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We are all given work here, and it turns out that my work assignment is to scrub the temple
floors. So that’s where you can find me for several hours a day now—down on my knees on
the cold marble with a brush and a bucket, working away like a fairy-tale stepsister. (By the
way, I’m aware of the metaphor—the scrubbing clean of the temple that is my heart, the pol-
ishing of my soul, the everyday mundane effort that must be applied to spiritual practice in or-
der to purify the self, etc., etc.)
My fellow floor-scrubbers are mainly a bunch of Indian teenagers. They always give teen-
agers this job because it requires high physical energy but not enormous reserves of respons-
ibility; there’s a limit to how much damage you can do if you mess up. I like my coworkers.
The girls are fluttery little butterflies who seem so much younger than American eight-
een-year-old girls, and the boys are serious little autocrats who seem so much older than
American eighteen-year-old boys. Nobody’s supposed to talk in the temples, but these are
teenagers, so there’s a constant chatter going on all the time as we’re working. It’s not all idle
gossip. One of the boys spends all day scrubbing beside me, lecturing me earnestly on how
to best perform my work here: “Take seriously. Make punctual. Be cool and easy. Remem-
ber—everything you do, you do for God. And everything God does, He do for you.”
It’s tiring physical labor, but my daily hours of work are considerably easier than my daily
hours of meditation. The truth is, I don’t think I’m good at meditation. I know I’m out of practice
with it, but honestly I was never good at it. I can’t seem to get my mind to hold still. I men-
tioned this once to an Indian monk, and he said, “It’s a pity you’re the only person in the his-
tory of the world who ever had this problem.” Then the monk quoted to me from the Bhagavad
Gita, the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: “Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong
and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind.”
Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga. Meditation is the way. There’s a dif-
ference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communion with the di-
vine. I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of
listening. Take a wild guess as to which comes easier for me. I can prattle away to God about
all my feelings and my problems all the livelong day, but when it comes time to descend into