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 and a practical activity. 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.
This week, we will explore how Easwaran links simple sense-training activities to grand qualities like freedom, joy, and loyalty in relationships. We’ll also have an opportunity to try some of these activities.
Is there an area of sense training that you do well, or that comes to you naturally? Please share this with us for inspiration! Suggested Activity: Think of a specific situation in your daily life where you would like to practice sense training. 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, feel free to enjoy this audio recording of Easwaran and Christine reading aloud passages. This is a practical opportunity to enjoy spiritual inspiration as uplifting entertainment.
We’d love to hear more about how your experiment with training the senses is going. Have you encountered challenges and/or successes? How has your strategy to help you remember the experiment during the day been working? If you don’t have time to comment, feel free to share through this brief check-in below. Finally, for inspiration from Easwaran, we’d like to offer a short clip (five minutes) that was shown in the November 11 Online Workshop. What are your thoughts on Easwaran’s commentary?
We’d like to invite you check out our new ‘Living and Learning’ private Facebook Group. This group is for you to share ideas and resources from both your spiritual practice and your everyday world. In last weekend’s Online Workshop, and in anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, we thought about a routine time in our daily lives during which we could experiment with training the senses. If you didn’t have a chance to join the Online Workshop live, please feel free to join us here and consider trying an experiment. We’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to try out this month.
Join us today for our Online Workshop and explore training the senses in the company of other passage meditators. We’d love to share this live satsang with you, today November 11 at 2 p.m. San Francisco time. You can register for the event for free, or you can pay on the sliding scale from $0–25. (The standard fee is $10.) In this week's reading, Easwaran describes the “fierce satisfaction of self-mastery.” He assures us that there is something more wonderful, more meaningful, and longer lasting than our common experiences of small pleasures.
This month, we’re launching into a timely topic of training the senses. As the holiday season approaches for many of us in November and December, we have found it helpful to focus on the role of training the senses in the eight-point program. We warmly invite you to join us for an online workshop, on Saturday November 11 at 2 p.m. San Francisco time. This is a 75-minute workshop and a chance for some real-time satsang on our theme of training the senses. We’ll be studying a reading from Easwaran’s book, Love Never Faileth in the online workshop, and here on the eSatsang!
Easwaran reminds us that the role of training the senses in daily life is directly tied to being free to choose our actions consciously. Please share your reflections. We are always eager to hear from you!
