Deepening Your Practice: Extending Fellowship Activities

Posted on June 29, 2010 by  | Add Comment

Some­times on a retreat you set an intent to deepen your spir­i­tual prac­tice – to add an evening med­i­ta­tion, for instance, or to write the mantram more – but once you’re back home things keep get­ting in the way.

One solu­tion is to extend your reg­u­lar fel­low­ship activ­i­ties, to deepen your prac­tice with the help of oth­ers. Here are a few ideas sent in from one BMCM Sat­sang, all in addi­tion to the usual weekly fel­low­ship meeting:

“Two of our friends wanted to add an evening med­i­ta­tion on the week­end, but found it hard to do on their own. So every Sat­ur­day evening, their door is open to local med­i­ta­tors, and once a month they have a big pot of soup for din­ner afterwards.

“Also, once a year we have sat­sang week­ends at a state park, with group med­i­ta­tions in the morn­ing, noon, and evening, mantram walks, and addi­tional activ­i­ties. These week­ends are get­ting increas­ingly pop­u­lar, so we are now think­ing about orga­niz­ing two a year.”

On a much smaller scale, just meet­ing up with one sat­sang friend occa­sion­ally to med­i­tate, or to watch an Easwaran video together, can offer a big boost!

Easwaran on The Imitation of Christ: Talk 1

Posted on June 28, 2010 by  | Read Comment | Add Comment

This is the first in a long series of talks Eknath Easwaran gave on The Imi­ta­tion of Christ by Thomas a Kem­pis. If you want to fol­low along in the text, he begins this talk with Book 1, Chap­ter 1.

We will be post­ing a talk from this series on this blog every other week. . . enjoy!

Note that all of the talks in this series are avail­able for down­load from our store. The series is described on this page.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

One Person Meditating Can Change a Community

Posted on June 25, 2010 by  | Comments Off

We often get ques­tions from BMCM Sat­sang (fel­low­ship group) coor­di­na­tors ask­ing how they can attract more mem­bers. Our answer is always that we should each deepen our own med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, and not worry about the num­ber of peo­ple attend­ing the group. But every­thing we do sows seeds, as this lit­tle story shows.

“We’ve been hold­ing a sat­sang at our local church, for years. Our min­is­ter is very sup­port­ive, and we’ve run the BMCM four-week intro­duc­tory course for new peo­ple reg­u­larly. Only a hand­ful of those attend­ing it have set­tled to the prac­tice and attended our sat­sang – but all these have told us, months, years later, how much pas­sage med­i­ta­tion has helped them through dif­fi­cult times. So we don’t get discouraged.

“Just recently we received an unex­pected com­pli­ment. Our church min­is­ter told us that the church has greatly ben­e­fited from the sat­sang — that it has added a new con­tem­pla­tive dimen­sion, and brought many pos­i­tive changes for the whole congregation.”

As Easwaran says, “just one per­son med­i­tat­ing can change a fam­ily, just one fam­ily can change a com­mu­nity, and just one com­mu­nity can change the country.”

Haven’t We Been Here Before?

Posted on June 22, 2010 by  | Add Comment

“Wait, are you sure?”

“Absolutely. You’ll rec­og­nize the room right away!”

The BMCM pulled up its Berke­ley stakes in 1970 when most of its mem­bers moved to Ram­a­giri Ashram, founded in 1969 in north­ern Marin County on a rural prop­erty acquired from a Catholic order who had used it as a novitiate.

Over the next few years, though, Easwaran came back to Berke­ley every week to give pub­lic talks on Tues­day and Wednes­day nights. For part of that time, the venue was a hand­some brick Unity church on a hill just north of the UC Berke­ley campus.

Just recently, the BMCM offered a half-day intro­duc­tory retreat in Berke­ley, its first pub­lic offer­ing there since the ‘70s. Only when the pre­sen­ters arrived in the morn­ing to set things up did they real­ize they had truly come all the way back to their Berke­ley roots. The friend who had made arrange­ments for the retreat didn’t know it, but she had brought them to the same Unity church where they had attended Easwaran’s talks more than thirty years ago.

It felt very much like the old days. Fifty-five peo­ple attended the retreat, and we’ve already heard from sev­eral who are inter­ested in look­ing fur­ther into the prac­tice of pas­sage meditation.

Changes to Our Books in Google Books

Posted on June 18, 2010 by  | Add Comment

How quickly the world of e-books changes! A few months ago only Ama­zon was sell­ing e-books. Then Apple launched the iPad. Now it’s becom­ing clear that the whole e-book mar­ket will be dom­i­nated by the big 3: Ama­zon, Apple, and Google.

E-book sales are becom­ing more and more impor­tant to us here at Nil­giri Press. They already make up 25% of Ama­zon sales for some of our titles, and soon we’ll need to be present on all the main e-book retailers.

Shortly, pos­si­bly as soon as July, Google will enter the e-book mar­ket with Google Edi­tions, which should be a good oppor­tu­nity for us. We will no longer be able to make the com­plete text of our books avail­able on Google Books but 30 per­cent of each of our Nil­giri Press books will still be avail­able for free preview.

We’ll keep you posted from time to time on how we’re doing in this excit­ing new world.

