Mindfulness Meditation With Tracy Cochran

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 19:30.

Transcript

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 teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center.

The series is supported in part by the Hamera 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,

Everybody.

Welcome to the Rubin Museum of Art and our weekly mindfulness meditation practice.

My name is Dawn Eshelman.

So we've been talking about hopes and anxieties this month as we contribute to this larger conversation about the future and our relationship to it.

And this theme of hopes and anxieties is one that has really surfaced whenever we talk about the future.

And it's embodied in the interactive installation upstairs in the spiral lobby.

It's called Monument to the Hopeful and the Anxious,

Or the Anxious and the Hopeful by Candy Chang and James Reeves.

And has everybody had a chance to at least take a look or maybe even participate?

It's really interesting and I think really quite relevant for our experience as human beings in New York City and citizens of the world in general.

And I don't know about you,

But this week,

This last week for me,

I have had many chances to experience hope and anxiety.

And I'm really so grateful that we get to come together and just kind of work on that a little bit or just share really our own experiences.

And we're going to do that today and for the next three weeks with the fabulous Tracy Cochran.

So we'll get to have a nice in-depth exploration of this topic together with Tracy.

We have a beautiful offering for you today from the collection.

This is Maitreya.

Maitreya is the Buddha of the future.

And Maitreya represents loving kindness,

Which you can kind of tell just from looking here,

Right?

This sculpture is late 18th,

Early 19th century.

It's from Mongolia.

And in fact,

It's interesting to note that Maitreya was a very strong figure,

Especially within the Galagpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

And the Mongols really embraced Maitreya because they were seeking this kind of resurrection of their empire and wanted to look towards a future of loving kindness.

And just interesting to note that this was the figure that they really clung to in the hopes of that.

So here we have this gorgeous figure here of Maitreya who is a very kind of gentle form here.

He has quite an impressive pile of hair on top of his head,

Which holds a stupa symbolizing the Buddha and the Buddha's mind.

He has his kind of Buddha earlobes there,

Which show where the jewels that he used to wear would have gone,

Noting his past wealth.

And Maitreya does appear sometimes as a Bodhisattva as well,

Often there bejeweled.

And his posture here is one that we do often see,

But it's just so elegantly displayed here.

And quite feminine hips here,

A little sway in his posture,

Echoed by the beads that are running down his torso and across his legs.

And just very light and delicate robes.

So interesting to think of Maitreya waiting in the future for the time that humanity has forgotten all the Buddha's teachings.

We'll come back and give them again.

So Tracy Cochran is here with us and she is a writer and the editorial director of Parabola.

Parabola Magazine,

Which can always be found upstairs in our shop and also online at parabola.

Org.

Tracy tells me that the issue that's just about to come out for Parabola is all about hope,

Something that she has a few things to say about with us this week and in the coming weeks.

So in addition to teaching here at the Rubin,

She currently teaches at New York Insight and every Sunday at Hudson River Sangha in Tarrytown,

New York.

You can find her writings and her teaching schedule online at Parabola on Facebook and Twitter and tracycochran.

Org.

Please welcome her back,

Tracy Cochran.

I must be honest with you.

When I saw this beautiful golden figure looking so dewy and young with his jaunty little swing in his hips and that this was an embodiment of our hopes for the future,

The thought and the sentence that arose inside me was,

Give me a break.

Give me a break.

Give me a break.

And then when I read the fine print that it was also by some people a symbol of a hope to a return to a golden age of empire,

It underscored the feeling of give me a break.

Because some of us may feel like we're living through the end of an empire,

A disintegration.

Some of us may have come into the room feeling so separate from the rest of the people here because of their own anxieties and worries.

You might feel like your head is so colonized by worries about another person that it's all you can do to be here.

If that's how you happen to feel,

You have company in this room and beyond this room.

You might feel a secret sorrow for your own future.

You might have gotten a diagnosis or some other news that makes you wonder what will come.

But you're pretty sure it's not this dewy gold figure behind me.

If you happen to feel that way,

You have company here and beyond this room.

