A Work In Progress

This week we share a post from Steve, a passage meditator living in Santa Rosa, California. In this post Steve shares how he leverages his life-long love of sweets to build up his willpower.

I like sweets! Always have.

While growing up, breakfast was a sugary dry cereal, lunch always concluded with cookies and dinner wasn’t over till ice cream or something similar had been enjoyed.

The pattern continued through my adult life. The entrees became healthier, but the desserts remained ever present.

Since becoming a student of EE, things have changed. I learned that “training the senses” is one of the eight points and critical to the larger process of taming self-will. So now I try to keep sweets out of the house. I (almost!) always drive past frozen yogurt shops without stopping. Avoidance of ice cream - my very favorite treat - while shopping at the grocery store is still sometimes difficult, but I (almost!) always manage. Rigorously controlling my own environment has yielded enormous gains.

But alas, the task becomes more difficult during the holidays, especially since my wife and I now live in a senior community, where we’ve joined many groups (all of which have holiday parties) and gained many wonderful friends (who also have holiday parties). Everywhere I go, it seems that something terribly attractive and very, very available is staring me in the face.

My wife and I at the Boomers Club Mardi Gras Party

The holidays also bring frequent travel to see family. Out of my normal routine, I find it tough to deny myself “comfort” food, especially if prepared with love by a relative.

Of course, I know this problem is not unique to me. “Lose weight” and “eat healthier” must be very high on the list of the most common New Year’s resolutions! For me, however, it’s become a year-long struggle as my age advances and my metabolism slows.

So, what to do?

What to do?

As usual, the eight-point program holds my salvation. In particular, the first four points (meditation, mantram, slowing down, one-pointed attention) are the ones I call on. I note the patterns in my life that tend to create problems and plan my use of these four “points” carefully.

My “food samskaras” (negative patterns associated with food) include:

• Eating with less discrimination when I'm with friends and food is readily available (as during the holidays)
• Eating with less discrimination when I'm feeling down
• Craving more sweets later in the day if I eat sweets early in the day
• Eating while doing other things (particularly reading) if I'm in a hurry
• Eating with less discrimination if I feel speeded up, which happens as the day goes on (particularly during the holidays)
• Thinking about (and enjoying in advance!) my next meal well before I need to

In addition to my morning meditation, I meditate in the late afternoon. Missing the second meditation of the day is easier when I’m away from home. But that second meditation often occurs at a time where I’ve gotten speeded up and desperately need slowing down. To keep this from occurring, I plan my day in advance and mindfully consider when and where that second meditation will happen. It’s useful for me to consider dinner well earned by the meditation prior.

My Salvation!

The mantram is most helpful to me just after eating a meal, when the craving for sweets peaks. At home, I’ll usually force myself to retire to a loveseat in the bedroom where I can read quietly or repeat the mantram while the urge for sweets dissolves. I call it “timing myself out,” after a practice used with our kids when they got a bit more amped up than was useful for them. In a short period of time, as I occupy my mind with something healthier than Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup, I slow down, become more considered and the temptation invariably wanes.

The “time out” method borrows from the phrase “use your mighty arms to free the senses” (from the meditation passage entitled “Living in Wisdom” from the Gita). Rather, I’m using my mighty legs to escape from the world of “ten thousand things” (“Holding to the Constant,” Lao Tzu) to a place where time and temptation have less purchase. The idea is that if my legs can get my arms far enough from attractive foods, my arms can’t reach anything unhealthy! I’m not always successful, of course, but I know that, when the strategies are employed, they inevitably work.

The “Time Out” Sofa

The "Time Out" Sofa

Slowing down has always been essential for me. When I think, speak and act slowly, the space between thoughts opens up and I gain the needed perspective and time to make good choices.

Over the years, I’ve painstakingly noted those situations in which I tend to speed up (talking on the phone, interacting with people at parties, working on the computer, putting too many activities into one day) and work hard to avoid them. Where they can’t be avoided, I time myself out after each in order to return to the baseline slowness I feel after finishing meditation, completing an absorbing task or exiting from an extended mantramming period.

