A Passage for May

The recent advent of spring here on the East Coast of the US (where dwells a segment of the YA Blog Team) has brought with it glorious sunshine and beautifully blossoming trees, longer hours of light and warmer temperatures. It has been a welcome change to the cold winter and reminded us of this passage by Hazrat Inayat Khan. In it, he praises the sun whom all beings take refuge in. 

The sun and the beauty of nature can indeed be something to take refuge in. One activity we here on the YA Blog Team like to do when the weather is nice is “mantram in nature.” Sometimes this involves taking a little hike or walk through a park while repeating the mantram. Some of us like to take mantram runs, swims or bike rides. And sometimes, it’s as simple as sitting alone in nature (whether “nature” be your backyard, a small park in the city or a vast wilderness), letting yourself take refuge in the sun and hearing the mantram in all around you.

If you don’t already know Easwaran’s instructions on choosing and using a mantram, or if you would just like a refresher, you can find them here.

Of course, another activity to enjoy in lovely weather is passage memorization!  This month, we invite you to enjoy and appreciate nature, the sun and its warmth by memorizing or putting into your passage rotation “Prayer for the Peace of the World.” We hope that whatever the weather may be like in your part of the world, this passage may bring you some sunshine.

And, as always, we’d love to hear from you, so please share your thoughts in the comments below:

• Which parts of this passage speak to you right now?
• Are there other passages that come to mind when you are enjoying springtime?
• What “mantram in nature” activities have you tried? Or which of the other eight points have you enjoyed practicing in nature?

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Prayer for the Peace of the World – Hazrat Inayat Khan

O Thou, the Almighty Sun,
Whose light cleareth away all clouds,
We take refuge in Thee,
King of men, God of all deities,
Lord of all angels.
We pray Thee
Dispel the mists of illusion
From the hearts of the nations
And lift their lives
By Thy all-sufficient power.
Pour upon them
Thy limitless love
Thy everlasting life
Thy heavenly joy
And Thy perfect peace.

Passage Meditation in a Christian Context

Meet Josh, a YA living in Danville, California. This week, Josh shares how Easwaran and passage meditation have helped his faith and personal practice as both a Christian and a pastor. 

In the early 2000s, I was introduced to Easwaran by Father Henri Nouwen in his book Life of the Beloved. In it he described the importance of passage meditation and the direction of my life ultimately shifted. Instantly, I scoured the internet, dove into the free book Passage Meditation on easwaran.org, and implemented the practice into my daily life. Once I had finished reading through Passage Meditation online, I went to my local bookstore and found Original Goodness. It’s been a domino effect from one book to the next through Easwaran’s writings since then.

As a Christian and pastor, Easwaran’s 8-point program has shed a whole new light into my faith and personal practice. Passage meditation especially has brought me a new understanding and sensitivity to Christ, who “is all and is in all” (Colossians 3.11). I’ve often humorously reflected with other pastors, “It took a Hindu Mystic to show me the beauty of Jesus and my own faith.”

Josh and his family

By memorizing passages and prayers, repeating them slowly and internally without analyzing them, I continuously feel my entire mind, and therefore life, become transformed and redirected. It brought me a literal understanding of Saint Paul’s instruction in the book of Romans, “Be transformed by the entire renewal of your mind, by its new ideals and its new attitude.” Growing up in church, I had known these things were a part of Christianity, but I had never been given practices to help cultivate them within myself. It was (and still is) an internal revolution!

Easwaran often teaches about consciousness being a powerful stream. When left unattended, it moves about recklessly; eventually, grooves are conditioned for the stream to flow more easily and quickly. He made psychological realities so easy to understand. When focusing on a prayer or passage in Easwaran’s method of meditation, I felt the oppositional current of my mind’s stream of consciousness. Discovering this was such an incredibly exposing encounter with myself!