And it occurred to me that that feeling of having company might be the beginning of something new.

So I wanted to tell you a little story from my own life.

I live in northern Westchester,

Which is surprisingly rural.

I take a train.

I'm always happy when I get here and there's no big tree down on the tracks.

And seriously,

My town is full of people who are either commuters to New York City or steadfastly rural.

And they wish New York City could just be hauled out to sea.

Really.

And we all live together,

Rural and urban people.

And because it's a rural area,

I often have blackouts because great big tree limbs come crashing down and they take out all the power.

So I have a man,

A tree man who comes and he cuts the limbs that come crashing down and saves them from crashing down on my house.

And over the years,

We've come to have a kind of friendship and I greatly admire his ability to shimmy up in these great big tall trees with a chainsaw on his belt.

I'm really very impressed with his agility and I could never do such a thing.

And one day recently,

Actually this has happened several times,

But this is fresh in my mind.

He did this work and cut down all these big limbs that were dangling after our last big storm.

And after he finished his work,

We talked as usual and he launched into a diatribe of political views that couldn't be further from my views.

And his vehemence was so great that I realized I'm not going to argue with him.

I'm not going to engage.

But I did listen.

I looked at him and I watched him because I kept contrasting his kindness to me.

Every time a big limb came down,

His pickup truck came rushing over to help me.

He was kind to my dog.

She loved him.

And then this hate coming out of his mouth,

Or certainly his vehemence.

And then I began to notice that I was just listening and watching,

Watching his posture which was defensive.

Noticing that maybe he picked up on that big Buddha that sits on my front step.

There are all these kind of like kind of hippish liberal giveaways in my eye.

But he was in a kind of battle stance.

He was kind of embattled.

But I just kept listening and slowly,

Slowly he didn't quite calm down but something began to deepen and he finally said to me that his father used to beat him when he disagreed,

When he didn't give him the proper respect.

And in that moment I suddenly shifted.

It was like the center of gravity in my posture shifted from my head to my center.

And I could perceive him as someone deprived and embattled.

And it's not like wisdom poured out of me in that moment.

I didn't persuade him of anything.

And our conversation ended like this.

He said,

Well okay then Tracy,

I'll be back around in a while to cable those big maple trees so they don't come down on your bedroom.

And off he went with a smile.

But there was something that had changed between us.

I realized that there was an accord between us that didn't have to do with having the same views.

It was just compassion for a moment,

Person to person.

And I read,

I am a great admirer of Doug Harmshaw,

The great UN Secretary General,

The great man of peace and statesmen.

And he said freedom from fear could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

Freedom from fear is the whole of human rights.

I realized that that exchange I had in the front yard,

And it wasn't really an exchange of words because for once he was doing all the talking,

Was a freedom from fear.

In me too.

I wasn't afraid of him.

And he wasn't afraid of me.

Even though we were wildly different,

It was like red state,

Blue state,

It's like polka dots in my town.

Red and blue.

But I began to feel a new possibility that matriya means love.

Matriya means love.

And it doesn't mean I realized so often when we have a dharma talk,

They ask us to do something I don't want to do,

Which is open my borders to be completely invaded by scary people.

I don't want to.

I don't want to.

I spend too much time having my head full of people I'm not even going to mention because you know their names too because we all saw them on TV last week.

And I don't want to.

But I realized through my practice and as I prepared to come here that what we're really being invited to do is to soften and open to the boundaries,

Our own boundaries to our own capacity for compassion and love for ourselves.

And you might come in here with a head so full of worry that this sounds like a stretch.

But what you can begin to experience is an ability to see in the dark.

That you can sit and relax and begin to soften just as you are,

Head and heart,

Just as preoccupied as they are,

Just exactly as they are.

You notice almost imperceptibly that you're widening your circle of compassion,

As Einstein put it,

That you're just beginning to remember that there's more to you than your fears,

Your anxieties,

Your beliefs even.

There's a body that senses,

You sense the temperature in the room right now,

You hear the sound of my voice,

You sense what it's like to be upright.

And more than this,

There's something in you that begins to respond.

