We are eager to hear about how your experiment is going in slowing down and becoming more aware of conditioned behavior. Were you able to recall it at the time you wanted to? Was there a change in the situation, or interaction? If you haven’t yet chosen an experiment, it’s not too late! Remember to keep it small. Click here to read all about it. We’d love to hear your reflections or observations.
To inspire us to continue deepening our appreciation of Slowing Down, we’re offering a short clip (three minutes) from Easwaran called “Slowing Down Our Thoughts.” Let’s try watching him with as much One-Pointed Attention as possible. Please feel free to share your reflections on Easwaran’s tips.
In a year when many friends have been asking the BMCM for guidance, the BMCM is sharing Easwaran’s message of hope through this special edition of the Blue Mountain Journal. You’ll find inspiration and practical advice in two articles from Easwaran, two short pieces that Christine Easwaran wrote after 9/11, and a new, previously unpublished passage for meditation.
Here on the eSatsang, we will be studying articles in this journal together throughout January 2019. We’re sharing today however, so that you could have this resource at hand right away.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When we’re more slowed down and one-pointed during the day, we’re more likely to be aware of our conditioned habits. This awareness provides us with opportunities to begin reversing or reengineering our conditioned patterns. We invite you to try a tiny experiment this month. Please make it very small! Ideally, it will fit into something you are already doing.
Please let us know what experiment you’d like to try and if you have ideas of other small ways we can give the gifts of time and attention throughout our days and busy lives!
To inspire us for the week ahead, enjoy this reading below by Easwaran from the book Passage Meditation.
This month, we’ll focus on giving the gifts of time and attention through the subtle points of Slowing Down and One-Pointed Attention. Slowing Down dovetails nicely into our spiritual reading topic from last month, because part of slowing down is prioritizing how we spend our time effectively.
As this holiday period begins around the world, we consider gifts to our families, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. This month, we’ll also consider the generosity that comes from the gift of our time and attention. It’s a gift we can give every day, in any season. During the month, we’ll sharpen our focus on how we can give gifts of time and attention more of the time.
Is there something you have done in your life to help you slow down effectively? How has that helped you and those around you? We’d love to hear your strategies and tips!
Thank you for all of your responses and encouraging experiments! It’s great to hear about all of the effort we’re collectively putting in to deepen our practice of the eight-point program.
We’d love to hear more about how your experiment with incorporating Spiritual Reading is going. What successes and/or challenges have you encountered? How has the strategy to help you remember the experiment been working?
Finally, for inspiration from Easwaran, please enjoy this five-minute video that was shown in the November 10 Online Workshop. What are your thoughts on Easwaran’s comments? Did something resonate with you? We’d love to hear what stood out to you from the video.
In last weekend’s Online Workshop, we thought about a routine time in our daily lives during which we could experiment with Spiritual Reading. We also thought about a way to remember our chosen time during the day, so that we set ourselves up for success over the next couple of months! We’d love to hear from you about what you are trying out this month. Please feel free to share any part of your experiment – the part of your week or day you’ll explore your reading opportunities, or ways in which you’ll help yourself remember to incorporate spiritual reading.
Even if you didn’t have a chance to join the Online Workshop, please feel free to consider trying a simple exercise to emphasize your use of Spiritual Reading this month.
This is an excerpt from the Blue Mountain Journal, Spring/Summer 2016 by Easwaran:
We welcome you to join us today for our Online Workshop and explore Spiritual Reading in the company of other passage meditators. We’d love to share this live satsang with you, today on November 10 at 9:00 a.m. San Francisco time. It’s not too late to register for the event, and you can pay on the sliding scale from $0–25. (The standard fee is $10.)
In the reading below, Easwaran describes our need for “transcendent companionship.” He describes the richness we can find in reading the mystics and meditating on their words in order to bring their presence into daily life through the eight points.
If you’re unable to attend the Online Workshop live, don’t worry – register below and we’ll send you the recording in a few days.
This month, we’re taking a deeper look at one of the eight points that we touch upon lightly during retreats and satsangs: Spiritual Reading.
During the online workshop we’ll be studying an excerpt from the Blue Mountain Journal, Spring/Summer 2016, focusing on Easwaran’s teachings on Spiritual Reading. Here on the eSatsang, we’ll have the opportunity to study/discuss the excerpt featured in the online workshop in more depth, and to develop our understanding of the eighth point through reviewing additional readings throughout the month.
