Are you burned out and stressed? Perhaps meditation will help. This is a guest post from Tom Von Deck of www.DeeperMeditation.Net
Whether you work for yourself or for a company, stress is a productivity killer. In fact, it is estimated that stress costs USA businesses about $300 Billion per year in absenteeism, insurance claims, sick leave, illness, poor communication, low energy at work, office politics and more. If you do the math, that’s a couple thousand dollars per person per year.
Meditation is one of the best ways to truly go to the root of stress by making life much easier to process from moment to moment. However, many people try to beat stress with meditation techniques, then give up.
You may have even tried meditation as a form of stress relief and failed. This is not necessarily because meditation is not your thing. In fact, meditation is for everyone because it is your natural peaceful state of mind when you’re not resisting experience. Resisting experience means clinging to comfortable experience and pushing away undesirable experience.
The key to a successful meditation practice is compatibility. There are many teachers and centers out there pushing the “best” meditation technique. Maybe you tried some and found that they were not for you. Regardless, there is a technique for you.
The first step to beating stress with meditation is to find an “object of focus” that you find deep, loving absorption in. This is something constant or repetitive that you can fall in love with easily. Examples include the breath, a visualization of Jesus or Krishna, a line of a peaceful song, a mantra and images of a familiar waterfall. Once you find your object of focus, choose a consistent time each day to meditate on it. Fall in love with it. It does not matter how “deeply” you fall in love. Your capacity for concentration will rise and fall in the short run and expand in the long run.
When thoughts come up, just take note of them like they are clouds and you are the sky. Practice observing thought and emotion in a detached manner. Then bring your attention back to the object of focus. This builds equanimity and reduces stress.
Meditating at the same time every day builds a momentum of peace behind the scenes regardless of the amount of time you spend doing it. If you’re busy, 5-10 minutes is ok. If you can aim for an hour, even better. Keep that consistency going and it will have a cumulative effect that greatly banishes stress from your life.
Another momentum builder is the wise use of “elevator time”. You have 20 seconds in an elevator to do whatever you wish. Why not do those yoga stretches, conscious breathing, spiritual song, gratitude work, prayer, etc? You know what “turns you on” on a deep level. Do those things regardless of the abundance or lack of immediate results. You will notice profound results in time.
If you properly follow this advice and develop a solid meditation program that slips into your time schedule, then stress will easily roll off of you and productivity will soar.
Tom Von Deck is an internationally available workplace meditation trainer, stress management speaker and author of Oceanic Mind – The Deeper Meditation Training Course and The Deeper Meditation Audio Course. His website is www.DeeperMeditation.Net
