Have you ever considered beyond your daily or weekly routines that you might need something else to make your life complete? Do you feel you need to put all of your ducks in a row and you need to find that piece inside of you to frame it all to make sense? A technique used all over the world to reach this inner knowing is the practice of meditation.
Meditating is deceptively simple. Don’t you just close your eyes and clear your mind? How do you focus on a moment? Believe it or not, you can with some practice.
In a National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) conducted by the NIH’s NCCIH (Nat’l Center for Complementary & Alternative Health) reported in 2017, reveals 9.9% of the US population (21+ million) practice meditation and is one of the most used mind and body practices in the country. Meditation has been shown to improve employee well-being and productivity in the workplace. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) journal, Preventing Chronic Disease, “Approximately 1 in 7 workers report engagement in some form of mindfulness-based activity, and these individuals can bring awareness of the benefit of such practices into the workplace.”
The health and psychological benefits of mindfulness meditation are well documented. In a 2012 study by the University of Washington at Seattle, human resources (HR) workers who had an 8-week mindfulness meditation training course were found to be more focused and to have a less negative attitude towards work than a trial group who had been on an 8-week relaxation training course.
There are also studies that show the benefits of guided meditation. Practicing guided meditation allows our thoughts and perceptions about our lives to shape the chemical pathways and cells in our brain to make them more neuroplastic so they can actually be reshaped. This is proven to help handle stress more skillfully and train the brain to be more optimistic and take on a “positive thinking” environment to look at the world in a more hopeful way.
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Copyright © 2017 by Kimberly Schwender
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