I’ve returned to Singapore and this evening I went to a meditation class with my friend Yolande. She’s really into meditating and was keen for me to try it out, so we went to a ‘mindful meditation’ class in Chinatown.

I’ve traveled with Yolande to some faraway places in the world, but oddly enough it was quite hard for me to get on the train to tranquility. Despite the excellent guidance from the teacher who encouraged us to ‘label our distractions and set them aside,’ I wasn’t really able to get to a place in my mind that felt worthy of being called ‘mindful meditation.’

I suspect this is merely a question of practice. We could all do with a lot more moments of mindfulness and time to unplug from our deeply digital existence. Personally, I’ve been a long time practitioner of ‘beditation’ – the practice of not leaping out of bed the moment you wake up, but instead staying in bed for as long as you can, sometimes lapsing into a creative state of mind (sometimes incorrectly referred to as sleep). Now skeptics have called this ‘dozing’ or even ‘laziness,’ but it’s beditation, and I won’t hear anything to the contrary!