Thank you for sharing your ideas on simple ways to deepen meditation and to strengthen evenness of mind. We’re also very grateful to everyone who joined us for last week’s online workshop. It’s a great boost to our practice to strive together as a worldwide community as we put our meditation first, more of the time.
We are very interested to hear how your experiments went this past week. What did you try and did you learn something new? What impact did you notice on your meditation? Feel free to share any reflections as they always inspire us.
Please enjoy this six-minute video clip from the online workshop during which Easwaran shares stories and anecdotes about how the Lord is always closest to us in our time of need.
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.”
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!
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!
Thank you all for getting us off to a wonderful start on this month’s topic of deepening our meditation. Your insights are very helpful and motivating. Keep them coming!
We wanted to remind you about our weekly virtual meditation sessions each Saturday morning. You might consider participating as a concrete way to deepen your meditation. We invite you to join us if you can next Saturday morning at 6:30 a.m. San Francisco time. This is the same time of day that you would meditate in the morning if you were in Tomales, at the retreat house.
To inspire us, we’re sharing an article from Easwaran where he describes what we are doing during meditation and what is happening within us. After reading the article, please share your reflections in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you, and by offering your ideas you’ll inspire others to do so, too! You might share:
a line or two that really stood out to you – one you’d like to remember
an overall message from Easwaran that resonates with you in some way
thoughts, feelings, or questions that come up for you as you read Easwaran’s words.
Thanks to all of you for responding so earnestly to January’s study of the latest Blue Mountain Journal, in which we discussed how we can contribute to hopefulness for ourselves and others during these trying times. It was really encouraging to hear from so many, and to share a renewed sense of inspiration with one another.
This month we’ll continue exploring a theme Christine shared in the last Blue Mountain Journal, of being “a force for peace”. Our focus will be on the many ways in which we can give our best to meditation – both during meditation, and during the rest of the day, too.
One way that Easwaran often suggested going deeper in meditation was to refresh or memorize a new passage. Because “we become what we meditate on”, we wanted to remind you of the many passages in God Makes the Rivers to Flow and available for free on the BMCM website. We invite you to read each passage simply for the sense of peace and inspiration they impart. Do you already use one during meditation? If so, which one, and do you notice its impact on you? Are you moved to memorize a new one in order to refresh your meditation repertoire? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks to all of you for sharing your introductions and joining as you can in our “bring a weeklong retreat home” theme. Your reflections are always inspiring because they are a testament to how Easwaran speaks to each of us differently and in just the way we need. This week, we’ll revisit Easwaran’s teachings about how our meditation practice helps build our will.
Also, you might like to meditate with others this week as another way to bring the retreat home. Perhaps you have an in-person satsang to facilitate this, or another place to meditate with others.
As an optional alternative, you might try joining us for a virtual meditation next Saturday morning at 6:30 a.m. San Francisco time. This is the same time of day that you would meditate in the morning if you were in Tomales, at the retreat house.
This week, we’ll continue our reading study in which Easwaran discusses the role that our practice of passage meditation plays in building the will. Please feel free to share particular lines or sections from the reading that stand out to you, and tell us how they might apply to your own life. We’d love to hear from you!
To conclude this study of our meditation practice, we’d like to draw on some inspiration from Easwaran in this 22-minute video entitled “Tips for Deepening Meditation”. In the video, Easwaran reminds us that we have a choice at all times to ask: “Shall I do what is pleasing, appealing only to me, or shall I choose to do what will benefit all?” (Click the title for more...)
This week, we face a challenging area when making efforts to deepen our meditation: distractions.
Distractions in meditation will be with us for a long time, and can be tricky to overcome. The good news is that we can always be working on reducing our level of distraction by being aware of our thoughts and actions in daily life. What are your strategies for helping reduce your level of distraction during the day?
Also, please cast your vote for the passage you would most like to study as a satsang next month!
We are continuing to take a close look at specific factors of our meditation practice. This week, we’ll revisit Easwaran’s recommendation on the pace of the passage, and how it can help us slow down and become more loving and aware of life.
Do you experiment with the pace of reciting the passage? What have you noticed?
Easwaran says below, “When you concentrate on the sound of each word, you will also be concentrating on the meaning of the passage. Sound and sense are one.”
This month, we’ll study several subtle factors that influence our passage meditation practice. Over the next four weeks, we’ll look at place, posture, pace, and distractions using Easwaran’s book Passage Meditation as a guide. We’re eager to share this great opportunity to look at some ways to sharpen up our practice. What better way than to do it together?
We’d love to hear about how you keep meditation fresh by adjusting your external surroundings to support you, and how that may have changed over time.
