Mindfulness Meditation · Perspectives
This week’s meditation session is led by Tracy Cochran and the theme is Perspectives. The guided meditation begins at 16:53.
Wrathful Offerings; Tibet; 19th century; Ink and pigment on silk damask; 36 × 25 in. (estimated); Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art; C2006.2.5
Wrathful offerings are an extremely rare subject for portable paintings but a common theme in the protector chapels of Tibetan monasteries. Such paintings communicate the horrors of life in an astonishingly humorous manner. At the top of this work are three offering bowls, the central one containing an offering of the five senses, each represented by its corresponding organ. The animals underneath—horses, yaks, sheep, and dogs—are the main domestic animals of the Tibetan Plateau, here shown in a hierarchy with the most valuable on top. The corpses at the bottom, and the human body parts between them, remind us that the scenery represented is a charnel ground.
Tracy Cochran has been a student and teacher of meditation and spiritual practice for decades. She is the founder of the Hudson River Sangha. In addition to offering meditation online, Tracy has taught mindfulness meditation and mindful writing at the Rubin Museum and the New York Insight Meditation Center, as well as in schools, corporations, and other venues worldwide. She is also a writer and the editorial director of Parabola, an acclaimed quarterly magazine that seeks to bring timeless spiritual wisdom to the burning questions of the day.
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