Announcement
Since the 1980s Easwaran has been calling on his students to take care of the earth, because he could see a crisis ahead. This climate and environmental emergency is now confronting us both at our front door and around the world. Here at the BMCM, we’ve experienced three years of devastating fire seasons in our area. We know that many of Easwaran’s students around the world are also seeing unprecedented changes. Sensitive people everywhere feel deep sorrow at what our Mother Earth, our children, and our children’s children will be facing now and in the future.
In times of great crisis throughout the ages, great mystics have appealed to their students to call out to the Lord for help with all their heart – by constant repetition of the mantram.
Surely Easwaran is calling his students to join together to give our hearts and souls to this prayer from the depths of the unconscious. What better way to start the New Year of 2020 than in a concerted effort to keep our mantrams going throughout that day, and then to keep increasing our mantram repetition even more as the year proceeds?
Join us for the Mantram Relay on January 1, 2020! Help our worldwide BMCM community to keep the mantram going collectively for all 24 hours of January 1 and start the New Year with a positive force to deepen our practice and spread peace to the world. You can sign up for a time slot using the button below.
Here’s how it works:
Go to the Mantram Relay spreadsheet.
Find a half-hour time slot that works well for you and sign your name.
Choose a time when you can really focus on mantram repetition in a concentrated and sustained way, e.g. a mantram walk, mantram writing, or even some hard, physical work or exercise with the mantram.
When January 1 arrives, give fervor and gusto to your mantram repetition.
Don’t stop there; use the Mantram Relay as a springboard for concentrated mantram repetition each and every day of the coming year.
Try an Experiment
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.
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. For example, you might choose to:
Proactively remove one activity or chore from your calendar each week, at the start of that week.
Get up just 5–10 minutes earlier than normal, one morning per week.
Try taking a short, brisk mantram walk during a busy day; try even scheduling the walk in if you can.
Create your own Slowing Down and One-Pointed Attention experiment!
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.
How can we reverse these patterns of hurry and tension? The first thing, as I mentioned, is to rise early so you can set a relaxed pace for the day. Eat slowly at mealtime, sharing yourself generously with others. Arrive beforehand at your job and work on the essentials at a steady rate, not pushed by the clock or competition. Build friendly and loving relations with those at work and at home by practicing patience at every opportunity. Put things in order when you leave your job, and learn to detach yourself from your work at will. Cultivate discrimination in recreation so that you choose what really revitalizes and avoid what drains your time and energy.
The mantram is also particularly helpful in the case of hurry, because it gives the restless mind something to fasten on and gradually slows it down. Repeating the mantram on a brisk walk brings the words, breathing, footsteps, and mind into rhythmic harmony. An excellent way to take a short, refreshing break from work, it is also an aid in training yourself to drop your work at will. When you begin to feel yourself rushed, just stop a minute, repeat your mantram, and then be deliberately slow in whatever you are doing. On occasion you may have created a comic skit when you dropped something by rushing and, as you went to sweep it up, knocked something else over. Then you banged your shin, and so forth. The best course to follow at that time is to repeat the mantram a few times and recollect yourself so you can proceed at a measured pace.
Nor should we ever allow ourselves to be rushed by others. If the telephone rings while you are cooking dinner, find a convenient point to stop instead of immediately running to answer it and leaving the soup to boil over. We need not be intimidated by such things as telephones. After all, a phone call constitutes a request to talk to us, not an imperial command. If the message is important, the caller will stay on the line for a time or try again later.
I have another suggestion that may be of some value. When I recommend to someone that they slow down, they often raise a legitimate question: “There is so much that I have to do; how can I go through it slowly and get it all done?” I usually answer by referring to my own experience as a teacher in India. As chairman of the Department of English at a large university I had heavy responsibilities. But I wanted very much to train myself to do things slowly and without tension because I knew it would be a help on the spiritual path.
I began by making a list of all the activities I engaged in on the campus, the things that I was expected to do and the things that I liked doing. It turned out to be a long list. I said at the time what people tell me today: I simply cannot go slowly and take care of all these vital matters.
Then I remembered my spiritual teacher, my grandmother, who had great responsibilities in our extended family of over a hundred people and in our village. She always fulfilled those responsibilities splendidly, and I recalled that she had an unerring sense of what was central and what was peripheral. So, using her example, I started striking from my list activities not absolutely essential.
I was amazed at the number that could go. Those connected with colleges know the number of conferences, meetings, symposia, lectures, receptions, and so forth that it is generally assumed we have to attend. Often the gathering has very little to do with our chief duties. So I began to avoid those functions that I could not justify to myself. I thought at first that I would be censured when I no longer appeared at the monthly meeting of, say, the bicycle parking committee. But after several months of nonattendance, I noticed from the conversation of another member of the committee that he had not even noticed my absence. Putting aside my likes and dislikes, keeping my eye on what was necessary, using as much detachment as I could, I struck more and more from the list. Soon half of it was gone, and I found I had more time to give to what seemed likely to be of permanent value.
Reengineering our patterns in the ways I have mentioned will not be easy or painless. It will require persistent effort for a long time to reverse the patterns of hurry we have built up over the years. But the benefits are magnificent, and we begin to receive them the very first day we try to make these changes. From the beginning, we have embarked on a new course that will bring us abundant energy, better health, increased peace of mind, more harmonious relations with others, rich creativity in work and play, and a longer, happier span of life.