Thankfully, Easwaran assures, “We are not our minds.” We are free to objectify our minds rather than be objectified by them. So, I took to the practice even more ardently. He’s taught me to look at my mind as a giant stone that is being shaped and sculpted by every thought. What do I want the final image to be? Love. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him,” Easwaran writes in Original Goodness, quoting the First Book of John.

Jesus often said, “Those who have ears, let them hear.” He also said, “Consider carefully how you listen.” Without the aid of Easwaran’s convicting gentleness, I can’t imagine having understood Jesus’ words with such clarity. My ears were full of currents made up of fear, anxiety, insecurity, and bitterness. These currents would whisk away the words of Jesus and Scriptures until they ended up far and away from where they were intended to land. Passage meditation affords me the space, stillness, sensitivity, and attention to see those currents and apply the needed effort to redirect them toward what Jesus defined as the purpose of his life, that we may have “life and life more abundantly.”

In Original Goodness, Easwaran writes, “...what we say we believe in is not so important; what matters is what we actually do – and, even more, what we actually are. ‘As we think in our hearts, so we are.’ Goodness is in us; our job is simply to get deep into our consciousness and begin removing what stands in the way."  He goes on to write, "Meditation is not dogma or doctrine or metaphysics; it is a powerful tool. Everyone can use a shovel, regardless of his views of the dignity of hand labor.”

On YA Stats

This month we're continuing to celebrate the blog's two-year anniversary and wanted to share with you some stats on the blog itself, and the BMCM's other big online endeavor over the past year, the webinars.

YA Blog
We have an average of 612 unique monthly visitors (up from 532 a year ago). Since January of this year we've had visitors from over 68 countries, though the blog has the most visitors from the US, India, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands.

We've been pleased with the reception to our audio talks from Easwaran with nearly 250 plays on the audio talk "Harmony with Others and Oneself" and nearly 60 plays on the Gandhi talk posted just last week.

Anecdotally, we hear great stories at our retreats about friends, family, grandparents, and neighbors using the YA blog as a comfortable entry point for sharing passage meditation with YAs and non-YAs alike, as well as using the blog as a source of satsang when meditators don't have a physical community nearby. 

Webinars
Last year the BMCM hosted its first ever webinar and we're so pleased to be able to reach out to a new audience, and especially provide a way for our international friends to participate!

Since January 2014 we've held three introductory webinars introducing passage meditation and just four weeks ago we held our first ever "Webinar 2" focusing on the rest of the eight points and how they help you get the most out of your meditation.

We got a lot of feedback from our "Webinar 1" curriculum and as a result integrated group brainstorms, self-reflection exercises, and an extended Q&A period into Webinar 2. We loved seeing all the questions and comments come in throughout the webinar and were pleased to hear from long-time friends as well as brand new folks. As the BMCM continues to develop its online offerings, we're so grateful for all our audience support and we'd like to share a bit about the webinar. Here are some statistics:

• There were 394 registrations!
• 19% of registrations came from outside the US from 20 countries.
• 20% of registrants have no current meditation practice (and 30% of those were YAs!)
• 71% of participants first became interested in passage meditation by reading one of Easwaran's books.
• After attending the webinar, participants were asked what next steps they were going to take and visiting the YA Blog was the second most popular next step (attending a retreat was most popular).

We also heard directly from some participants:

From someone relatively new: "I appreciate this opportunity to have more connection with other passage meditators since I just started this practice in January. So far I have been mostly focusing on passage meditation and using a mantram. I was happy to get a better sense of how to expand into the use of the other points."

From a longer-term meditator: "It was a great experience to participate in this webinar. It was inspiring and enlightening. It motivated me to dig deeper in my practice - learn a new passage for meditation, meditate every day, go to a retreat, continue in satsang. "

What about year three?
We're queuing up more great posts for you from our broader YA community and curating more readings and audio content from Easwaran to continue the blog for its third year.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! In the comments below, let us know if there's a particular topic you'd love to see on the YA blog, either from a YA or in Easwaran excerpts.