Tracy Cochran

A meditation session led by Tracy Cochran. If you missed this program, check out the podcast, now live in the Rubin Media Center.

For centuries Himalayan practitioners have used meditation to quiet the mind, open the heart, calm the nervous system, and increase focus. Mindfulness meditation offers both a refuge from the world around us, and an opportunity to engage with it more consciously.

Whether you’re a beginner, a dabbler, or a skilled meditator seeking the company of others, join expert teachers in a forty-five-minute weekly program. Each session is inspired by a different work of art from the Rubin Museum’s collection. Designed to fit into your lunch break, the program includes an opening talk, a twenty-minute sitting session, and a closing discussion. Chairs will be provided.

Presented in partnership with Sharon Salzberg and the New York Insight Meditation Center. This program is supported in part by the Hemera Foundation.

RELATED ARTWORK

Theme: Seeking Refuge

Resting in her celestial abode, Green Tara sits on a lotus throne surrounded by blooming flowers. As a goddess, Green Tara represents enlightened activity and is believed to intercede frequently in daily affairs. For travelers, she offers a sense of refuge as she protects from “the eight great fears” that they might encounter on their journeys. These fears are drowning, thieves, lions, snakes, fire, spirits and flesh-eating demons, captivity or imprisonment, and elephants. Each one of these fears can be literal, but they also symbolize negative mental states (respectively craving, wrong or false views, pride, envy, hatred, doubt, avarice, ignorance). Therefore, Green Tara provides refuge for both external and internal struggles.

About the Speaker

Tracy Cochran is editorial director of Parabola, a quarterly magazine that for forty years has drawn on the world’s cultural and wisdom traditions to explore the questions that all humans share. She has been a student of meditation and spiritual practices for decades and teaches mindfulness meditation and mindful writing at New York Insight Meditation Center and throughout the greater New York area. In addition to Parabola, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Today, O Magazine, New York Magazine, the Boston Review, and many other publications and anthologies. For more information please visit tracycochran.org.