A great time to meditate is at the beginning of your workday. Once you arrive at work, find a space to sit for 10 minutes; this also works for your office. Many people start their workday by checking email, but you take a few moments to focus, connect, and notice where you are before responding to external events.
Here is a 10-minute guided meditation to start your workday.
Beginning of Workday Meditation: 10-Minute Guided Practice to Focus
0:00 Guided 10-minute practice
10:10 How this practice helps you start your workday
11:35 Mindfulness skills developed
13:40 Letting go practice
Why meditating at the start of your workday is smart
Starting a meditation practice, like any new habit, takes effort. One of the best ways to build a habit is in small steps and treat them like experiments. If you can link the habit to an existing event, you’ll easily stick to it. The start of your workday is ideal because most of us arrive somewhere to start our work. It may be a home office or a physical space like an office, school, or warehouse. Your workday has a beginning. You can use that beginning as a prompt to practice.
Prompts are the invisible drivers of our lives. BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits
How this beginning-of-day guided meditation works
This meditation is a combination of two mindfulness techniques.
I learned from this Kundalini book the first exercise is a concentrated breathing exercise.
To do the exercise, inhale through the left nostril to the space between your eyebrows and exhale through the right. Then inhale through the right to the space between the eyebrows and exhale through the left. This is one round. As you inhale and exhale, imagine a triangle that starts from the top of your left upper lip to the space between your eyebrow and down again to your right upper lip. Do this 25 times.
I appreciate how this breathing technique brings together every sense of experience. You can “see” the triangle of movement. You can “hear” the counting and the breathing, and you can feel the breath. The instructions in my video suggest starting with 25 rounds. I do 100 rounds; sometimes, it takes me more than 10 minutes to complete the 100 rounds of breathing, though.
Guided meditation: Flow Focus
The second exercise is to move your attention from the breath to your body to detect any flow in your body. Flow refers to the ever-changing nature of our experience. In our bodies, it can feel like waves, vibrations, bubbling, something percolating, movement, or shifts. It might be subtle, or it might be strong.
You experienced flow in the first exercise when you watched your breath move from the entry of one nostril to the space between your eyebrows. And then from your eyebrows to your right nostril. The difference between noticing flow while you control your breath and scanning for it is letting go of control.
In the first exercise, you made the flow. In the second exercise, you look for it.
Flow can sometimes be hard to find. The benefit of practicing locating and soaking in flow is a softening of your rigid idea of yourself. We dig into that more if we see ourselves as solid and unchanging humans. We are less flexible at work. Anything that happens at work that threatens our solid idea of ourselves causes inner-tightening and negative reactions. When we can see that we’re always changing and experimenting with that feeling safely (like a short meditation), we start to relax. Over time, and with deeper practices, flow can start to dissolve the imaginary boundaries we hold fast to. This offers incredible relief to your life.
Career contentment experiment: how does this meditation support my work?
I recommend trying this meditation at the beginning of your workday for an entire week. When you arrive at work, do this short sequence. Throughout the day, track how it changes work for you. Notice and note if you find your actions are more in line with your values. Are you more patient? Are you more open to new ideas? Is there less tension?
Notice and see.
If you notice changes, great. Keep up this meditation practice for another few weeks. If you desire a new technique or have a specific work obstacle you’d like to overcome, send me a note, and we can discuss creating a custom program to meet your career contentment needs.
If you find there is no change. That’s great too. Try another technique and see what works. Come to this with a sense of experimentation. Trying this practice wasn’t a waste of time; you were still trained in concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity.
I want you to treat your life as your own personal “change lab” – a place to experiment with the person you want to be. A place where you not only feel safe but also feel like anything is possible. BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits
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