Training the Senses

Easwaran taught this as a steady discipline of conscious intake, with one sharp exercise at its heart:

1. Choose consciously what you let in. Treat what you watch, read, listen to, eat, drink and talk about as decisions, not defaults. Ask: is this nourishing or just craved? Easwaran extended “diet” to the whole sensory diet — media and conversation included.
2. Favour what genuinely nourishes. Learn to enjoy what is wholesome and beneficial. Over time the palate (for food, for media, for company) re-trains toward what actually fulfils rather than what merely stimulates.
3. Occasionally go against a strong like. The core exercise: now and then, deliberately decline something you crave — not always, not punitively, but enough to keep the choice yours. Easwaran’s test of freedom is being able to say no to a like; if you can’t, the like owns you.
4. Occasionally go against a dislike. The mirror exercise: sometimes do, eat, or attend to something you’d normally avoid (a wholesome food you “don’t like”, a task you resist), again to loosen aversion’s grip. Likes and dislikes are both forms of bondage.
5. Use the mantram at the point of craving. When a strong urge rises, repeat the mantram to create a gap between impulse and action — riding out the urge rather than obeying it automatically.
6. Aim at freedom, not deprivation. The goal is never asceticism for its own sake. It is to act from choice. When the compulsion has loosened, you can enjoy the good things fully and set them down at will. (Sourcing note: “free the mind from the tyranny of likes and dislikes / live in freedom” and “make conscious choices in what you watch, read, listen to, eat, drink and talk about” are Easwaran’s own framing of the fifth point, documented at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. The “go against a like / against a dislike” exercise is his characteristic teaching, drawn from his Gita commentary. Faithful paraphrase, not direct quotation.)

Eknath Easwaran (1910–1999) made Training the Senses the fifth of his eight points (Meditation / Passage Meditation) and developed it at length in his three-volume commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, whose teaching on the senses — that the wise neither indulge nor brutally repress them but master them — is its direct source.

The Gita’s image of senses as horses the charioteer (the discerning self) must rein lies behind Easwaran’s whole framing. → originator file under. Sources: [BMCM, The Eight-Point Program](https://www.bmcm.org/learn/eight-point/); [Passage Meditation — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_Meditation).

Bhagavad Gita / yoga (indriya-nigraha) — mastery (not suppression) of the senses; Easwaran’s direct root.

• Buddhist sense-restraint (indriya-samvara) — guarding the sense-doors against compulsive reaction.
• Stoic discipline of desire — training assent so cravings and aversions don’t dictate action.
• Urge-surfing (Marlatt; modern CBT/MBRP) — the clinical descendant: observing and riding out a craving rather than acting on it.
• Fasting / Lenten disciplines — periodic going-against-a-like to reclaim freedom from appetite.
• Mantram (Easwaran’s second point) — the tool used at the point of craving.

Turning it into punishment or asceticism. Easwaran’s aim is freedom and fuller enjoyment, not self-denial. Grim deprivation misses the point and rarely lasts.

• Going against every like. The exercise is occasional and chosen, not constant white-knuckling — which exhausts willpower and backfires.
• Forgetting the dislikes. People fixate on resisting cravings and ignore that aversions bind equally. Both need loosening.
• Pure willpower with no tool. Use the mantram / urge-gap and change your environment (don’t keep the craved thing in sight); brute resistance fails.
• Ignoring the media/conversation diet. Easwaran explicitly included what you watch, read and talk about — not just food. The information diet is half the practice.