Meditation makes us calmer, clearer, and relaxed. Meditation is reported to help blood vessels to open up and blood pressure to drop, making us healthier. And meditation is one of the easiest things we can do.
Meditation isn’t just for sitting cross-legged in a private sanctuary with running water and the surroundings of a zen garden. No. You can meditate in the least likely of places, such as a busy train station or while waiting for a flight. If you exist, you have got everything that you need to meditate!
Our lives have become very busy. And for the modern workaholic to meditate and relax, the office is often calmer than many other places. While the zen garden is a much better experience, there are lots of ways to get your meditation on, and lots of places that you can get micro doses of the same impact. Here are a few tips to get you started meditating in the office.
Routine is important if you want to make a long-term lifestyle change. Get in a rhythm. To do so, find a time that works best for you. Maybe this is right when you get into the office, or at 11am every day. Try to pick a time when people don’t often send you calendar invitations, and make your own entry in the calendar for meditation.
Be present. To gradually start meditating, focus on the ‘present’ when you sit in the office. What is ‘present’? Well, present is the work environment, scenery from your room, your bookshelf and most importantly, yourself! Start by aligning your meditation with your breathing cycles. In every breathing cycle, there is inhalation and exhalation. Focus on each cycle and your situation. Try not to alter your breathing; just let the tides move you and feel everything without being judgmental.
Close your eyes. No, don’t fall asleep. But if you set a timer for a couple of minutes, you can close your eyes, which helps to focus on the present, and without all that input, you can usually focus on breathing in ways you can’t otherwise do.
Add another meditation. Once you practice meditating for a few days, it will start to become habit, and you would not have to ‘struggle’ with it. However, just morning meditation is not enough because the upcoming day is hectic; and pretty much is every day. So if you want to be more productive and relaxed throughout the day, you meditate recursively.
Time management is the key to huge gains in productivity. For instance, if you are handling loads of work in a day, then you should set alarms on your phone to alert you to meditate after every hour; Apple does something similar with their Breathe app on the Apple Watch. Once every hour, stop whatever you are doing and focus on yourself. Spend a little time to indulge yourself in your own existence.
Meditate socially. If you have some colleagues in the workplace who also meditate in the office, you can team up with them and meditate on a daily basis at a mutually agreed time. If this is not possible, then you could also get up from your chair after regular intervals (let’s say 60 minutes) and move around. Provided that your office offers the luxury of sitting alone in a quiet environment, avail that opportunity and change your place of meditation.
Breathe. Another method that I use in the office is to just close my eyes and focus on breathing in one nostril and out the other. Do this in alternates to explore more about how your body reacts to different forms of breathing. Practice big breaths and the difference between those and your normal cycles of breathing.
Posture. While you likely can’t sit on a yoga block with your legs crossed, you can sit up, sit straight, and let your chest expand. By opening your chest, you will usually find deeper breaths as well as any a gentle tightening of the core muscles.
When you start practicing this routine, it will become an integral part of your lifestyle, and you will automatically feel the need to meditate at regular intervals on a daily basis. Meditating will make you more serene, and less gloomy. You just have to feel your presence and the environment around you without categorizing it as bad or good. Doing so will allow you to be more effective with the tasks you undertake and more deliberate in your actions.