Financial meltdowns pale in comparison to the holiday madness. Add in fears of lay offs and hard times ahead and this is a very scary time for many of us.

In the “Managing Through Change: Personal and Professional Workshop I led this week at iMedia, I talked about a new vein of neuroscience/psychology called MBSR. This practice can really help you feel better by lowering your stress levels. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction combines attention to your physical body and your mental state – mind/body work. Often MBSR is a combination of meditation and yoga, but it can take many forms.

(If you are suffering from nagging fears and anxiety, you might also want to explore CBT, below)

In this workshop, I taught a meditation to 100 ad agency executives in the hopes that they would utlize this amazing tool as well as make it okay for employees to meditate in the workplace. As Meng, the Jolly Good Fellow and director of the Personal Growth University at Google noted, businesses as recently 1925 didn’t believe exercise was good for employees. Now we have fitness centers inside our corporations.

Some companies have meditation rooms already, like SoundsTrue in Boulder. This is a trend, I tell you.

This particular meditation I taught everyone is one you can do right at your desk and no one would even notice you doing it.

It’s called Calm-Abiding Meditation or Samatha and it’s Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.

You can do this for just a minute or two and derive amazing benefits – all 100 of us did it together in a conference room in Palm Springs and it was a calming and really good shared experience.

So here’s what you do. Calm-Abiding Meditation:

• Sit on the floor on a cushion with your legs crossed and your buns raised above your legs. (or sit in your office chair)
• Stack your spine for good posture, but be comfortable.
• Open your arms and put your hands on your knees. (or just rest your hands in your lap)
• Keep your eyes open and softly focus them about a foot in front of you with your head tilted slightly down. (if you are in your chair, it will look like you are thinking deep and great thoughts)
• Breathe deeply in and out.
• Clear your mind (the tricky part) and every time a thought enters your mind, say “let go” to yourself and bring yourself back to your breathing and to not thinking.
• Do this for 3 minutes, or even a minute every time you are stressed and it will calm you.

I liken this to rebooting a computer. Know how slow your computer is when you’ve used a bunch of apps and left it on for too long? It’s faster when you shut it down and reboot, right? That’s what this meditation will do for you.

Try it. Try it with your team. Make space in your group for anyone to do this anytime. It’s one more way you can be a great leader to yourself and your employees.

Coming up soon on DishyMix is an interview with Kelley Rainwater and Ben Thompson, experts in emotional leadership and self-care in the corporate world. We’ll teach you some great things you can do to help your employees get through this down market with less anxiety.

Note: MBSR is also often aligned with CBT, which is Cognitive Behavior Therapy. The fundamental strategy of CBT is that you change your thoughts to change your behavior to change your state – you learn to reframe your thinking at a very rational level – it’s not “positive thinking” or affirmations which are more like “wishful thinking.” If you want to overcome anxiety, stress or depression, CBT is an excellent tool. The best book on this is by Sarah Edelman, PhD. called “Change Your Thinking.”

Buy this book if you are stressed or if little things set you off.