Moti the puppy had decided that sitting still was the most boring idea in the whole world.

Ravi was trying to teach him to stay on the mat by the doorway. "Sit, Moti. Stay." And Moti would sit — for exactly two seconds — and then bolt: after a butterfly, after a smell, after a chicken, after nothing at all, his little paws skittering on the smooth mud floor. Ravi would sigh, scoop him up, and set him back on the mat. Two seconds later, off he went again.

"He'll NEVER learn," Ravi groaned, plopping down beside Nani as Moti chased his own tail across the courtyard. "I bring him back a hundred times and he runs off a hundred and one."

Nani was grinding turmeric for her paints, the yellow powder bright as morning. She did not look up. "And what do you do," she asked, "the hundred-and-first time?"

Ravi shrugged. "I bring him back again, I suppose."

"Do you shout at him? Do you give up?"

"No," said Ravi. "He's only little. He doesn't know yet. I just... bring him back. Gently. Again."

Nani set down her grinding stone and smiled the slow smile that meant a lesson was coming.

"Ravi, your mind is exactly like Moti. When you sit to be quiet, your mind sits still for two seconds — and then it bolts. To the river. To dinner. To that game you lost. To Moti himself! And here is the whole secret of meditation, the thing the great sages spent their lives learning: you do for your mind exactly what you do for your puppy."

She touched his forehead lightly. "Wherever it runs off to — and it will run off, a hundred times, a thousand — you simply notice, and gently bring it back. Back to your breath. Back to the quiet place inside. No shouting. No giving up. The mind is only little and untrained, like Moti. It doesn't know yet."

Ravi looked over at the puppy, who had finally flopped down, panting and pleased, right in the middle of the mat. Just where Ravi had wanted him all along.

"So every time I bring it back," Ravi said slowly, "I'm training it. Even the hundredth time."

"Especially the hundredth time," said Nani. "That is the whole practice. Bringing it back, gently, is not the thing that gets in the way of meditation. It *is* the meditation."