he's not in the body that he inhabited in the year 800, he can come to you when practitioners meditate. How do we understand that? We can have a presence of someone, even the people who are with us, in a moment of thinking,

help, I'm lost, and it doesn't need to be in the woods. Just an impression of somebody kind, somebody who can touch the earth and be grounded, be grounded. Somebody who can be open, can give you heart and courage. The story also includes, he came to Tibet and encountered difficult beings, demonic beings who resisted the Dharma. And he subdued them. How do we understand that? Difficult feelings. Difficult. They can grip us so powerfully.

They can be like demonic forces. And in a way, the ritual of meditation, which is not and the breath is a way to begin to be soft with even our most difficult feelings, our deepest fury and rage, our grief and sorrow, our fear, even stark terror, for moments, and I can't emphasize enough, moments, we can make a micro-decision that we're not going to push this away, decision that we're not going to push this away, we're not going to get hooked by it, but we're going to be with it just for this moment. And sometimes something amazing happens. You can feel a burst of energy, a vibrancy. of energy, of vibrancy, so your fury turns into fuel. Just like those demonic forces became allies of Padmasambhava inside you. You're liberating your own energy. You're taking it back from the colonizers,

from the people and stories that captured your energy and kept you in thrall, thinking that this is who you are and this is how it will always be. And when we engage in this ritual of coming home, we can see or sense just for a moment, no, I'm more. My life is so much more than I thought it would be. It's richer and it's got so much more support and so many more people and beings who are here with me, who are just like me, who I can share this life with, and this struggle. So in retrospect, I'm very grateful for being lost yet again. But I did come to see, one final note before we sit, so I was on my way today and then a train had a tree across it.

And I was like, across the tracks, not the train. Enough with these trees. But then thinking, it's always something. That great American mantra, it's always something. And this is, I can see nodding heads, we know this expression, it's always something.

And this is a practice for meeting life as it comes. so that everything that happens to you can be a support for your return to your biggest life. So let's sit. And we have our feet nice and firm, taking up space, and our back straight, and just notice right now with no judgments, no comments. begins to soften the body. And as this begins to happen, bring the attention to the breathing without seeking to change it in any way. Just notice in-breath and out-breath. Notice how it feels to be here with no judging. thinking, sensing, sounds, feeling, Be soft.

And come home. Thank you. Notice how it feels to introduce an aspiration of patience in your seeing and mind. Let everything be. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing that this stillness can also be embracing, patient and kind. Thank you. When we start drifting we come home noticing that we can be patient with everything unresolved. Give space. Breathe. Thank you. Thank you.... Noticing that as we let ourselves soften we begin to feel a vibrancy inside us and outside, a presence, a life. Thank you. Thank you. Noticing how it feels to come home with no judging. Just a light of awareness that isn't thinking. Thank you. Thank you. Notice that no matter what, we can make a decision to be soft, to let be greater than we think we are. Thank you. Thank you for your practice. Thank you for your practice. 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 Ruben Museum members,

just one of the many benefits of membership. Thank you for listening. Have a mindful day.