Invitation to a Journey

Posted on June 17, 2010 by  | Add Comment

“Not long ago, a young forty-foot hump­back whale on his way to Alaska became enticed by the lure of San Fran­cisco. He veered off course into the bay, and once inside, instead of decid­ing he had made a wrong turn and retrac­ing his wake, he chose to push on to Sacramento.

“By the time I learned of his plight, he had worked his way into fresh waters and got trapped in the shal­lows of the Sacra­mento River Delta – a most uncon­ge­nial envi­ron­ment for any salt-water crea­ture, but prac­ti­cally a bath­tub for one used to thou­sands of miles of open sea.

“Humphrey, as reporters dubbed him, imme­di­ately became a media sen­sa­tion. Every day, news ser­vices car­ried updates on his predica­ment around the world, while hun­dreds of whale-lovers flocked to San Fran­cisco to help the Coast Guard try to res­cue him. But Humphrey just kept swim­ming up blind alleys.

“Finally some­one hit on the idea of lur­ing him back to the sea by the call of recorded whale songs. Humphrey began leap­ing joy­fully, splash­ing great sheets of water to the delight of spec­ta­tors, and churned toward the open ocean at a good thirty miles an hour. Traf­fic on the Golden Gate Bridge backed up in both direc­tions as fans got out of their cars to crowd at the rails and cheer. They paid hand­some fines, but as one woman told reporters, ‘It was worth every penny.’

“Some­thing in all of us cheers when a cap­tive crea­ture breaks free. We are born for free­dom, even if we don’t under­stand what that means or how to find it. Some­how we sense that we are not meant to spend our lives in the shal­lows of plea­sure and profit. We are made for vast spaces, to reach beyond bound­aries until, as an Eng­lish mys­tic put it, we are ‘clothed with the heav­ens and crowned with the stars.’ We are born with inti­ma­tions of a poten­tial much, much grander than any­thing we can dream of in the day-to-day world.”

Read the rest of this arti­cle by Easwaran which appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of our quar­terly Blue Moun­tain jour­nal.

A Small Child, Nightmares, and the Mantram

Posted on June 16, 2010 by  | Comments Off

Even a three-year-old can use the mantram, as this story from a long­time med­i­ta­tor shows.

“My lit­tle grand­son has been hav­ing scary dreams about mon­sters, so my daugh­ter and I have taught him to say the mantram. Tuck­ing him in as he set­tles down to sleep, we can hear him say­ing softly through his paci­fier, ‘My God and my all, My God and my all.’

“It works, he says. The mon­sters don’t bother him now.”

Eknath Easwaran and Charles the Cat

Posted on June 14, 2010 by  | Add Comment

In this short video, Easwaran relates the pass­ing of a stray cat at his ashram to talk about death.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

Patience Takes Off on Amazon

Posted on June 11, 2010 by  | Add Comment

We hold our breath and say our mantrams in our Press when­ever a new book by Easwaran launches. In the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate, ini­tial sales fig­ures are cru­cial — if the book doesn’t catch on quickly, many buy­ers won’t re-order the title.

So we were very encour­aged to see that sales of Patience on Amazon.com are start­ing to rise – helped, per­haps, by some five star reader reviews, includ­ing this one:

“This lit­tle book is a gem for me. Easwaran is able to kindly and humor­ously shed light on the areas of my life that could really use improve­ment. I espe­cially like the table of con­tents, because it seems almost like there is a chap­ter for every kind of chal­lenge that I am fac­ing right now. I like also that the chap­ters are short and pithy, so that I can read them even if if I don’t have much time.

“I highly rec­om­mend this book for any­one who is look­ing on tan­gi­ble and prac­ti­cal ways to be more patient and present for all those pre­cious moments in life.”

A Great Gift

Posted on June 9, 2010 by  | Add Comment

Some­times we get the ques­tion, “Why do you think sat­sang (spir­i­tual fel­low­ship) is so impor­tant that you talk about it all the time?” Here’s a recent mes­sage from a pas­sage med­i­ta­tor extolling the ben­e­fits of a new BMCM Sat­sang start­ing up in the area.

“A great gift this year was the form­ing of a new Sat­sang here. Group med­i­ta­tion and watch­ing videos of Sri Easwaran, hear­ing his dear laugh and see­ing his face, with both the smile that cap­tures the heart and the thought­ful­ness in his eyes as he so elo­quently brings home a point, has been a great lift to my prac­tice and spreads out­ward to life in general.”

If you have been using pas­sage med­i­ta­tion daily for at least six months (as your only form of med­i­ta­tion) and have attended at least one BMCM pas­sage med­i­ta­tion retreat, you too can start a BMCM Sat­sang in your area. We have lots of resources to help you get started. Send us an email and remem­ber — it’s a “great gift.”


  • A few times a week we’ll post some­thing here to show­case the time­less wis­dom of Eknath Easwaran.

    We’ll also post items about the Blue Moun­tain Cen­ter of Med­i­ta­tion – new book announce­ments, retreat sched­ules and updates, news from our fel­low­ship groups.

    And we’ll post items from some of Easwaran’s many friends around the world who have brought his prac­ti­cal wis­dom into their lives.

    We hope you’ll join the con­ver­sa­tion as well.

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