A meditation on breaking free, one small moment at a time. To support Tracy’s work, please consider donating.
Author: Tracy Cochran
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Be an Island: a guided meditation
A talk on being grounded even in the midst of a storm. To support Tracy’s work, please consider donating.
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Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There
One night at New York Insight, a meditation center in downtown Manhattan, I taught meditation in the midst of a protest against injustice. I taught people to take their seats, spines straight, feet planted firmly on the ground, affirming their right to take up space in the world, people in the streets below were chanting and shouting for justice. We sat still as more and more police helicopters showed up, hovering low like huge mechanical hawks, tracking the protesters who marched up Fifth Avenue from Union Square.
Whup, whup, whup, the predatory sound of the choppers was louder than the big bell that called us to mindfulness. I told my students that taking time to be still does not mean inaction. We must all do all we can to end injustice in all forms. Being still is learning to listen and see and sense inside as well as outside so that we can hear and see and act in a way that helps instead of merely reacting.
In the midst of the shouts and the sirens and the whupping of the helicopters grew louder and louder, we sat. This is not because we didn’t care, but because we need to know how to care.
Mindfulness meditation is a way to remember our own deepest values—re-connecting us with sensations and feelings that get drowned out in all our thinking. Sitting is a way to ground ourselves in a sense of the basic goodness of life, a way of remembering our own innate responsiveness or compassion.
“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees,” wrote the poet Rilke. Faced by images of terrible armies conjured by the devil Mara, the Buddha reached down and touched the earth, rooting himself in the knowing that most children have: we belong to life. We are more alike than different.
Great change begins by going back to the beginning, forgetting what we thought we knew as adults, uncovering what is essential. Returning to where we started, we remember that there is a responsiveness in us that is as natural as breathing. As children, we innately know how to take in impressions, not stopping them with judgments and commentary. Children know that imagination isn’t just entertainment and distraction but a way of understanding what is happening. J.K . Rowling famously said that imagination “is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
In times when you don’t know what to do, times that call for action, be still for a time. Go back to where you started and know the place for the first time. Recollect yourself, remembering body, heart, and mind. Act from there.
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Escaping Our Stories: a guided meditation
A guided meditation on being gentle with yourself when things are hard. To support Tracy’s work, please consider donating.
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Islands in the Stream
“Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves….” As he lay dying, the Buddha gave this advice to his beloved disciple Ananda.
Most of us are so, so tired of being islands right now, isolated from others, watching video streams.
Yet when the Buddha spoke of being an island he didn’t mean being cut off from the flow of life. He understood that this is not possible. Even in a life of total seclusion, alone in a cell or on an actual island, you can’t help but notice how things change, the seasons, our own hearts and minds.
We see that we are not really separate from others, that our feelings and thoughts reach far beyond the boundaries of our skin. Our hearts literally go out to those we love and those who suffer. On some days, we see that we owe thanks in every direction, inside and outside, up and down, north, south, east, and west, the way Native people give thanks, the way people in New York gave thanks to the helpers at the height of the pandemic.
When he said be an island the Buddha meant let yourself be grounded, come down out of your thoughts and touch the earth of your own living experience in the present moment. Don’t reach outside for an idea or a phrase from a teacher or a book. Witness the living the truth of your experience in the present moment. Make space for the whole of your experience, body, heart, and mind. Be still and listen. Or don’t even listen, just wait without resistance. Notice how the world comes to you.
The practice of meditation allows us to settle down and inhabit our own human experience without judgment or fear. As we learn to relax, we sink from the surface to the depths, from thinking and emotional reactions to deeper feelings and values and insights. These deeper realizations out to be very, very simple., written in the language of living experience. We might feel, for example, how good it is to be alive on a bright morning, sipping good coffee, feeling fresh air through an open window. Last night we despaired, and yet here we are, born anew. Life is a gift. Life is change.
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Let It Be: a guided meditation
A guided meditation on being gentle with yourself when things are hard. To support Tracy’s work, please consider donating.
Tracy Cochran 