Announcement
This month’s theme of deepening meditation will culminate with the next Returnee Online Workshop on Saturday, February 23 at 9:00–10:15 a.m. San Francisco Time. Many members of the eSatsang will be taking part, so it’s a chance for some real-time community interaction and discussion. We hope you can join us!
If you haven’t tried an Online Workshop before, this is a perfect opportunity. You’ll watch a live video stream of two BMCM presenters and a host, and we’ll study Easwaran’s writings and watch one of his videos together. You’ll be able to type in your comments and questions. You can interact as much or as little as you choose.
Thanks to everyone for your inspiring contributions from last week. We appreciate hearing from you! This week, we’ve got a practical reading from Easwaran to inspire us to try one small thing to move towards a more even state of mind, and absorption in meditation.
After reading the article below, please share your reflections in the comments section. We’d love to hear from you, and by offering your ideas you’ll inspire others to do so, too! Consider some of the practical suggestions Easwaran offers, and see whether you’d like to try implementing one this week.
You might try thinking of a routine time in your day when you can make a small effort towards putting your meditation first, or strive for evenness of mind. Then, prepare yourself by thinking of a way to remind yourself about your plan and the time of day you’d like to try it. Here’s an example: “I’m going to read at least five minutes of Easwaran before bed. I’ll remind myself by putting his book on my pillow each morning.”
We’d really love to hear all of the ways everyone will be planning to put your meditation first this week. Your example will encourage others, so consider sharing as a way of putting your eSatsang friends first. Thank you!
This is an excerpt from an article by Easwaran in the Blue Mountain Journal, Summer 2013.
I’m going to make a number of practical suggestions for deepening meditation. It does not matter whether you have been meditating for a long time or a short time; all these suggestions are equally applicable. They are not taken from books; they are the distilled observations on my own experience, offered in response to a question that serious students ask over and over: “How can I go deeper?”
Surprisingly, it is not during meditation that you make progress in meditation; it is during the rest of the day. What you do in meditation is get the power, install the dynamo; the actual work is done after you open your eyes, get up, and go out into the world.
In the actual practice of meditation, when you are going through an inspirational passage like the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi – “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand” – you are driving these precious words deeper and deeper into the unconscious. That’s what concentration means. If the words fall so deep into the unconscious that they begin to change your ways of thinking and reacting, that is what meditation is for: we become what we meditate on.
But that doesn’t happen if you meditate and then spend the rest of the day following the same old patterns, reacting in the same old manner. We need to draw upon the power released in meditation to implement the words on which we are meditating.
At the breakfast table, when there is a little provocation, you should be able to smile and come up with a kind word. In the evening, when you come home tired, you should still be able to be kind and supportive. This is how old habits are changed, old patterns of thinking are transformed – with little changes in thought and behavior during the rest of the day.
That is why I say that it’s not enough if you meditate regularly or longer than half an hour. The rest of your day must facilitate that meditation. If you have a good meditation in the morning and then yield to compulsive urges, dwell on yourself, or get self-willed or angry, you are undoing all the work you did that morning in meditation.
On the other hand, if you go on doing your best to follow the rest of this eight-point program throughout the day, not only are you going to have a better meditation on the following day, you are beginning to solve your problems and even to help other people solve theirs. When you’re able to do your job with cheerful concentration, when you can give and take when things go wrong, when you’re working under pressure and are able to remain kind, you’re helping your meditation immensely. So try to remember every day that you are participating in meditation even at breakfast, at work, at school, in the garden, everywhere.
Warming Up
Of course, this works both ways: meditation makes it easier to get through the day without agitation. You can look at meditation as warm-up exercises for the rest of the day so that you don’t get tense and sprain your mind. Without meditation, if you go and try to work with people who are difficult like yourself, you may not be able to digest your dinner afterwards. You may have difficulty falling asleep, and if you do manage to fall asleep, you may not be able to get up. Every morning’s meditation is a kind of warm-up session for stretching your capacity to rub off the angles and corners of your personality.
There is a famous definition in the Bhagavad Gita: “Yoga is evenness of mind.” Here, yoga means not only meditation but the essential art of living. The Gita is trying to say that keeping on an even keel through life’s ups and downs will protect your mind against pulling a muscle during the day. Not only that, it will deepen your meditation the next morning too.
Most people could make a lot more progress in meditation if they would learn to keep the mind from getting agitated. That is one thing I learned quickly, right in the midst of my university work. I had all kinds of responsibilities and difficulties, and often even personal conflicts, and I found quickly that if I could keep from getting agitated when dealing with these problems, I could see the results in meditation the very next morning.