Clare Graham: The daily commute to and from work can make anyone stressed.

Especially if you work in Sydney or Newcastle, adding an extra three or so hours to each working day.

And that’s not including lengthy train delays and unexpected track work.

But meditation expert Alison Jose believes she has the perfect way of finding peace within your inner commuter self.

Ms Jose has been meditating for 10 years and a commuter for even longer, so she knows all about the benefits of relaxing the mind and and body every day.

Her new Commuter Meditation Classes are now being …

Read the rest of this article…

News reporting on meditation is always going to be a mixed bag, with practical and serious articles interspersed with pieces in a more flippant mood. The latter style is perfectly exemplified by an extraordinarily silly column by Denise Malloy of Montana’s Bozeman Chronicle. In “Monkeying Around with Meditation” Malloy tells us that five minutes of meditation (done by following instructions from a book) was enough to make her skeptical about the proven health benefits of meditation, as well as its potential to bring about inner peace. To be fair, the writer’s tone tends more toward self-mockery than to mockery of meditation itself. But her article made me want to send her a meditation CD.

And then there are the stories …

Collectively we’re spending longer and longer commuting: The average American takes around 30 minutes to get to work, and in large cities the drive can take much longer. In rural areas commuting can also eat up the miles and hours: I know two Buddhists in New England who each drive 1000 miles (1600km) per week.

Even without those extremes, commuting makes for a lot of time spent in cars, trains, buses, and even for some people airplanes. It’s not always pleasant time either; stop-go traffic is increasingly common, public transport can be crowded and unreliable, civility seems to be on the decline, and the term “road rage” has entered our lexicon as …