You can rest your hands in your lap. The most important thing is that you find a position that you can stay in for a while.

Meditation is a highly personal activity, with everyone finding their best own way to practice. Some find guided meditations to be useful, especially when starting out, to help focus their attention.

Meditation has proven benefits, but the style that works best depends on a person's habits and preferences. In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore walking meditation, a powerful practice for feeling more centered and grounded. Dan Harris, host of the award-winning 10% Happier podcast, shares how walking meditation helps him manage the residual stress and anxiety from years of war reporting and high-pressure TV anchoring.

Instead, try this: When you wake up, spend two minutes in your bed simply noticing your breath. As thoughts about the day pop into your mind, let them go and return to your breath.

Continue like this for two minutes. Noticing the breath moving into your body on the inhale, and leaving your body on the exhale.

For example, drug addictions, at heart, come about because of physiological cravings for a substance that relieves people temporarily from their psychological suffering. Mindfulness can be a useful adjunct to addiction treatment by helping people better understand and tolerate their cravings, potentially helping them to avoid relapse after they’ve been safely weaned off of drugs or alcohol. The same is true for people struggling with overeating.

We’ll get started together. Then by the end of this article, we’ll be more familiar with how to meditate and be ready to practice on our own.

As the day moves on and the inevitable back-to-back tibetan healing sounds meetings start, mindfulness can help you lead shorter, more effective meetings. To avoid entering a meeting with a wandering mind, take two minutes to practice mindfulness.

The researchers write that in the future, interventions could place a more explicit focus on approaching relationships with mindfulness. This focus could reinforce the benefit of MBCT, and perhaps lead to even better outcomes in reducing the risk of relapse for people with chronic depression.

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But meditation is more like sleep. The harder we try to sleep, sometimes the harder it is to drift off. When we sit to meditate, if we try hard to empty the mind, it tends to feel full.

Loving-kindness meditation, which the GGSC’s Christine Carter explains in this post, involves extending feelings of compassion toward people, starting with yourself then branching out to someone close deep healing music to you, then to an acquaintance, then to someone giving you a hard time, then finally to all beings everywhere.

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

You’ll be surprised how fast it goes by. Add a minute or two with each successive session until you find the ideal relaxing sounds duration for your daily practice.