Micro Meditations You Can Do at Your Desk: 10 Simple Practices
You meditate in the morning and start your day with awareness. But then the workday starts. With all of the meetings, emails, deadlines, and interaction with coworkers, the mindfulness seems to disappear. As the day goes on, we fall more and more into autopilot. This is a normal experience many of us have regularly.
In order to meditate we don’t need a quiet room, 30 minutes, and a meditation bell. Micro meditations are opportunities to pause and reconnect with awareness. Just stopping for 30 seconds or a minute throughout the day can help you find continuity of awareness and more mindfulness throughout the day.
The Power of Micro-Meditations
If you already know my practice style, it will not be a surprise that I’m a big fan of micro-meditations at your desk. I recently wrote on One Mind Dharma about the importance of continuity and consistency. Finding ways to practice outside of formal sitting practice is one of the most powerful things we can do for the development of mindfulness.
Whenever I begin talking mindfulness for beginners with people, I discuss the importance of cultivating mindfulness in our everyday lives. Even if we sit for an hour every morning, our practice doesn’t serve us if we just leave it on the cushion. We need to bring our practice into everyday situations like work.
Micro-meditations can be useful in encouraging this continuity of mindfulness. We train the mind to incline toward awareness, and eventually awareness comes more naturally. Over time, we find moments of mindfulness arising without volitional intention. We learn to live in the moment more easily and awareness becomes much more accessible.
Additionally, these micro-meditations can help calm both the mind and body. As we get going on autopilot, we may speed up or get activated. This often pulls us away from awareness. Little moments of mindfulness at work can help us return to presence, find some ease in the mind and body, and give us a moment of relief from that autopilot.
10 Micro Meditations to Try at Your Desk
There are many ways to practice mindfulness in everyday life. I actually had a hard time picking ten micro meditations here as I have so many ideas in my head! These are all short meditations you can do at work. Most are mindfulness exercises at your desk, while a few may be implemented around the office or on the move.
The Three Breath Pause
This is where I often start with people who want to practice meditation during the workday. When I was relatively new to meditation, this was introduced to me by Enrique Collazo. His instruction to me was to pause during the day and take three mindful breaths, nothing more. Keep it simple and accessible.
This is a lovely exercise because you can do it while you’re doing anything else. You might stop what you’re doing and take three mindful breaths, or you might continue whatever it is you’re doing. If it’s useful, you can do this with a breath counting exercise. You might tune into the breath at one point in the body, or the sensation overall of the body breathing.
This helps us redirect the attention to the present-time experience with the anchor of the breath. Furthermore, by extending the exhale we can actually engage the parasympathetic nervous system and help calm the mind and body. I encourage you to play with this practice, and see what type of breath feels useful to you!
Feeling the Feet
This is a practice I offered in my first book, Practicing Mindfulness. I offer it with the feet, but you’re welcome to use any individual body part that works for you. The feet work well as it can be grounding to tune into the sensation in the feet.
This practice is simple. Pause, and feel the feet! That’s it! Feel the sensation of the feet on the floor. You might give your toes a little wiggle or otherwise move the feet to help bring awareness. There’s nothing to do or fix here. Just use the sensation of the feet as your anchor back into the present-time experience.
The Quick Body Scan
The body scan is a lovely meditation practice in general. In addition to being a useful formal meditation practice, it’s also one of my favorite mindful grounding exercises. This is a great practice to do at your desk, and you can move as quickly or slowly as you like.
You can start at the top of the head, and move your attention down through the body. You don’t need to relax, change anything, or judge what’s happening in the body. Just tune into the experience at each part of the body. Below is a short meditation from my playlist of 5 Minute Guided Meditations you can use to familiarize yourself with the practice of body scanning.
Mindful Walking
Okay, this is one that perhaps can’t literally be done at your desk, but can be done in the office or workplace. Although we think of meditation as something we do sitting still, there are many forms of moving meditation. Walking meditation is one we can incorporate fairly easily in daily life.
When you get up from your desk to go to the restroom, eat lunch, walk to a meeting, etc., you can use the practice of walking as your mindful moment. Tune into the feet on the floor, the movement of the body through space, and what is present in the mind. Below is a video from my Mindfulness for Beginners playlist introducing the practice of walking meditation.
Mindful Hearing
We’ve focused on the experience in the body thus far, but that isn’t the entirety of our experience. We can tune into other sense-doors, such as the experience of hearing. With this micro meditation, you don’t need to do anything special or even necessarily stop working.
As we might pause and tune into the experience in the feet or body, we can do the same with the experience of hearing. As you sit at your desk, what sounds are present? Can you hear people talking, the sound of keyboards, cars driving by, etc.? The task here is to simply use the experience of hearing to arrive in the present moment. Below is a mindful hearing meditation from my collection of Two Minute Mindfulness practices. You might try this meditation, then do the practice without the guidance throughout the day.
Mental Noting
Noting is a practice that was popularized by Burmese monk Mahasi Sayadaw. It’s useful both in meditation and in daily life, and we can incorporate it well in the workplace. All you need to do is pause and note what is happening in your experience. You might use a one-word label like thinking, typing, breathing, etc.
