Meditation in your workplace
Meditation Solutions offers workplace training in meditation a wide range of workplace settings – just look at our list of valued clients:
Employees will value and remain committed to a workplace that supports both their physical and mental health.
Meditation and Mental Health
The mental health of a workforce may well be the most important aspect of any business or organisation. Employees support clients, and if your employees are not feeling supported, they will have very little to give. A high-stress work culture is at risk of becoming toxic and will not appeal to your prospective clients. Running a busy and profitable business doesn’t have to equate to high stress levels, and when workloads are at their peak, the emotional intelligence strengths of resilience, patience and emotional self-regulation are most needed, to reduce tension in the office and avoid burnout in your staff.
Meditation practice teaches us these vital strategies. Through meditation, we can learn to attend to the required tasks of a busy role and yet stay focused and calm. We can effectively raise our ‘coping threshold’ so that we can more easily maintain patience and presence of mind.
Meditation is an individual practice that has a collective effect
Group practice has a multiplier effect: meditators in groups often report that they feel less alone and more connected to others, enhancing cohesion and team spirit. Their practice feels deeper and taps into a more profound calm than they are capable of experiencing on their own.
Meditation in your workplace teaches your staff new strategies to deal with stress
As a society and as a workforce, we have never been busier. It seems that the technology that was designed to set us free has ‘chained us to the office’, as we now carry our work with us everywhere, literally (our devices) and psychologically. This can be a heavy burden, eroding employee wellbeing. The solution is to find ways to manage stress.
Meditation practice –
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- develops the ability to relax and reduce stress at will
- maintains and improves our health and resilience and
- enhances our capacity to focus, concentrate (sustain attention) and make better decisions, even in difficult circumstances
What happens when we meditate?
Meditation trains our minds while also being a structured form of rest. It turns on the relaxation response, addressing the body’s physiological response to stress and changing our body chemistry for the better. When we meditate we lower our levels of arousal and our body produces less stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol. Chronically high levels of these stress hormones can have an adverse affect on the physiology of your employees, downgrading their wellbeing and therefore negatively impacting the productivity and health of your workplace.
Meditation can enhance productivity by literally changing your brain!
A study conducted by Harvard researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) determined that meditation literally rebuilds the brain’s grey matter in just eight weeks. It was the very first study to document these changes.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging showed increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Research in this area is continuing to investigate how meditation facilitates this deep change in the physiology of the brain.
These are exciting results and further demonstrate the value of regular workplace meditation practice.
Talk to Meditation Solutions now about how we can bring the benefits of meditation to your workplace.
Here are our two most popular workplace training offerings:
This workshop provides a short introduction to meditation, delivered in a single session of 45 – 90 min.
The workshop includes definitions of meditation, a description of some of its uses and benefits and a discussion of postures that can be used for meditation practice, followed by a mix of longer guided meditations of about 15 – 25 min and short practices of 1 – 5 min, with time for questions and discussion at the end of each meditation.
Gain valuable skills in mindfulness, relaxation and stress reduction in this program of 5-8 weekly classes (30min-1hr) of guided meditations, using mindfulness of sounds, breathing and body sensations.
Each class contains a description of the meditation practice to be used, followed by a guided meditation and time for discussion and questions.