A Busy Person’s Guide to Meditation & Mindfulness

When I started running a business as a young, ambitious entrepreneur a few years ago, every day was full of worries and surprises. The days were long and I would often wonder if I was making any progress.

If I had an unpleasant meeting with a client or pressure from my investors, it would throw me off balance for hours. Before I knew it, my day was gone and I could not accomplish all of the things that I had planned to do.

Entrepreneurs need tools to be able to deal with these stresses to be effective in daily life. Paramhansa Yogananda, who was a great yoga master, taught many successful businessmen how to improve their powers of concentration, achieve more, and most importantly, remain peaceful and joyful through everything they encountered.

Yogananda would often tell his students to learn how to “be calmly active and actively calm.” This phrase perfectly describes what we need in today’s fast-paced life. Using techniques like meditation, we effectively learn how to calm ourselves and manage our stressors. We also need to bring that calmness into our daily activities to successfully discharge our duties.

Your Two Best Friends – Meditation & Mindfulness

The terms meditation and mindfulness are used interchangeably but do not exactly mean the same thing.

Nayaswami Jyotish, in his book Lessons in Meditation, defines meditation as a “state of intense awareness achieved by stilling and concentrating the thoughts.” We can reach our natural state of being—one of calmness and stillness—by unlearning the bad habits of restlessness, tension, and distraction. Once we learn how to still our minds and bodies, we can experience a higher reality —a reality that will forever elude us until we can reach that state that exists in each one of us that lies just beyond our five senses.

Mindfulness, on the other hand, refers to the awareness of the present moment in everything we do. It means letting go of the past, the future, our judgments, worries, and anxieties.

In order to achieve dynamic calmness in the midst of our daily activities, we would be wise to practice both  of these things. We can practice meditation every day and infuse our work with mindfulness to carry that peace with us wherever we go.

Mindfulness is one way that many entrepreneurs choose to combat the toll wrought by round-the-clock emails, long working hours, and other aspects of our accelerated business culture. – Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin Airlines

We often condition our happiness on our achievements as we continue to pursue our personal goals. I discovered that this is why I would be unhappy most of the time as a business owner;  my happiness depended on signing a deal or seeing a new user signing up for my software.

Over time, this made me hate coming to work because I was always delaying my happiness. I could never be truly content in the present moment.

Many founders that I have spoken to feel the same. They want to learn how they can set and achieve ambitious goals yet still be happy during the journey.

Meditation is the answer. In meditation, we train ourselves to focus on the present moment while banishing the thoughts of the past and future. We condition the mind to live in the present by doing this repeatedly. It is, after all, in the present moment that true happiness can be found.

Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself. –Paramhansa Yogananda

Meditation has a long list of benefits and if you are reading this article, you probably know them. If you don’t know where to begin, we can focus on that here:

In order to make meditation a part of your life, I like to simplify it into two aspects:

• Have a daily meditation practice
• Bring mindfulness into daily life

Let’s look at both of them:

The Practice of Meditation

You do not need to meditate for hours to start reaping the benefits of meditation. You can start with as little as five or ten minutes every day.

If you are a novice meditator, do your best to meditate every day, even if you can only manage to meditate a few minutes each time. A little meditation is always better than none at all. Once you make daily meditation a habit, you can begin to make your meditations longer and deeper. At that point, aim to meditate twice a day for 15 minutes or more.

It is best to meditate first thing in the morning before you get disturbed and distracted by the demands of the day and the outside world. Another good time to meditate is in the evening when you have completed your work for the day. Meditation is a great way to unwind, rejuvenate, and get ready for the end of the day and a good night’s sleep.

No matter what your schedule and daily routine are, do not skip meditation. If you cannot do it in the morning or in the evening, you can find some time during your day to meditate for a few minutes. Meditation can be done anytime and anywhere. Meditating every day and working to be consistent, is the most important aspect of building the habit and your meditation practice.

There are many meditation techniques available but I have found the ancient technique of Hong Sau to be simple and highly effective.