My best meals are those I eat by myself, with one-pointed attention to each bite. Savoring the flavor of my food, often with my eyes closed, returns the satisfaction I’m “losing” when I don’t eat sweets. While enjoying the company of others along with my food, I force myself to eat slowly and try to notice when the speeding up occurs.

As the years have passed, I’ve realized that, for me, successful eight-point-program-style eating means using EE’s tools to make good decisions at those key moments when I’m tempted by food. Thankfully, there are not many of these moments. I alert myself in advance prior to going into a grocery store, a restaurant, a friend’s home for dinner, or a party that I am about to be tested. I remind myself of the import of my choices, why I’ve resolved to make them and what the benefits will be.

Above all, I know that I’m forming good habits when I make the right decisions at those moments where I’m tested. In addition to displacing the negative food samskaras, the stronger will I’m building helps me better focus on undesirable tasks and stay the course on long-term goals I’ve set for myself. My entire life has been touched in a positive way by this increase in will power.

Like life, it’s a work in progress!

Eknath Easwaran: Invitation to a Journey

This week we bring you an excerpt from the afterword in Passage Meditation by Eknath Easwaran. Here Easwaran shares the wonder and and adventure of the spiritual life, inspiring us to take up the practice of meditation.

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 toward 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” – born with intimations of a potential much, much grander than anything we can dream of in the day-to-day world.

While Humphrey’s story was unfolding in the daily news, we human viewers had the advantage of a higher dimension. We could look at maps, watch aerial views on TV, and see the scene whole: the narrow confines of the river delta, the broader bay, the narrow passage to the sea that Humphrey needed to find. To us it seemed so simple what to do. But Humphrey had no access to that higher view. All he could have known was that an interesting diversion had turned into a trap. It’s easy to imagine his panic as he found himself alone and boxed in, with no sense of where to turn for help from a situation he could not understand.

That is how I felt when I discovered meditation: as if I had been spending my life cramped indoors and just discovered the real world. Imagine living in one little room all your life! You would forget what the outdoors was like. Gradually you would come to believe there is no such thing; only your room is real. That’s why I identified with Humphrey escaping into the sea. Early every morning, while the rest of the world slept, I would open the door of consciousness in meditation, slip inside, and set about exploring the world within – a world I was making my own.

I like to imagine Humphrey free at last, charging out through the Golden Gate deaf to the cheers of earthbound creatures on the bridge above, into the open sea where he belonged. There’s not much to the continental shelf in northern California, and whales swim fast. Within a few minutes he would have been in mile-deep waters again, with half a planet of open ocean to roam in as he pleased.

Then, free to go wherever he chose, he must instead have felt a silent command: “North. Go north. Go home.” No details, no map, no companions, no guide, just a direction and a desire in response to an overriding imperative from within: go home. It is very much like that on the journey of meditation too.

Once you turn inward, the words of the passages urge you forward in response to a summons from the very depths of the heart. This need to return to the source of our being is nothing less than an evolutionary imperative – the drive to realize our full human potential. As Meister Eckhart says, “Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.” Something deep within us must find expression beyond the plane of pleasure and profit; that is our glory as human beings.

Only from a higher level than physical existence can we understand this deep need to find our purpose and our place in life. Because this dimension is as real as the physical – nearer to us even than the body, as the Sufis say – we cannot help living in two worlds, the material and the spiritual. To live fully means being at home in both these realms, and that requires a way to bring the deep wisdom of the heart into daily life.

There are many reasons today why one might choose to meditate – health, concentration, reduced anxiety, deeper relationships, security, serenity, the creative resources for making a lasting contribution with your life. Meditation can help you attain all these goals – or, rather, it provides the path; you will need to do the traveling yourself.

