This month we will continue “bringing a Tomales retreat experience home”, by focusing on this year’s BMCM Weeklong Retreat theme of “Deepening Our Meditation.” We’ll suggest ways in which you can get a taste of a weeklong retreat from wherever you are.
This week, we will explore some of Easwaran’s teachings on sense training in a reading study below. He shows how we can use simple sense training activities as a means for gathering and focusing our energy so we can direct it towards life’s bigger challenges. In this way, he links sense training to grand qualities like freedom, joy, and loyalty.
Is there a challenge or transition you are working on, but where you feel you need more power or energy to make progress? Consider this week as an opportunity to work on a chosen situation. If you’d like to, please feel free to share this with us for inspiration!
Is there an area of sense training that you do well, or that comes to you naturally? Or, is there an area of sense training that you’d really like to work on?
Suggested Activity
Think of a specific situation or challenge where you need to gather more energy or enthusiasm in order to tackle it. Then, think of a sense training experiment you can try in order to harness this new energy. 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, enjoy this audio recording of Easwaran and Christine reading passages. This is a practical opportunity to enjoy spiritual inspiration as uplifting entertainment.
Reading Study
The following excerpt is from Seeing With the Eyes of Love by Easwaran, pages 55–57.
On the other hand, far-reaching though these changes were, I don’t think I really understood what Gandhi was getting at until much later, when I began to meditate. It was then that I made what was for me a remarkable discovery. When I needed a lot of drive to go deeper in meditation – for example, if I had a problem to solve that required more energy and creativity than usual – I found that I had only to pick a strong sensory urge and defy it. When you suddenly need cash, don’t you go and shake the piggy bank? It was a little like that. I would look around intently to see what kind of cravings I had, and then I would walk up to a really big one and say, “Come on, because I am really broke.” The desire would come on strong, and I would push it back and come out with both my pockets loaded.
My whole outlook on desire changed. Formerly, when a strong urge would come, I used to do what everybody does: yield to it, and not reluctantly either. Now I began to rub my hands with joy at the prospect of doing just the opposite. “Here’s another desire! It’s strong, so I’ll gain even more by defying it.” I began to understand that any strong desire, when it is defied, generates a lot of power. It’s like watching the needle on your gas gauge go up! But I must confess to you that this insight did not come to me because of my own ingenuity. It came because of my teacher’s blessing. I could almost feel her looking on and smiling as I recklessly flung aside one after another of these fetters and plunged ahead.
Not every desire, I should say, is to be rejected out of hand. I distinguish very carefully between harmless desires and desires that are harmful to the body or mind – or, of course, to those around you. If the desire is for food that is wholesome, you may well be able to yield with full appreciation. But if it is a desire for something sweet that you don’t need, you will find you can get equal satisfaction out of refusing it. It’s a deceptively simple change in perspective. Your attitude toward the body becomes very different: you see it no longer as an instrument of pleasure, but as an instrument of loving service.
From the very start, you will be able to see some benefits in training the senses. But the full reward comes only after long years of meditation in conjunction with the allied disciplines. For when the senses and the mind become still, we realize our true nature in the supreme climax of meditation. Saint Teresa of Avila describes this supreme state with an inspired simile:
As soon as you apply yourself to prayer, you will feel your senses gather themselves together. They seem like bees which return to the hive and there shut themselves up to work at the making of honey. And this will take place without effort or care on your part. God thus rewards the violence which your soul has been doing to itself, and gives to it such a domination over the senses that when it desires to recollect itself, a sign is enough for them to obey and so gather themselves together. At the first call of the will, they come back more and more quickly. At last, after countless exercises of this kind, God disposes them to a state of utter rest and of perfect contemplation.
Our senses are groping into the external world just like bees hovering over a fragrant garden. What restaurant can I go to? What show can I see? What store is having bargain sales? At least the bees’ busy search will be rewarded, but for us, as we grow more sensitive, there is only bitter disappointment; for there is no nectar in the outside world. No honey is being manufactured there; all the honey is being made inside.