To work with the thinking mind, you can get more specific. Note that the mind is planning, with anxiety, calm, or whatever is present. This is a powerful practice in observing thoughts without judgement and getting to know the flow of experience in the mind. The labels help us recognize what is present while keeping us from getting pulled away by the thinking mind.
Mindful Consumption
Hopefully you eat or drink water at some point during your work day. Whether it’s at your desk, in a cafeteria, or outside, you can use this time as a practice in mindful eating. This is a great opportunity to meditate during the day. You can consume mindfully when you have lunch, eat a snack, drink water, or even take a cigarette break.
Below is an episode of my podcast in which we discuss the practice of mindful eating in more detail. This talk offers a good introduction to the practice of mindful food preparation and eating. During the day, we can use these moments to center ourselves in the present-time experience.
Checking the Attitude
This is a practice that comes from another Burmese monk, Sayadaw U Tejaniya. It’s a practice in mindfulness of the mind, and one we can utilize many times throughout the day. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing, we can always check in with the quality of awareness and attention.
The practice here is to tune into the quality of mind. This may be more abstract at first than tuning into the body or sounds, but we get the hang of it with practice. You might ask if there is any tension or resistance in the mind. Is there a subtle feeling of disliking experience in this moment, or wanting things to be different? Tune into not just what’s arising, but how the mind is meeting it.
We talked about this concept a bit in one of our Thursday Morning Meditation sessions. The video is below with both a guided meditation in this practice and a short talk discussing right attitude. This is a practice I use regularly in my life, and find it to be a lovely return to presence and awareness.
Mindful Transitions
Transition periods offer a lovely opportunity to practice for a moment. When you finish a task or are switching gears, pause and check in with yourself. In these moments, the brain is not actively engaged with a task. This makes it an ideal moment to pause and bring the attention back to the present moment.
You might tune into the shifting of gears. Notice how the mind moves from one task to the next. You also might pause to notice the feeling of completing a task. Or you can use one of the other practices on this list such as mindful breathing, feeling the feet, etc.
Smiling
Finally, this micro meditation comes from Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. You can take a pause during your day, collect your attention, and smile. Notice how it feels in the mind and body to smile and relax in this moment.
You also can use Thich Nhat Hanh’s full practice here, one that I love in my own life. It’s a smiling practice with the breath:
Breathing in, I calm the body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Breathing in, present moment.
Breathing out, wonderful moment.
I generally just use the labels calm, smile, present moment, wonderful moment. We can do this while we’re sitting at the desk, walking into work, eating, etc. It’s a wonderful practice that has helped me return to a loving awareness many times in my life.
How to Make Micro Meditations a Habit
Much like any aspect of mindfulness practice, it takes time to really make these micro-meditations a regular habit. Be patient with yourself. At first these will take reminding, and eventually the mind will incline more toward mindfulness naturally.
Transitioning from Sitting to Living
With your sitting meditation practice, what do you do when the bell rings? Most of us don’t give much thought of what to do after meditation, but this transition period can be quite useful. Rather than seeing it as the end of our practice, we can view it as a bridge from sitting meditation into daily life meditation.
When you sit in meditation, don’t just jump up off the cushion. Bring awareness to what’s happening. Notice the mind recognizing meditation is over. Notice the dissipation of awareness. Recognize the visual field as you open your eyes, and how the body feels as you start moving. By using this period as a bridge, we give ourselves more continuity of mindfulness.
Mindfulness Reminders
Mindfulness reminders, or awareness triggers, are a practice I’ve used for decades. A mindfulness reminder is something that happens during your day that reminds you to be present. Whenever your reminder or trigger happens, you use it as a moment to pause and practice. You can use that time to do any of the activities on the list above.
You’ll want to pick an awareness trigger that is relative to your work. Maybe it’s when a customer leaves, when you open your email program, when a phone rings, or when you get up to move. I recommend picking one awareness trigger, and working with it for a week or so to investigate it and make it habit.
Regular Meditation Practice
A regular meditation practice will help you find more mindfulness in daily life, including at work. Yes, we need to put effort forth to practice off the cushion as well. But a daily meditation habit will help that awareness come more naturally. If you don’t have a regular sitting practice, I have a few options that may help support you.
You can read this post for some ideas and tips on starting a daily meditation practice. I also created the Month of Mindfulness specifically for people who want to start building a daily meditation practice. It includes a new 3-6 minute meditation every day. These short meditations help make the practice accessible, encouraging the building of a habit without long periods of meditation or too much stress.
Engaged Mindfulness
Finally, investigate teachers and teachings related to engaged mindfulness. Thich Nhat Hanh and Sayadaw U Tejaniya are great places to start. They have plenty of teachings surrounding this topic. You might try reading a book, listening to their teachings online, or investigating teachers who cover engaged mindfulness.
We also have our Living with Awareness group every Friday morning. This meditation class is taught via the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, and focuses specifically on practicing mindfulness in everyday life.
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Matthew Sockolov is a Buddhist meditation teacher who trained at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Completing the Dharma Leader training program in 2017, Matthew was given power to teach in the Insight Meditation tradition by Jack Kornfield, Kittisaro, Thanissara, and others. You can learn more about Matthew here.