Imperceptibly maybe you hear my story.

You know that experience.

Sometime when you felt kind towards someone in your family who is driving you crazy,

Someone whose voice triggers you,

Someone whose beliefs you can't stand.

And sometimes just the slightest gesture on their part causes you to remember your humanity.

And it's extraordinary to remember that that is exactly what practice brings us,

A capacity to realize that our limitations,

No matter how heavy they are,

Our obligations and restrictions,

Don't have to limit us.

Because one moment at a time,

Just like I felt when I was standing in my front yard,

One moment at a time we can connect with a kind of presence that's not separate from love.

This is the future.

The future is present.

The future is here.

So let's take our seat and practice this.

So we have our feet firmly planted and our back straight,

Noticing how it feels to be in this body right now.

Allowing ourselves to feel a bit of warmth and kindness towards this body for showing up.

It came all this way to be here.

Noticing without thinking about it the basic goodness and goodwill of this body.

It wants to be here.

It opens for something it might not be able to name,

For an experience.

Noticing that bringing attention to the body without judgment begins to soften it just a bit.

And as this begins to happen,

Allow the attention to come to the breathing without seeking to change it.

Just notice the breathing.

Notice that the thoughts keep thinking.

Sensations appear.

Sounds,

Memories allow everything to be here with no judgment,

With kind awareness.

Notice that when you find yourself thinking or feeling or picturing,

You can gently come home to the breath and the body and this presence of being here and find welcome,

No judgment.

Enjoy!

Notice that coming home to the breath reminds you that there is a light of awareness inside you that is more than your thinking,

More than your fears.

It's a light of seeing without judging,

Without comment.

When you're lost in thought you gently come back with no judgment,

Noticing that there's an attention inside that isn't separate from kindness,

That wishes to be here.

You can see that fire is the most important thing in this world.

The reason that fire exists is because it's the source of light inside you.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

Notice how it feels to be welcomed into the light of your own kind attention.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

As we come home to the breath,

As we let things be,

There's a sensation of presence,

A vibrancy or light in us.

As you let yourself soften and open and come home,

You may notice a presence that's larger than you think you are.

That's inside and also outside.

As you let yourself soften and open and come home,

You may notice a presence that's larger than you think you are.

That's inside and also outside.

As you let yourself soften and open and come home,

You may notice a presence that's larger than you think you are.

That's inside and also outside.

As you let yourself soften and open and come home,

You may notice a presence that's larger than you think you are.

Noticing that there's an attention that's always waiting for us here in the present separate from love and kindness.

It accepts without judgment.

It accepts without judgment.

Noticing how it feels to be welcome and free from fear.

Noticing how it feels to be welcome and free from fear.

Thank you,

Tracy.

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 and our website.

Thank you for listening.

Have a mindful day.

Reviews

Another beautiful Dharma..🙏🏼❤️🕉📿

Awesome..enlightening....deeply calming

I can listen to this over and over.
Absolutely wonderful
Thank you 🙏🏼

A peaceful way to introduce the day. Usually listen for my Sunday lesson and meditation. Love Tracy and her insightful stories. A calming presence.🌺

Great story from Tracey. You are very good indeed at sharing and telling. I so wish I could do a visit to the Rubin Museum and see the artworks for real. Maybe I’ll have to satisfy myself by a trip to the British Museum in London to see what they have in their collection if my dog doesn’t mind. Thank you for the story and the meditation. Always a pleasure. 🙏🏼

Thankyou for the interesting stories and the spacious awareness 🌿🕉💫

It doesn’t get any better than this. Thank you for your wonderful reflections and guidance, which provided enough space in the meditation to move into the breath and present moment.

Fabulous Tracy. Love your talks and powerful meditation.

Always so beautiful and meaningful. Thank you.

As always, well worth listening to, and meditating on. Thank you Tracy Cochran 🙏🏻

Wow, did I need this meditation and talk! I’m going to listen to this a few more times. The unfolding of Tracy’s discussion of the power of presence and listening is very touching. Her thoughts are both timely and timeless. Thank you very much for this chat and meditation.