My cousin is a pastor in a progressive Baptist church in town. They have summer camp for the neighborhood kids where they learn to love reading. And there are some bible lessons.

And there are some creativity and skill classes, too. They asked me to teach the kids a short little lesson about meditation. I thought that would be lots of fun.

I decided immediately we should make mala beads.

Mala beads are from India.They are used in counted chants and meditation. In traditional malas, there will be 108 beads and then one special bead at the end that is not counted that marks the beginning and ending spot where you turn around.

One of the ways yoga and meditation and massage could be described would be that they are all conscious cultivation of a better relationship with your own nervous system. 

Get on your yoga mat, you will sweat and breathe and move and align your nervous system in that hour.  Sit on your meditation cushion and you will close your eyes and breathe and still your focus inside your own body at your center point for that hour.  Get on the massage table and you will relax and release hormones that are aimed at feeling better and repairing your system as a whole.

Now that man spread a lot of light while he was here on earth.

I have laughed so hard at things Robin Williams said that I have had water come out my nose.  He made the Vietnam war a topic that could be approached through his healing gift of comedy and his great love for humanity.

He did some amazing things with the spotlight he had on his life.  Having a spotlight on your life all the time cannot be fun or easy. 

I do not know what his mental health status was.  But he seems bipolar to me.

I sometimes get into astrology.  Every ten years or so, I start reexamining it.  This is one of those years. 

A week or two ago, I pulled up my natal chart showing the position of the planets in the sky overhead the moment I was born. There were the same patterns I have seen so many times in my life.  I got a book on the houses and I started reading about the placement of the planets in my chart.

One thing that was fascinating to me was that my chart said that a key elder would appear to me and help to guide me to become the person I want to be.

One thing I love about yoga and meditation is how wonderful their traditions are around learning to be intentional in life.  I have learned so much in these past four and a half years since I started making yoga and meditation big parts of my life.

I think it is good to have a mission statement.  It makes the journey easier to navigate.  It is so easy to lose our way on earth.  We all make missteps.  We all take wrong turns.  But when there is a mission statement, it is easy to refer to it and ask, "Is this furthering my mission?

My meditation group meets weekly and brings together all sorts of varied characters.  One of these characters is my pal, Karl Rosenblum.  He is a meditator and an engineer. He blogs about it athttp://karlrosenblum.com/blog/meditate/, so if you like his post, surf on over and check out his site.

He is today's guest blogger.

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  I have the worst possible mind for meditating. Not only is my brain working overtime on ideas and next steps on everything from work, yard projects, family and blogging, but my job as a strategic planner for a manufacturing company, has me looking out in intervals of 2, 5 and 10 years in the future.

I was headed to teach my little ESL class a few weeks ago at the Buddhist Meditation Center.  I was driving in five o'clock traffic and I was running late.  Traffic in Atlanta can be truly terrible.  And it was.

As I exited the superhighway (12 lanes across), a man in a fast car cut me off and zipped past me, honking his horn. 

I have only been late to meet with the monk once, and it is very bad form.  I understand the importance of being on time for that meeting.  I felt lots of pressure to be on time.

This day had some nice parts to it.  I talked before about my chart with the Y for yoga and the M for meditation.  I have been working diligently to get those letters most days.  I spend fifteen minutes sometime in the day in meditation and I attend a yoga class most days of the week.  One unintended benefit of this more rigorous yoga practice is that I got an invitation from a cool yogi friend out to brunch today. 

One of the reasons I try to put myself into healthy situations and do healthy things is that I meet others who are doing the same thing.