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.

One kind of meditation technique that’s good for beginners is a body scan meditation, which helps us check in with our bodies by mentally scanning each part.

Join Mindfulness.utilizando co-host Cory Muscara for a 10-day course to master the foundational principles of mindfulness and establish a realistic daily mindfulness practice that can easily integrate into your modern, busy life.

Expanding your awareness during meditation to notice anything in your experience, inner or outer, and simply noticing what’s there without holding it in your focus.

The raisin exercise, where you slowly use all of your senses, one after another, to observe a raisin in great detail, from the way it feels in your hand to the way its taste bursts on your tongue.

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Once you finish this practice and get ready to start working, mindfulness can help increase your effectiveness. Two skills define a mindful mind: focus

While you often hear about “clearing your mind” through meditation, the truth is you can’t really clear or empty your mind. Thinking is what these big ol’ brains of ours do! And stopping thinking isn’t the goal of meditation, anyway—not getting caught up in those thoughts is.

This can be accomplished by sitting on the edge of a chair or another seat, or by sitting on the floor with a support like a meditation cushion under your hips.

Since that time, thousands of studies have documented the physical and mental health benefits of mindfulness in general and MBSR in particular, inspiring countless programs to adapt the MBSR model for schools, prisons, hospitals, veterans centers, and beyond.

JM: Here in the mindfulness San Francisco Bay area, we’re seeing growing interest. Initially, that was among tech and social media companies. Google has been a pioneer in providing mindfulness practice training for its employees. In fact, an engineer at Google first instituted a mindfulness training program there, which has now become the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, offering mindfulness training for companies around the world.

And we do our best to recognize how we’re feeling without judging ourselves or trying to change what we feel. Research shows that practicing regular body scans can help reduce stress-induced hormones.

Want to give it a try? With our eyes closed, bring our focus to the top of our heads. Slowly, begin to scan down. Spend about 20 seconds noticing how each body part feels, then move on to the next.

At the end, participants who’d practiced mindfulness had higher levels of the protein interleukin-8 in their nasal secretions, suggesting improved immune function. Another study found increases in interleukin-10 in colitis patients who took a mindfulness meditation course compared to a mind-body educational program, especially among patients whose colitis had flared up. Yet another study found that patients who had greater increases in mindfulness after an MBSR course also showed faster wound healing, a process regulated by the immune system.