Tricycle | Awake in the World

One cold night twelve years ago, Tracy Cochran was walking past an empty parking lot in New York City when she got mugged. One man grabbed her around the neck and choked her, while two others stood hunched in their hooded sweatshirts, their eyes “as dead as bashed-out windows.” As she stood there gasping for air, her knees buckling beneath her, she felt a sensation she had experienced before, in a milder form, during meditation: a stream of “dazzling white light” shot out of her head and thirty or forty feet into the sky, melting into a larger light that reassured her. Although it was years before Cochran understood the full significance of her experience, she eventually came to see her mugging as a “transformation,” a shock that awakened her to the sacred that already resides inside each one of us.