The BMCM Retreat House
We are thrilled to invite you to explore the idea of how you might “bring a retreat” to wherever you are in the world. We know that some of you have recently attended a BMCM retreat in Tomales, California, others may have come to a Tomales retreat long ago, and many of you may not yet have had the opportunity to attend a retreat in person.
Easwaran felt that our BMCM retreats here in Tomales are essential to his students and to the world. Here are his words when he inaugurated our retreat house in 1994:
“Come here often, as often as you can. Renew your commitment. Come together to support each other and rededicate your lives to this supreme ambition. This is a waystation on your pilgrimage. This is your second home.”
With this in mind, over the next two months we’ll offer a taste of the retreat experience by focusing on this year’s weeklong retreat theme and providing suggestions so you can experience elements of this retreat from wherever you are.
Many friends have shared that attending retreats makes their connection to Easwaran deeper, and their practice of the eight points stronger. One key element of our retreats is the daily retreat schedule, which is carefully structured to make our spiritual practice the only priority throughout each day. It’s this supportive environment and conscious focus on the eight-point program that we hope to capture together over the next couple of months.
We’ll start with a reading study that emphasizes the theme of this year’s weeklong retreats: Building the Will. We’ll be referring to Easwaran’s book The End of Sorrow, volume 1 of The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living. Feel free to read along in your copy of the book, or in the excerpts provided on this site. Throughout the next two months, you’ll be invited to share particular lines or sections from the reading that stand out to you and might apply to your own life. We’ll also suggest some weekly exercises that you could try.
But first! We invite you to share your name, location (optional), how you first found Easwaran, and when you began practicing his eight-point program.
The following is an excerpt on the role of the will from The End of Sorrow, volume 1 of The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living by Easwaran.
20. In the still mind the Self reveals itself. From the depths of meditation a man draws the joy and peace of complete fulfillment.
21. Having attained that abiding joy beyond the senses, revealed in the stilled mind, he will never swerve from the eternal truth that all life is one.
22. In this state he desires nothing else, and cannot be shaken by the heaviest burdens of sorrow.
23. The practice of meditation frees him from all affliction. This is the path of yoga. Follow it with determination and sustained enthusiasm.
In these verses Sri Krishna is trying to tell us, as far as words can convey, the state we reach when our mind becomes completely one-pointed. First of all, we see ourselves as we really are. Up until this point, the one person we have never seen is ourselves. When Nureyev appeared in San Francisco not long ago there were quite a few ballet fans who, I was told, flew all the way from New York to see him. The mystics would point out how fruitless it is to go to see important people when our first priority is to see ourselves. We think we know Tom, Dick, and Harry, but we really know everyone, including ourselves, only on the surface level. If we could see our real Self coming down Ashram Street, we would wonder who this beautiful, radiant, magnificent creature could be. We would not be able to take our eyes off him, we would be so full of love. Then he would come to us, slowly, step by step, and enter our consciousness. All of us are full of dazzling beauty just waiting to reveal itself, and in order to let this radiance emerge all we must do is throw off the mask of the self-willed, separate ego with which we identify ourselves today.
Once we have seen our real Self in all its glory, no treasure on earth, no achievement, no pleasure is even worth mentioning. When we look at money, it is only dull metal; when we look at pleasure, it is just dull tinsel; when we look at power and prestige, they are no more than dimestore jewelry. Today we can be excited about the pursuit of little satisfactions because we lack a frame of reference in which to evaluate them meaningfully. It is only when we have made a certain amount of progress on the spiritual path through meditation that we develop a standard of comparison. When we acquire this deeper, clearer point of view, we can compare the joy of St. Francis to the joy of going into a pizza parlor, or the joy of Meister Eckhart to that of going into a beer garden. Then we realize we have been penny-wise and pound-foolish in life, going after trivia when we could as well go after the supreme goal.
In the final stages of meditation the whole burden of regret, resentment, vague longing, and restlessness falls away. This is the end of all sorrow. We become established in the Lord and see him in the heart of every creature – human, beast, bird – and in all life. With this inspiring picture of the goal of meditation, Sri Krishna appeals to Arjuna: “Make your will resolute, and throw yourself into this spiritual endeavor so that you too will go beyond sorrow to become established in the indivisible unity that is divine.”