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4 Ways to Incorporate Meditation Into Your Meeting

Lodro Rinzler — co-founder and chief spiritual officer of New York City’s MNDFL studio, and founder of the Institute for Compassionate Leadership — offers some guidelines.

Meditation1. Use an expert. “I was talking with another meditation teacher the other day, and she said, ‘You wouldn’t necessarily say, “Hey, let’s do some yoga. I invented these stretches.”’ Because that would actually hurt someone. There’s a million apps [for meditation] out there these days, but you should use trained instructors that come in person to guide people, at least at first, until they learn how to do it on their own.”

2. Understand where you are. “There’s a particular environment that’s created at work. When you might sit down to meditate, even if you’re with a supportive group, you’re sitting, for example, at a boardroom table, and what normally happens at the boardroom table is that you have a lot of really intense meetings. You walk into an environment that you already have a certain habitual way of relating to. You have an expectation of what will happen. Then you say, ‘Okay, everyone — relax,’ and it’s hard to do.”

3. Start small. “I would generally recommend just doing 10 minutes a day for anyone to start. That’s at home, at work, wherever. Ten minutes a day, believe it or not, actually does have a restful influence on the mind. All of these studies that have been done, it’s 20 minutes a day, but even 10 minutes actually starts to rewire the brain so that we’re less held by stress and we’re actually more able to be present for the best of our life.”

4. Mix it up. “There are many different types of meditation out there. There’s meditating on an object, like you might meditate on a breath, on a mantra, on sound. Then there’s contemplation, where you might use your mind in a more exploratory way to work through or analyze a particular concept. Then there’s visualization, where you might bring to mind images of people that you love or people that you have a hard time with and try to open up to them. I often recommend that people try a variety of types of meditation before they settle on just doing one thing. It’s best to explore around and find what works for you, and then go deep with that particular thing.”.

Christopher Durso

Christopher Durso formerly was executive editor of Convene.