But the path leads much, much farther – as far as you want to go. It opens onto a journey that is literally without end, since its goal is only the beginning of a fully human life. The journey holds challenges enough for the most daring adventurer, wonders and treasures that would make Marco Polo’s accounts of Cathay trivial by comparison. It is, without exaggeration, the adventure of a lifetime. 

Finding Easwaran & Establishing a Practice

This week our post comes from Laura, a young adult living in Denver, Colorado. Laura shares her story of finding passage meditation and her path to establishing a regular daily practice.

Finding Easwaran

When I was about 17 or 18, a lot of my inner thoughts and dialogue were consumed with questions about the nature of life. I was on my own small search for meaning, and for the most part I was disappointed by the lack of answers. The general plan or arc of our lives (school, work, family) seemed devoid of the richness and magic I craved from life.

When I started college, I began to learn about social and environmental injustices around the world. My studies made me wonder how I, one single human being, could possibly make any change for the better. I felt more and more anxious about the state of the world, and about the lack of meaning and purpose in my own experiences.

Amidst all these agonizing questions, my interest in mediation took root. Figures whom I admired such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.—who had changed the world in positive ways—appeared to be in on some secret together, and that secret I perceived to be the spiritual path.

I also felt that meditation could help me deal with the stress of living. Whether you’re working or studying (as I was) or both, life has its ups and downs. I felt immense pressure all the time—to earn good grades, find the right career path, even to enjoy the social aspects of college as much as I felt I was “supposed” to. It was all a bit overwhelming. I had recently taken up yoga and was simply amazed by how calm it made me feel. Mental and physical well-being started to become a daily priority, and I had a hunch that meditation was the next step forward.

My college offered a one-credit class on meditation, so I enrolled. The professor happened to be a dedicated passage meditator, and Passage Meditation was the assigned reading. Nowadays, I feel that it was a great stroke of luck to find Easwaran this way—it could have been any professor, and it could have been any book. To be honest, I don’t know that I would have picked up Passage Meditation on my own; my perception of what meditation was had nothing to do with passages or mystic literature. I had only read Buddhist books on meditating on the breath. Luckily, I was ever the good student and made sure to read every chapter as assigned.

Of course, I fell in love with Easwaran’s sensible, clear writing, his humor, sincerity, and compassion for the reader. I’m sure many passage meditators can relate to this part! Each of the eight points made so much sense. Easwaran’s assurances that we can all find unshakable security, better health, stronger relationships, and most enchanting of all, more meaningful lives, pulled me in at the introduction.

Now For the Hard Part

Laura's meditation spot!

When Easwaran said, “Meditation is the greatest challenge on earth,” he was not kidding around. After discovering the 8PP, I embarked on a journey to make it a daily practice, a journey of self-discipline that continues today. As Easwaran predicts for new meditators, I had a great burst of enthusiasm at the beginning and meditated regularly for about a week. It was downhill from there for a while.

Keeping a regular practice in college can be difficult, because schedules are constantly shifting from semester to semester. I was never rising at the same time each day, and I was always staying up late studying or writing papers. But I kept trying. I would reread Passage Meditation, and my enthusiasm would be renewed for a while. I would have weeks of solid meditation, and weeks of no meditation. It was only after I graduated and entered the working world when finally something clicked. Easwaran asserts that nothing in life—not sleep, not work, not the pleasures of the day—is more important than daily mediation, and this thought struck a deep chord. I finally felt the sense of urgency he talked about. Also, for me, it was much easier to integrate morning meditation into my day once I had a set schedule that was more or less nine-to-five.

What I’ve learned from the process of starting a daily practice is just that—it’s a process. It took me the better part of two years from the day I opened Passage Mediation, and there have been many bumps along the road since then. I have a long way to go in my “desire for perfection” (St. Catherine), and my practice of all the points. But by reflecting on my journey to this moment, I remember that the spiritual journey just takes time, a dash of divine grace, and faith in the process.