I med­i­tated today for a par­tic­u­lar rea­son: to relax. I fit­ted in just under 15 min­utes in between fin­ish­ing din­ner and head­ing off to the BBC for my first TV shoot. And very likely my last — I’m not in the habit of doing inter­views, but the regional BBC team needed a local pho­tog­ra­pher to talk about snap­ping pics of light­ning, for a one-off pro­gramme about local weather.

And I think those min­utes of med­i­ta­tion helped. It’s a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing to be flung into a room with a cam­era­man and a pre­sen­ter, both sea­soned pros — the pre­sen­ter, espe­cially, could just switch on and off the “to cam­era” per­sona, and would hap­pily smile engag­ingly at empty air, where I would have been if we’d actu­ally been hav­ing the whole con­ver­sa­tion, rather than shoot­ing it in two halves, to be edited together later…

But yes, I didn’t feel too pan­icked, and I think I did okay (though I’m not sure I want to see the results!)

And I think, with­out the med­i­ta­tion — not just today, but for the last few weeks — I would have been a lot more jit­tery, wor­ried and hot under the collar.

So, maybe I should spend some time this week think­ing about and jour­nalling my pri­mary rea­sons for med­i­ta­tion, apart from relax­ing myself before TV pro­grammes. It might help me define my pur­pose bet­ter, and head in the right direc­tion more effectively.