BMCM Retreat House, Gokulam
This summer, we would like to explore the idea of how you might bring a BMCM retreat experience to wherever you are in the world.
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, which he named Gokulam, in 1997:
“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. For those of you who have recently attended a BMCM retreat in Tomales, California, you might consider this an opportunity to extend your retreat.
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 retreat: Deepening Our Meditation. We’ll be referring to Easwaran’s book Seeing With the Eyes of Love. Feel free to read along if you have a copy of the book, or use 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 might like to try.
If you’d like to write in, we invite you first to share your name, location (optional), how you first found Easwaran, and when you began practicing his eight-point program.
Reading Study
To give us some inspiration from Easwaran for the start of our reading study, here is an excerpt from Seeing With the Eyes of Love, pages 13–15. (The book we are using is the latest edition with the blue cover.)
The great mystics of all religions agree that in the very depths of the unconscious, in every one of us, there is a living presence that is not touched by time, place, or circumstance. Life has only one purpose, they add, and that is to discover this presence. The men and women who have done this – Francis of Assisi, for example, Mahatma Gandhi, Teresa of Avila, the Compassionate Buddha – are living proof of the words of Jesus Christ, “The kingdom of heaven is within.” But they are quick to tell us – every one of them – that no one can enter that kingdom and discover the Ruler who lives there who has not brought the movements of the mind under control. And they do not pretend that our own efforts to tame the mind will suffice in themselves. Grace, they remind us, is all-important. “Increase in me thy grace,” Thomas à Kempis prays, “that I may be able to fulfill thy words, and to work out mine own salvation.”
The hallmark of the man or woman of God is gratitude – endless, passionate gratitude for the precious gift of spiritual awareness. Universally, from whatever tradition they come and no matter how long and hard they struggled, they agree that without divine grace no one can achieve what they have achieved. At the same time, they tell us divine grace is not something that descends at particular times and places, like lightning. Rather, it surrounds us always. Like a wind that is always blowing, said Francis of Sales; like fire, said Catherine of Genoa, that never stops burning: “In this world the rays of God’s love, unbeknownst to man, encircle him all about, hungrily seeking to penetrate him.”
It can be baffling, this mysterious interplay of divine grace and individual effort. The truth is, both are absolutely necessary. “Knock,” Jesus assured us, “and it shall be opened unto you,” and he keeps his promise. But we have to knock hard. We have to sound as if we mean business. And before we can do that, all our desires must be unified. This comes in stages, in cycles repeated over and over – the painful effort, then the breakthrough to a new level of awareness; again the effort, again the breakthrough. Sometimes it can feel like we’re doing it all ourselves, but in the final stages all doubts fall away, and we realize we were in His hands from the very start. The moment we feel even the slightest attraction to the spiritual life – the moment when we first take a book on the subject off the bookstore shelf – divine grace has called, and we have answered.
In the West, the practice of meditation or interior prayer has been associated so persistently with the cloister that ordinary men and women haven’t readily taken it up. “We don’t have time,” they say. Sometimes they add, “Besides, isn’t meditation just an attempt to run away from life’s challenges?”
When we look at the lives of the great mystics, however, we find ready proof that turning inward does not mean turning away from life. For the man or woman “in the world but not of it,” just as well as for monks or nuns, action and prayer are the two halves of the spiritual life, as complementary as breathing in and breathing out. In prayer and meditation, we breathe in deep; in the outward action of selfless service we breathe out again, blessing the lives of those around us in meeting life’s challenges head-on. This does not require a special gift. Just as each of us has been born with the capacity to breathe, we have all come into life with the capacity to draw upon the deep spiritual resources released through meditation and make a great contribution to life.