You meditate to meditate - that's the key message from today's video. Indeed, that's the message from millenia of practice and teaching. The same message comes from the University of Massachussets: although meditation forms a key part of their strategy for the management of stress, you don't meditate to reduce stress - to do so would be to focus on the stress - you meditate to meditate. Meditating gets rid of the stress.

Meditation is mental training - a specialist machine, just like a treadmill, a rowing machine, a leg- or bench-press - that enables you get your mind fit for purpose: the purpose being to live life to the full, effortlessly, here and now, no holds barred. If you don't take the trouble to do the necessary mental exercising, your mind will not be fit for purpose - it will only operate in its automatic mode, fit to make it through the day - which was "fit for purpose" ten thousand years ago. But not today.

Fit for purpose means that you can bring your highly focuse mind to bear on what you are doing right now. In the cut and thrust of your daily life, your focus in the present moment is informed by what you want to get out of the present moment. In other words, you're doing what you're doing now with a purpose or end in mind. It's what I call purposeful focus.

So, whilst you meditate seeking nothing, whilst you meditate to simply meditate, your meditation, which enables your mind be fit for purpose, will enable you do what you're doing now with a very clear expectation in mind - the outcome or goal that you desire. Or, better again, the outcome that is best for you - which is, generally speaking, better than our ordinary little minds could envisage.

The shops are full or compost, fertiliser, bedding plants. Our neighbour opposite has just got his annual tractor load of manure... it will be a day or two before we venture to have a coffee on the terrace!

Everyone is digging, weeding, preparing to sow this Summer's crop of goodies... including another one of our neighbours who religiously plants and tends courgettes, cabbage, lettuce, carrots and tomatoes every year. They're looked after with loving care, watered, weeded, fertilized...

And, no doubt, this year will be no different from each year past. As the Summer progresses into Autumn, all her lovely vegetables will mature and rot on the plant, in the ground... she never eats any of them!

I never ask but often wonder why she goes through the motions... perhaps all her hard work is food for the soul!