Walking meditation, where you focus on the movement of your body as you take step after step, your feet touching and leaving the ground—an everyday activity we usually take for granted.

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In many organizations, there are bigger, systemic changes that need to be made, but I don’t think that instituting a mindfulness program will prevent those changes from happening. At the least, a mindfulness program provides workers with some relief from stress and anxiety while they campaign for systemic changes; at best, it helps to catalyze those bigger systemic changes.

When the timer rings, cease your current activity and do one minute of mindfulness practice. These mindful performance breaks will help keep you from resorting to autopilot and lapsing into action addiction.

The best way to to set ourselves up to keep meditating is knowing our intention. Why do we want to meditate? Being clear about what we want to get out of our practice — whether it’s to feel happier, feel calmer, be more focused, or be less stressed — will be a big help in creating the right attitude going into it.

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Meditating after a large meal—and certainly after drinking alcohol—can make you feel sleepy, which isn’t ideal. The goal is to stay alert during your practice.

A visualization meditation that harnesses the image of a mountain to guide us into awareness of our own steady, still nature beyond the thinking mind.

This exercise is often practiced walking back and forth along a path 10 paces long, though it can be practiced along most any path.

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Those who took the mindfulness program showed significant improvements on the six-minute walking test (a measure of cardiovascular capacity) and slower heart rates than those in the waitlist group.

The Headspace app has hundreds of guided exercises to help you build your practice. Start by searching these three meditations to help you start a meditation practice. A happier, healthier you is a few breaths away.

If you’re interested in more formal training, here are some successful programs for cultivating mindfulness that we’ve identified..

It’s not surprising that meditation would affect attention, since many practices focus on this very skill. And, deep healing music in fact, researchers have found that meditation helps to counter habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve our ability to solve problems. There’s more good news: Studies have shown that improved attention seems to last up to five years after mindfulness training, again suggesting trait-like changes are possible.