Our Summer Spiritual Olympics ’08 continues – and we have superb air quality. At our Olympics, the main event is not track and field, but meditation.

Today, as yesterday, the morning began for many of us with an hour-long meditation session, followed by Swami Veda’s lecture about meditation. To those more inclined to attend the lectures, Swami Veda pointed out this is like attending many lectures on tea without drinking a cup. “What kind of tea party would that be?”

An hour-long meditation is a challenge for many of us who have not sat for so long before. We have never trained our minds to follow a single track. At first we sit and flit from thought to thought. We think of stuff we’ve got to do, stuff we forgot to do, food we’re going to eat, food we’re sorry we ate, things we need to tell people, and things we wish we hadn’t ever said. Sometimes we think, “Look at me, I’m meditating!” Though of course we’re not. But after a while – and perhaps because we are in the presence of a master – our minds calm. We feel a lightness of being. We are, for at least a little while, at peace.

“What is meditation for?” Swami Veda asks us afterward.“ It gives you a pleasant life,” he says, “because it makes your mind a pleasant place.” He asks us to picture our minds. How do we want them to be, clear or foggy? If our minds had an aroma, would it fragrant, or not? Meditation is like a shower for the mind, he says, like the mind’s deodorant. The mind takes on the form of what it encounters; let it encounter the gentle rhythm of breath and it will be gentle and stable.

Not all of us will fit lengthy meditations into our lives each day, but whether we do or don’t, Swami Veda recommends two-minute meditations every few hours. He advises us to relax the forehead, feel the touch of the breath in the nostrils, eliminate the pause between breaths and recite a mantra or favorite name for the Divine, or simply the words “one, two” with each inhalation and exhalation. This, he says, breaks he mind’s habits of tension. I like to think of it as a reboot.

So, wherever you are (and we wish you were here!) won’t you try this with us? Click on “comments” and let us know how it’s going. Hold us in our good thoughts as we hold you in ours. See you tomorrow.