Thank you for sharing your mantram experiences this week. It’s great to hear how you are bringing your practice into everyday life. This week, identify a specific time or times during the day when you are physically active and would like to practice the mantram. Maybe you walk to work, or have a scheduled exercise time, or other active time that you already do. While moving with focus and safety, try to consciously apply the mantram. If you already have a “mantram movement” time during the week, can you expand it a bit more ?
Happy New Year eSatsang friends and families! Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Mantram Relay for Peace on January 1, created by one of our eSatsang members. It was wonderful to see all 24 hours filled up – sometimes with five of us repeating the mantram at any one time. Such an inspiration!
To build on the momentum from the Mantram Relay, we invite you to make January Mantram Month. Each week, we’ll have a new practical mantram exercise including guidance from Easwaran. Join us in solidifying a new year’s resolution, or for more mantram repetition as a resolution in itself. Here’s this week’s mantram exercise...(click the title to read more!)
In this talk given just before the New Year in 1978, Easwaran challenges us to renew our earnest commitment to the spiritual life.
Announcement
Join us for the mantram relay on January 1! Help our world-wide BMCM community to collectively keep the mantram going for all 24 hours of January 1, 2018, and start the new year off deepening your practice and spreading peace to the world. You can sign up for a time slot using the button below.
All of the details can be found in the ‘Living and Learning” Facebook group. A warm welcome to those who have joined already! If you’d still like to join the group, log in to your Facebook account and click here. If you don’t have an account, consider creating an alias account, just for the purpose of satsang.
On this final post for 2017, we invite you to reflect on the past year of your practice of the eight-point program. What was one success you had? Also, feel free to share any words about your gratitude for your eSatsang friends!
If you are new to the eSatsang, or joined in the last several months, we’d love for you to take this opportunity to introduce yourself. You could tell us how you found out about passage meditation, and about a recent success you’ve experienced. Check out these examples of previous introductions.
Have you decided to set a positive intention for 2018? If so, share it with others below to help solidify it.
Please enjoy this 30 minute talk from Easwaran titled, “A New Year’s Message.”
This has been a rich period to explore Slowing Down, as we approach the end of the month and year! Please continue sharing your Slowing Down experiments and experiences with us during the week ahead. Your stories and questions are inspiring to others who may be having similar challenges, and similar successes. To help us understand the loftiest purpose of our efforts in Slowing Down, please enjoy this five-minute video from Easwaran below. In the video, Easwaran makes a connection between cultivating patience and deepening our devotion. We look forward to hearing your reflections and would love to know about any tips you’ll be trying out this week.
A very happy holidays to you and your families, from the eSatsang Team!
This week, we are continuing to apply Slowing Down to our daily lives and are eager to hear how your Slowing Down experiment is going as you’ve had some time to try it out. Were you able to recall it at the time you wanted to? Was there a change in the situation, or interaction? Do you need an extra boost of support to help you slow down? Try joining us for a “virtual meditation” on a Saturday, through our private Facebook Group. Details for the meditation each week are posted in the group. If you don’t have an account, no problem!
Finally, we are sharing an excerpt from Easwaran on the importance of human relationships, which he says “are often the first casualties in a speeded-up way of life.” Are there any practical tips from the reading that you’d like to try for the rest of this month?
Thank you all for sharing your experiences with Slowing Down and for encouraging many of us during this busy time of year to prioritize the eight points. Slowing down is about slowing down our thinking process. We invite you to try a tiny slowing down experiment this month. Please make it very small! Ideally, it will fit into something you are already doing. For example, you might choose to:
Proactively remove one activity or chore from your calendar each week, at the start of that week.
Show up 5–10 minutes early to a weekly or monthly meeting, or an upcoming appointment.
Try consciously speaking more slowly to elders, or children.
Get up just 5–10 minutes earlier than normal, one morning per week.
Create your own slowing down experiment.
To inspire us for the week ahead, enjoy this short reading below by Easwaran from the book, Take your Time.
This month, we’ll focus on the subtle point of Slowing Down. When we’re more slowed down during the day, we’re more likely to be aware of our conditioned habits. It can include prioritizing effectively on those inevitable days when not everything can get finished or the unexpected emerges. If you haven’t yet seen the New Year’s Day Mantram Relay, please check out the Facebook Group, and help us collectively keep the mantram going for all 24 hours of January 1, 2018. Is there something you have done in your life to help you slow down effectively? Please share your tips with us.
We’d love to hear more about how your experiment with training the senses is going. Have you encountered challenges and/or successes? How has your strategy to help you remember the experiment during the day been working? If you don’t have time to comment, feel free to share through this brief check-in below. Finally, for inspiration from Easwaran, we’d like to offer a short clip (five minutes) that was shown in the November 11 Online Workshop. What are your thoughts on Easwaran’s commentary?