In the reading below, Easwaran reminds us that the purpose of spiritual reading is to inspire our daily spiritual practice.
Please share any reflections you have on the reading below. We are always eager to hear from you!
To get us started on this topic, we have a reading study below! This reading will also prepare us for next week’s optional live real-time satsang opportunity during our Online Workshop.
Thank you all for your engagement during this rich period of reflection. As we enter the final week of October, we encourage you to choose one or more of the suggestions below.
Watch the Easwaran video below that will also be played in Shanti, the meditation hall at Ramagiri Ashram, on October 27. Try to watch with as much concentration as possible, and find Easwaran’s personal message for you.
Reflect on this theme, the process of your study, your experiment, or on joining together in spirit with the worldwide community. How has it helped you? What did you discover?
Share with others how you participated in Easwaran's Life Celebration – we’d love to hear from you! Tell us what you did, what your experience was like, and share a photo. It could be of yourself or your group, a page of mantrams you wrote, or your meditation spot where you meditated. Please share your photos in the Facebook Group!
Create worldwide satsang by reading comments, replying, and adding your own.
Reflect on how you could integrate something you learned or experienced into your practice next month. Feel free to share on the Event or in the BMCM Living & Learning Group in future weeks as you work on your practice.
Please continue sharing your wonderful comments and reflections with us as they show us how much we have in common wherever we are! It’s always fantastic hearing from you.
Next Saturday, October 27, 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 passage meditator friends. You could do it on October 27, 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? Create a plan and share it with us!
Here are some possible activities:
Try out any of the activities in Week One and Week Two that you haven’t tried already.
Meditate for 30 minutes.
Watch the Life Celebration video, a special Easwaran video created for the event. The video will be available on Monday October 22 – it’s a great resource for your own celebration!
Write your mantram dedicated to peace and well-being in the world, or for a person or situation you’re concerned about.
Take a silent walk, repeating your mantram.
Share a meal with others.
Plan on taking a photo and sending it in! We’d love to share some photos afterwards of all the groups all over the world taking part in this event. You can post your photo in the Facebook Group or send it to us at satsang@easwaran.org.
We are beginning a special month of celebration. Each October, a local group gathers at Ramagiri Ashram in Tomales, California, to honor Eawaran’s life and teachings. We invite our worldwide community of passage meditators to join in and to look upon the whole month of October as a time of re-dedication to our spiritual life through Easwaran’s eight-point program.
Please read the excerpt from Easwaran’s article, “Our Real Identity” below. What speaks to you in this reading?
Try an experiment. Over the next few days, look for a small instance of when you feel an inner tension between your yearning to be a spiritual being and your past conditioning as a separate, physical creature, “like a ball batted back and forth.” For example, you could be trying to put someone else first, or resist a small selfish desire. In that moment, recall Easwaran’s story about the two forces within, and try putting more effort into one of the eight points. What do you notice?
Thank you all for your ongoing engagement with this month’s topic of transformation. In our final week exploring this deep topic, we will offer both a reading and a video from Easwaran in which he touches on the radiant end goal of transformation through samadhi – union with reality. This is how Easwaran describes that supreme goal of meditation in The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Volume 2, “Like a Thousand Suns.”
We invite you to allow this reading and the video below to just wash over you as inspiration to give your best to your practice of the eight-point program. See if you can capture the desire for transformation this week.
This week, we will continue our conversation on opportunities for transforming our personalities to reflect our divine Self. Easwaran invites us to learn to live in freedom with a playful approach to our likes and dislikes that come up constantly in our everyday lives.
In the following reading study excerpt, Easwaran gives a number of practical suggestions for learning flexibility and true enjoyment through the senses.
Is there a line or two from the reading below that motivates you to play with your likes and dislikes? Is there a small “juggling” experiment that you’d like to try this week? We’d love to hear your perspective another angle of transformation.
Below is an excerpt from Conquest of Mind by Easwaran.
Easwaran often highlights the opportunities for transformation in strong emotions like fear, anger and greed. The reading excerpt below from Easwaran in The Mantram Handbook goes into detail about the ways we can apply the mantram to the tremendous forces within us for the benefit of others and ourselves, and why it can help.
We invite you to read the following excerpt from Easwaran and to consider these questions:
Have you experienced a taste of this kind of transformation of personality through the mantram?
