Love Your Work, Episode 18 – 2-Minute Meditation (Guided)

March 26 2016 – 04:01pm

Lots of people beat themselves up for not being able to meditate. I think they’re too hard on themselves. If you can simply make a habit of meditating 2 minutes a day, you can begin to enjoy meditation to the point where you’re ready to do longer sessions.

I have little formal meditation training, but this 2-minute meditation is roughly how I do my sessions. Part of it is rooted in what I know of mindfulness meditation, and, from what I’ve heard of Vipassana meditation, may have some influences from that as well.

I started meditating about 10 years ago, off and on, and have “practiced” regularly for about 5 years. Progress has been very slow, but grew more profound as I grew more disciplined about doing it regularly. Meditation has helped me eliminate anxiety, and think more deeply and clearly about whatever I face in work in life. I now relish sessions that are sometimes longer than 90 minutes!

There’s one BIG limitation about presenting a guided meditation as a podcast: It makes you likely to meditate using a device that is also full of distractions. If you have a device on which to play this file that isn’t going to distract you with a notification – either while meditating, or while glancing at the screen afterward – I highly recommend that. It might be an iPod, or I use my iPad, because I don’t allow notifications on it. If you don’t have anything like this ready to go, don’t let that prevent you from trying it out! Try putting your device in airplane mode, instead.

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This 2-minute format is inspired by my 10-Minute Hack, the idea being that, by setting an absurdly simple goal for yourself, you can “trick” yourself into doing more than you originally set out to do.