What a Great Four Years!

It’s time for a celebration! After nearly four years, we’ll be transitioning from our Blue Mountain Blog to our new Wednesdays With the BMCM email. With the launch of Wednesdays With the BMCM, we’re able to expand the scope of our offerings and share these stories as part of bmcm.org. This week, we want to celebrate a beautiful four years together here at yameditation.org by highlighting some of our favorite blog stories. We look forward to seeing you all next week (just as normal!) over at bmcm.org.

The Early Days: YA Blog

When the Blog launched in the Spring of 2013 it was part of the Young Adult (YA) Outreach initiative. Our goal was to help YAs see how passage meditation fits into a YA lifestyle, and to build a platform to share inspiration and practical tips about starting and sustaining a practice.

What tips and inspiration we’ve had! Here are some highlights:

• Carlos shared how passage meditation integrates with his faith tradition.
• Sarah wrote about how the mantram is part of her daily commute.
• Derek gave examples of how he integrates his spiritual practice into his daily technology use.
• Logan shared how she works on training the senses . . . “YA style.”
• Adam & Emily shared their “Passage Portfolio” – a digital tool for organizing your passages.

Throughout this time we’ve also published photo essays sharing an inside look at our YA retreats, summer internships, and Cohort Programs. It was a wonderful way to showcase the vibrant BMCM community of young adults in their teens, 20s and 30s.

A Blog for Everyone: The Blue Mountain Blog

A year ago, in early 2016, we announced the launch of the Blue Mountain Blog. We’d found that YAs really enjoyed, and benefited, from stories from older meditators. We’d also heard from many older friends that they enjoyed the personal stories.

Over the past year, we’ve enjoyed hearing stories from our broader community. The topics have showcased the variety of ways people live out the eight points in their day-to-day life, and we’ve benefited from hearing from a wider range of voices. Here are a few highlights:

• Hasmita wrote about how she hosted an event to share passage meditation with her friends.
• Dick shared how he sees parallels between his passage meditation practice and, surprisingly, his hobby of magic!
• Inspired by attending a retreat in Tomales, Paige wrote about how she created a personal retreat in her own home.
• We experimented with video, interviewing YAs to hear about how they first found the book Passage Meditation and how it’s influenced their lives.
• Ken wrote about how he’s used pictures of Easwaran to help him deepen his spiritual practice.
• Sandy shared how her practice supported her through the medical crisis of a family member.
• Gretchen shared wonderful insights about the benefits, and challenges, of practicing slowing down.

Wednesdays With the BMCM

Next week, we’ll launch Wednesdays With the BMCM. The email will arrive to your inbox as normal, and we’re all looking forward to moving our community over to the bmcm.org website. Though we won’t continue publishing new content on yameditation.org, the URL will remain active for the coming months.

We are looking forward to continuing conversations, now with the content published on bmcm.org. Just like on this site, you can comment by scrolling down to the bottom of the article where you’ll find a comment box. You have the option to comment anonymously or to create a profile. We’re always eager to hear from you.

Thank YOU!

We want to thank you for all your support and participation over the past four years. Just scrolling through the archive we are stunned to see all the amazing stories that have come from all of YOU in the Blue Mountain Blog Community. We’re grateful for the time you’ve spent with us in this incarnation of the blog, and look forward to many years to come!

Coming in March: Wednesdays With the BMCM

Dear Blue Mountain Blog Community,

We, the blog team, are writing to you with an exciting announcement. At the beginning of March, we’ll be launching our new weekly inspiration email: Wednesdays With the BMCM!

This weekly offering will replace our Blue Mountain Blog – but don’t worry, it’s designed to offer you the same spiritual support and inspiration with even more resources!

What is Wednesdays With the BMCM?

Wednesdays With the BMCM will be a weekly email sent out on. . .  you guessed it, Wednesdays!

Just like with the blog, each week we’ll feature an article with a story from a member of the community, or an article, audio or video from Easwaran, or a news update about what’s going on at the BMCM.