We’d like to invite you check out our new ‘Living and Learning’ private Facebook Group. This group is for you to share ideas and resources from both your spiritual practice and your everyday world. In last weekend’s Online Workshop, and in anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, we thought about a routine time in our daily lives during which we could experiment with training the senses. If you didn’t have a chance to join the Online Workshop live, please feel free to join us here and consider trying an experiment. We’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to try out this month.
Join us today for our Online Workshop and explore training the senses in the company of other passage meditators. We’d love to share this live satsang with you, today November 11 at 2 p.m. San Francisco time. You can register for the event for free, or you can pay on the sliding scale from $0–25. (The standard fee is $10.) In this week's reading, Easwaran describes the “fierce satisfaction of self-mastery.” He assures us that there is something more wonderful, more meaningful, and longer lasting than our common experiences of small pleasures.
This month, we’re launching into a timely topic of training the senses. As the holiday season approaches for many of us in November and December, we have found it helpful to focus on the role of training the senses in the eight-point program. We warmly invite you to join us for an online workshop, on Saturday November 11 at 2 p.m. San Francisco time. This is a 75-minute workshop and a chance for some real-time satsang on our theme of training the senses. We’ll be studying a reading from Easwaran’s book, Love Never Faileth in the online workshop, and here on the eSatsang!
Easwaran reminds us that the role of training the senses in daily life is directly tied to being free to choose our actions consciously. Please share your reflections. We are always eager to hear from you!
Today, a local group in Tomales is gathering at Ramagiri Ashram with Christine Easwaran to share readings, watch a video, and meditate together at 1p.m. Pacific Time. We invite you to set aside time for your own celebration today, too. Please share how you participated in Easwaran's Life Celebration – we’d love to hear from you! Tell us what you did, and what your experience was like.
This week, we have a special invitation for you to consider for the end of the month, and second reading study. On October 28, a local group in Tomales will gather at Ramagiri Ashram with Christine Easwaran to share readings, watch a video, and meditate together. We invite you to set aside time for your own celebration – whether that be a special dedication of your morning meditation, taking a day for a personal retreat, or organizing an event with friends. You could do it on October 28, or find another day and time that works better for you. How would you like to take part in the worldwide celebration of Easwaran’s life and teachings?
Each year at the end of October, a local group gathers at Ramagiri Ashram in Tomales, California, to celebrate Eawaran’s life and teachings. This year we’re inviting our worldwide community to join us in spirit. We’ve created a special curriculum to faciliate this. hoping that, collectively, we can all take some time to dive deep and reflect on the impact that Easwaran and his teachings have had on our lives. This experience is a wonderful complement to the BMCM’s new strategic plan, intended to help us all gain a deeper understanding of Easwaran’s teachings – so this is the perfect time to dive in.
The next edition of the Blue Mountain Journal will be available next week, with the theme “Teacher and Student”. We’re pleased to share a sneak preview of it with you today!
The Journal will include several articles by Easwaran on the role of a spiritual teacher, as well as stories from meditators around the world about how Easwaran influences their lives.
This week we’re sharing an article by Easwaran on the earnestness and enthusiasm we need for the spiritual journey.
Next week we’ll announce a special month-long curriculum — stay tuned!
We’ve spent the last three weeks studying the passage, “The Saint”. And we’ve enjoyed an opportunity to become familiar with a new passage without expectations. We’ve also been reminded about the benefits and beauty of reviewing passages outside of meditation, similar to spiritual reading, or contemplation.
Are there some phrases or lines already stuck in your mind? Have a look at our memorization worksheet and see if it helps you.
This week, we’ll continue to get to know the passage “The Saint” from yet another angle: from Easwaran’s commentary on the Dhammapada. You’ll notice in the video below that Easwaran refers to a section of the Dhammapada that touches on the themes found in “The Saint”. His commentary addresses the topics we’ve been exploring over the last two weeks.
In the 30-minute video, Easwaran draws on several excerpts to explore the practical meaning of leading a selfless life, and the rich rewards of going beyond sorrow. In what ways does Easwaran’s commentary further open up the verses for you?
This week, we’d like to continue our passage study together by looking at qualities a passage embodies. As Easwaran says, “we become what we meditate on.” For example, from the Prayer of St. Francis, “It is in giving that we receive” might help us cultivate the quality of generosity. Please read the passage below. Can you pull out words, phrases, or lines that speak to qualities you’d like to develop if you meditated on this passage?
This week, we ask you to think of having some fun with this passage, without worrying about committing it to memory. You could also review the passage in a relaxed way, in your favorite chair or outdoor space. You might write it out with colored pens, or doodle some images the passage suggests to you.
Thank you for helping us select a passage for our passage study this month. The votes are in and we’re pleased to announce you’ve chosen....
To conclude this study of our meditation practice, we’d like to draw on some inspiration from Easwaran in this 22-minute video entitled “Tips for Deepening Meditation”. In the video, Easwaran reminds us that we have a choice at all times to ask: “Shall I do what is pleasing, appealing only to me, or shall I choose to do what will benefit all?” (Click the title for more...)