Eight-Point Parenting

This week's blog post is from Adam and Emily, a couple from Alameda, California, who are using the eight points to find balance, unity, and sanity in their life with a new baby.

Adam: A week or two before Rosalie arrived, my boss told me to "get ready for the atom bomb" because everything was about to turn upside down for Emily and me. Okay, this way of putting it didn't quite meet my ideal of non-violent language, but the meaning was right on. Our lives were about to transform, and there was going to be a whole lot of energy released in the process.

Adam & Emily: Of course, this huge increase in family duties and challenges has meant lots of opportunities for whittling down our own personal wants and needs in favor of what's best for the family – a.k.a. spiritual growth! We've tried to refocus our day to hone in on being united as a family, in as many ways as we've been able. Here are a few of our experiments:

Emily, the mantram: For me, Easwaran nails it when he says, "Parents of small children will find the mantram a perfect lullaby." For the first four months of Rosalie's life (she's almost 8 months now), Adam and I would take turns bouncing Rosalie to sleep or calming her, especially during the wee hours of the night. I found singing the matram to her particularly helpful for my own sanity, and found Rosie calmed with it too. If I was really tired and couldn't even muster the energy to sing it myself, I would play it on my phone for her. Our friend, Jan, a passage meditator and musician, recorded this mantram song for our daughter. He called it Rama For Rosalie since Rama is both my mantram and Adam's (now it's our family mantram!). We still sing the mantram to Rosie a lot, but thankfully she's sleeping through the night these days.

Also, she's recently graduated to sitting at the table with us for breakfast and dinner, so we've been including her in saying grace and mantrams which she seems to like.

Adam, sharing passages: For a while we didn't know how to share passages with Rosalie – after all, she's just a baby. But recently we had an idea. At bedtime we spend a few moments at a little puja table we've set up in her room. (A puja table is a spot for spiritual connection with the divine, a.k.a. devotional worship – check out Rosie's in the photo below). As an extension of Rosalie's bedtime story, Goodnight Moon, we make a visit all together to the little puja table in her room and say goodnight to Baby Jesus, Mother Mary, Krishna, the Buddha, and Easwaran. It occurred to us that this could be our opportunity to share a brief child friendly passage – like Let Nothing Upset You, the Prayer of St. Francis, or The Path. Rosalie tends to be pretty calm and engaged as we recite these, and it's been a fun way to be united around a passage as a family.

Emily and Adam, one pointed attention: Emily: I pay full attention to Rosalie while she is nursing, as opposed to looking at my phone or being lost in other thoughts. Adam: and I've tried to use eye contact with Rosalie as a cue to be one pointed (and often to say the mantram). She can stare for a long time!  

We both found these experiments to be valuable. Discussing recently, we feel that she really has benefited from our focused attention. We aren't sure if she has learned to be more one pointed, or just has kept away from learning to be distracted. One mom commented that compared to her baby, Rosalie is able to concentrate on playing with a toy for a long time.

Adam, inspiration from Granny: Since learning that Rosalie was on the way, I've been working occasionally on a pet project to compile Easwaran's stories about Granny. After all, I figured, I want to be more like Granny! So I started making note of the "Granny Stories" I found – from Eawaran's books, audio and video talks, and journal articles – and putting them all into one website, with the original material from Easwaran right there on the page. I've been calling it "the Granny Project" and have it online here:  http://bit.ly/GrannyProject

I hope the project will help some others to connect with Granny and Easwaran – I know it has already helped me to keep them "with me" in my heart and mind more of the time, and I'm grateful to them both for that. So far the project only has a fraction of all the Granny stories out there. But part of the fun of the project is contributing to it together. You can suggest additions via the link at top right on each page. The project has already been a collaboration: my mom has found many of the stories, and Emily has given lots of advice for making the website usable.  

Adam and Emily: The eight points – and you all – have been tremendous sources of strength on this journey. Even so, it's often tough going. Little experiments like these help us take courage and have faith that little by little we will move toward our ideal together, and "bring forth much fruit with patience."

What's helped you move a bit closer to your ideals in your own family life, whether with friends, partners, parents, or kids? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below!

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?

---

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.”