Through Hong-Sau your mind and breath become perfectly synchronized; it is as if they become forged into one razor-sharp sword that suddenly severs the inner fetters that were binding you. One hour of Hong-Sau equals 24 hours of prayer and meditation. – Paramhansa Yogananda

Hong Sau meditation is a technique that uses a mantra to help us focus the mind and breath. It has the power to lead us into deeper states of calm and stillness. This meditation was taught by Yoganada as a part of the path of Kriya Yoga. You can learn more about it from Ananda Sangha’s centers around the world or online.

Bringing Mindfulness into Daily Life

You may have a goal. Let’s say you want to lose weight. Would you then eat a salad in the morning but eat junk food all day long? No, right? The same is true for meditation.

You cannot just meditate for 10 minutes in the morning and then be distracted for 23+ hours for the rest of the time. Those few minutes of meditation will help you be more focused and calmer but you also need to exercise and train your powers of concentration during the day.

If you make a conscious effort throughout the day to be mindful in all you do, you will amplify the benefits that meditation practice brings.

So here are a few ways to bring mindfulness into your daily life.

 Micro Mindfulness – Living a Mindful Life

Many executives and entrepreneurs have taken refuge in what they call micro mindfulness –   the practice of taking short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. This cannot replace your formal meditation practice, but it can add to it.

The way to practice micro-mindfulness is simple. Every couple of hours, take time out from whatever you are doing to be mindful for a few minutes. This could mean doing a few breathing exercises, meditating for a few minutes, listening to uplifting music, or just taking a walk.

I find that scheduling these moments as alarms or reminders on my phone helps me to re-center myself, especially when I feel stressed. Yogananda often urged his disciples to stay in silence, get centered, and keep their minds fixed on the Divine.

We must uplift our consciousness so that even the most worldly duties are performed with the thought of God. -Paramhansa Yogananda

Mindful Walking

Sometimes when we sit to meditate, it becomes difficult to focus the mind and take our attention away from work or our other daily demands. Walking helps us to move our bodies – thus releasing feel-good chemicals in the brain. At the same time, by being intensely aware of our movements and surroundings, we learn to focus our attention.

Researchers have found that the mind is almost always thinking about the next 24-hour period. So, we never really experience what is in front of us. The exercise of mindful walking helps to reverse that tendency.

Walking is one of the most automatic actions we perform. While we are being mindful of our surroundings and the sensations of walking, we train ourselves to be mindful in the middle of activity. Your mind slowly transitions, as you continue walking in this manner (walking meditation), from restlessness to stillness.

One meta-analysis of 20 studies conducted through UMass Memorial Health found that walking meditation improves the psychological wellness of people suffering from illnesses like heart disease, depression, and even cancer.

We all can take five to ten minutes to get up from our desks and walk. It is a simple tool to refocus and rejuvenate the mind.

Mindful Eating

Mindful eating means enjoying everything you experience in those moments during a meal – the  tastes, feelings, emotions, hunger, satisfaction, and more.

We are often doing something else while we eat our food. What would happen if we stop this and bring our minds to the present moment of having a meal? We will feel calmer, more relaxed and learn when to stop eating!

While growing up in India, I would often be told to observe silence during meals. In fact, according to Ayurveda, our state of mind while eating affects the nutrient absorption from our food. If we are calm and relaxed, we will get much more energy from our food.

Do your best to ensure that your eating environment is clean, calm, and quiet. Avoid looking at electronic gadgets or talking too much while you eat. Bring your mind to the sensations you feel as you eat and be fully aware of them.

If practiced with sincerity, every meal can be an opportunity to re-center and calm ourselves and enjoy a few moments of quiet amid our chaotic lives.

Final Words

When wealth is lost, you have lost a little; when your health is lost, you have lost something; but when your peace is lost, all is lost.” -Paramhansa Yogananda

If you sacrifice inner peace at the cost of working more, it will be as if you were too busy to put fuel in your car . Eventually, that negligence will catch up with you—you will run out of energy and burn out.

No matter how busy we are, we can choose to live mindful lives. By meditating every day and developing ways to hold on to that meditative peace and calmness, we can learn to be more effective and relaxed at the same time.

You can make inner peace a priority no matter how busy your life may be. Meditation and mindfulness are valuable tickets to happiness. As the Bhagavad Gita puts it:

 Without peace how is happiness possible? (2:66)

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