Announcing the Blue Mountain Blog

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we are making some exciting changes here at the YA blog. The biggest change is that it won’t be just the YA blog any more – we’re expanding our scope to include passage meditators of all ages. So, welcome to our new Blue Mountain Blog, serving our whole BMCM community!

This blog was founded three years ago as part of the BMCM’s strategic initiative to reach out to new young adults in their 20s and 30s. We’ve had amazing success using this platform to share stories as well as tips and inspiration. It’s been lovely to see over time that posts from older meditators have been just as engaging to our readers as the posts by YAs (see Norma, and Charley & Kathleen). We’ve also seen that our wider community of all ages have found great satsang and support from reading these stories, but were shy about participating since they were not of the “right” age.

We realized that although this blog was created with YAs in mind, it was already serving a broader community, and it’s now time to make that official!

Moving forward, we’ll be expanding our scope by inviting friends of all ages to contribute to the blog. You’ll still see a beautiful cross-section of our international BMCM community and find practical advice to help you strengthen your own practice. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be sharing two posts spanning the generations: a new grandmother integrating her practice of the eight points into her relationship with her granddaughter, and a YA who discovered Easwaran in college and attributes some very positive life changes to her meditation practice.

We’re also merging with the Timeless Wisdom blog, which was hosted on www.easwaran.org and provided curated Easwaran content for inspiration. To continue to serve the community of the Timeless Wisdom blog, we’ll be posting Easwaran content twice a month - providing an audio talk the first week of the month, and a reading excerpt the third week of the month.

Though we’ll continue hosting the blog here at YAmeditation.org, you’ll notice some cosmetic changes such as the new name “Blue Mountain Blog”. We hope that you’ll engage with the blog as much as you’d like, and feel at home here. We encourage you to share the blog with your friends and engage in conversation in the comments to help support each other.

Finally, because YA Outreach continues to be a strategic priority for the BMCM, we wanted to provide you with one way you can help (besides sharing the blog, of course). We have printed copies of these beautiful YA resource postcards and we’d love to send you some that you can hand out to friends, or leave in YA-friendly coffee-shops or yoga studios. If you’d like us to mail you some postcards you can email us at young.adults@easwaran.org.

A Passage for February

To tie into Jan’s lovely blog post from last week, we thought that Shankara’s passage, "Thy Holy Name", would be an appropriate choice for this month’s passage. In Jan’s post, he writes about singing mantrams for the elderly and those close to death. This passage deals directly with this ideal: the prayer that the last thing we do be to repeat the mantram. Easwaran made repetition of the mantram the second point in his eight point program of passage meditation, and tells us that the more we remember to repeat the mantram in our daily lives when things are going well, the more likely we will be to remember to call on it when we need it most.

Join us this month in memorizing (it’s nice and short!) or adding into your passage rotation "Thy Holy Name", and may it inspire us to increase our collective mantram use! As always, we love to hear from you. What are your thoughts about how this passage inspires you?

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Thy Holy Name – Shankara

I do not ask Thee, Mother,
Riches, good fortune or salvation;
I seek no happiness, no knowledge.
This is my only prayer to Thee:
That as the breath of my life forsakes me,
I may chant thy holy name.

Threading Together a Community with the Mantram

This week we hear from Jan, a YA living in Berkeley, California. Jan shares here how he has integrated his mantram practice to help him build spiritual community throughout his work and personal life.

Jan, in the background, playing basketball at a recent Young Adult retreat.

After a glorious weekend with like-minded young adults at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation retreat center in Tomales, I always used to be sad to come back home, where I didn't have roommates, not to mention like-minded roommates. 

So I decided to start a community in San Francisco similar to what I enjoyed at retreats.

As I brainstormed, I remembered how I had read somewhere that working together for a selfless purpose unites people in a deeper way than just going out to a restaurant.
What project could we work on? Singing mantrams for elders! 

Many Bay Area YAs are musical and this would combine our talents with our spiritual practice and with a need of the elderly. 

Even those who are not "musical" are invited, since it's more about the mantram than about the music

At the next retreat I didn't just go straight home. A couple YAs and I extended the February YA retreat by carpooling to SF and singing mantrams at elder care home before heading to a restaurant. 

Over the next year, we had a few such group visits, and I enjoyed singing mantrams for those at the brink of death and seeing their reactions so much that I did it almost every week, even when others weren't available to sing with me.

Jan, singing mantrams to those near the end of their lives.

To include as many of Easwaran's recommended mantrams as possible, I even added songs to the repertoire of tunes I had picked up at retreats. Both older and newer songs are included on the new "Easwaran and Children" website. 

Soon after a mantram singing session for the elderly with another YA, I moved in with him and the community I had been dreaming of became more of a reality.

We meditated together now and then, hiked together occasionally, and even read to each other from the Ramayana -- a dream come true. 

(That YA even introduced me to the person who is now my wife. But that's another story...)

As I was doing my Masters in composition I thought about how I could take advantage of my work for a degree in music to support this work in community building and in integrating the eight points into my daily living. 

I decided to make my thesis project include an album of mantram songs. 

Spiritual reading, one of Easwaran's points: I had read in a book by Gandhi that if the music is beautiful but the musician doesn't have a beautiful heart, then the music is not worth listening to...or something like that. 

Which musicians could sing with genuine conviction for this project? Other passage meditators using mantrams in their daily life!

On "Ten Thousand Threads," the album named after a 15th century passage about the mantram, you'll hear two singers whose name you might recognize if you've been to a retreat in Tomales.
 
The experience definitely built community, meaning I spent more time with like-minded aspirants and we came out of it with more shared and meaningful experiences.

I'll end with the 15th century passage from which I got the title for the album. The passage is by Kabir and is included in "God Makes the Rivers to Flow," Easwaran's anthology of passages recommended for meditation.

Weaving Your Name – Kabir

I weave your name on the loom of my mind,
To make my garment when you come to me.
My loom has ten thousand threads
To make my garment when you come to me.
The sun and moon watch while I weave your name;
The sun and moon hear while I count your name.
These are the wages I get by day and night
To deposit in the lotus bank of my heart.
 
I weave your name on the loom of my mind
To clean and soften ten thousand threads
And to comb the twists and knots of my thoughts.
No more shall I weave a garment of pain.
For you have come to me, drawn by my weaving,
Ceaselessly weaving your name on the loom of my mind.