In addition, Wednesdays With the BMCM will offer you some curated resources on the topic of the article. For example, if the main Easwaran article is on Slowing Down, your weekly email might also contain a link to a story from the community providing an example of slowing down in action. Or, there might be links to specific passages to help you cultivate qualities or practice the eight points. Or maybe we’ll include links to instructional resources to help you refresh or deepen your practice.

Dive Deep on Topics That Interest You!

There are two main reasons we are making this change. The first is that we have many digital resources that we want to show you – from Easwaran articles, to community stories, to passages, to books, to eight-point program instruction. We want to facilitate your exploration of these offerings and help you dive deep on the topics that are interesting and useful to you. 

The second reason for the change is that we want to consolidate our digital offerings. So we’ll publish our new content on the bmcm.org website and share it from there. This means that although the yameditation.org site will remain active, we won’t be publishing new content on this site.

For those of you already subscribed to the Blue Mountain Blog, you’ll be automatically subscribed to Wednesdays With the BMCM, and at the beginning of March the email will come directly to your inbox! New subscriptions are always welcome – you can sign up in the box on the right hand side of this page at yameditation.org.

We look forward to continuing conversations with this community, and seeing all of you over at bmcm.org.

We can’t wait to spend our Wednesdays with you!

Best,
The Blue Mountain Blog Team
(soon to be Wednesdays With the BMCM Team)

Eknath Easwaran: Pursuing Peace

In response to the turbulent and challenging times the world is facing, this week the BMCM sent out a special message to its audience. Often Easwaran would respond to global problems by sharing words of deep spiritual wisdom. In this article, curated by our editors, Easwaran offers hope, inspiration, and direction.

Mahatma Gandhi has said that to be well adjusted in a wrong situation is very bad; in a wrong situation we should keep on acting to set it right. But in order to reconcile individuals, communities, or countries, we have to have peace in our minds. If we pursue peace with anger and animosity, nothing can be stirred up but conflict.
 
Meditation and the allied disciplines enable you to take your convictions deeper and deeper into consciousness, so that they become a constant source of strength and security – even when you are severely challenged or threatened. When you practice meditation, you are working hard for the welfare of the world, for the regeneration of society, for the establishment of peace on earth and good will among all, which, as we know to our cost, cannot be done by governments or by corporations but only by millions of little people in little groups, working in all countries, through their personal example.
 
When I read newspaper accounts of individuals, factions, and governments unleashing provocative words and actions against each other at the same time they are trying to settle their differences, I am reminded of the wise statement attributed to Mahatma Gandhi that an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind. 
 
These tragic confrontations are caused by utter forgetfulness of the deep unity that underlies all petty differences of religion, ethnicity, language, or national identity – a forgetfulness that leads to never ending violence, war, and destruction.  Speaking as a spiritual teacher, let me humbly submit that a true and lasting peace can only come about through the awakening of a deep sense of shared humanity.

How meditation helps

In the mystical tradition it is said that the human appeal and the divine response go together. If we deepen our desire for God’s help by memorizing and using in meditation sublime testimonies of the highest qualities a human being can attain, we can bring into our daily lives the deep faith and unshakable security of the great mystics of all religions. By training our attention on magnificent testimonies such as the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (“Where there is hatred, let me sow love”), or the Twin Verses of the Compassionate Buddha (“Hatred can never put an end to hatred, love alone can”), or the twelfth chapter of Gandhi’s beloved Bhagavad Gita (“That one I love who is incapable of ill will and returns love for hatred”), we can become what we meditate on.  Through this method of meditation we will begin to understand that a human being can become an immense spiritual force barely contained in a physical form.

It all depends on us

If each of us, through the example of our own lives, can inspire two more people every year to meditate and to live at peace with those around them, it will have an incalculably great effect in creating a climate of peace.
 
That is my ambition, and that is why I say I am a terribly ambitious man.  You and I make peace. You and I make war. It all depends on us.