Meditation 101: Coming to a Campus Near You

Somehow, of all the habits one could pick up while in college -- living on pizza and ramen noodles, sleeping few and odd hours, drowning one's sorrows in the free flow of a keg -- I got hooked on something entirely different: meditation.

During my sophomore year, I serendipitously became involved with a new interfaith project at Georgetown University called the John Main Center. Named after a Benedictine monk who, in the late 1970s, helped to reignite the practice of meditation within the Catholic tradition, the center was established to bring together individuals of various faith traditions to share in the practice of silent meditation.

My only notion of meditation up to that point in my life was essentially the image of an ascetic, bearded Yogi, chanting in a lotus position atop a mountain in India. Could it work for me?

Figuring that college is all about experimentation, I agreed to sign on in 2005 as one of four student directors. In exchange for the sweet deal of living in housing normally reserved for upperclassmen, we agreed to facilitate the twice-daily meditations and periodically plan special events at the center. (MORE)