Do you have a current situation that you’d like to apply the mantram to?
Questions about how it can work?
We’d love to hear from you! Please share in the comments below.
After our rich, lively experience of “bringing a retreat home” over the past two months, we’re now inviting you to explore the concept of transformation throughout the month of September. When Easwaran writes about transformation, he emphasizes the power of the inspirational passage.
The big and small changes we experience in life provide us with opportunities for going deeper in our meditation and experiencing our own spiritual transformation. Over the next month, through a series of reading and video studies, we’ll strive to absorb Easwaran’s teachings on the overriding goal of spiritual transformation, and find ways we can take our own small steps each day using the eight points.
What are some ways you’ve used the eight-point program to help you during times of change, big or small? Do you have particular go-to passages that you use when you’re facing a difficult internal or external change? We’d love to hear from you! Please share in the comments below.
In the following 3-minute video, Easwaran reminds us of the true goal of our striving for transformation: “You have a loving relationship with everybody, and you express it every day in your life.”
Thank you all for such a rich period of immersion in the eight-point program. Each of your contributions and endeavors at home has helped us to get a better taste of “bringing the retreat home”. It’s been a wonderful time for reflecting individually and as a community of passage meditators.
To close, we’ll have an opportunity to hear from Easwaran. In this 18-minute video he reminds us about all the opportunities that our numerous desires offer to us for gaining a firmer, fitter will. He will also discuss the practical ways in which we can make great strides towards realizing our real Self within. We hope you have been deeply inspired by this satsang together. At the same time, we know that attending a weeklong retreat can take your practice and your dedication to a new level. For that reason, we offer sliding scale fees as well as financial aid for our Tomales retreats. If this is your hope, even if it feels like a wild dream today, don’t lose sight of that dream. As Gandhiji says, “What is impossible for man is child’s play for God.”
It’s been wonderful sharing a taste of “bringing the retreat home” with you over the past two months! We’ve enjoyed hearing from you, and appreciate all the ways you have been taking part from a distance.
Throughout the month, we’d asked you to select a passage that illustrates to you the ideals you strive for in building the will. We’d love to know which passage you’ve chosen! Feel free to share your passage with us in the comments below, but we also encourage you to join us for a special virtual satsang on Saturday, September 1 from 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. (San Francisco time.) During the virtual satsang we’ll meditate together and read our passages aloud in order to round out our home-retreat experience of the past two months.
As this study comes to a close, what is one piece of wisdom that you are taking away? Is there one practical experiment that you had success with and would like to keep up into the future?
Join us for a bonus virtual satsang! Please choose a passage from God Makes the Rivers to Flow or from our website that speaks to you about building your will. We’ll have a virtual satsang session to share these passages aloud, followed by 30 minutes of passage meditation on Saturday, September 1 at 11:00 a.m.-12:15p.m., San Francisco time.
This week, we’ll look at Putting Others First, one of the more nuanced of the eight points. How you put one person first is not necessarily how you will put the next person first – and it will even vary with the same person from situation to situation.
You may already be Putting Others First in many ways. This week, see if you can take the opportunity to do one focused selfless act. Perhaps you can help a friend or family member with a physical project in the yard or garden. Or maybe, you’ll take some time to write the mantram for someone going through a difficult time. Decide what is right for you. Give it a try, reflect on the experience, and let us know how it went! Easwaran reminds us that our true nature is selfless, and that meditation can free us from self-will to use our inner resources for the benefit of others. Have you tasted the benefits of setting aside your self-will by Putting Others First in the context of your personal relationships?
This week, we will explore how Easwaran links simple sense-training activities to grand qualities like freedom, joy, and loyalty in relationships. We’ll also have an opportunity to try some of these activities.
Is there an area of sense training that you do well, or that comes to you naturally? Please share this with us for inspiration! Suggested Activity: Think of a specific situation in your daily life where you would like to practice sense training. For example, you might try getting free from a sensory craving for a type of food or entertainment. You could list a few healthy substitutions for your craving and try one the next time a craving sneaks up on you. We’d love to hear about your experience with this activity. Please share in the comments section.
As a bonus activity, feel free to enjoy this audio recording of Easwaran and Christine reading aloud passages. This is a practical opportunity to enjoy spiritual inspiration as uplifting entertainment.
