When we’re stressed, even the thought of meditating can be stressful. We are in such a hurry to get rid of the things that we believe are causing our stress that taking time out to meditate is the last thing we can imagine doing. How could I possibly meditate now??!!  But I have come to believe that when we’re stressed, meditating for a moment is one of the best things we can do. The challenge is to realize that we don’t need special equipment, a peaceful place, or even a lot of time in order to meditate. We can do it wherever we are, and it only takes a moment. No one even has to know that we’re doing it.

A friend of mine once remarked that when he is feeling most compassionate, he feels the best. Or in other words, "Nothing feels better than compassion."

I like this idea, for two reasons:

First, it suggests that compassion is something to do for our sake, rather than for someone else, or because we think it will make us into "good" people. That is a nice twist. Just do it because it feels good.

Second, most people can relate to this, in that most of us have experienced some moments in which our heart was really open wide, where our feeling for someone else, or for other people, so dominated our consciousness that our ordinary preoccupations with self were just not so loud. So most of us have had some evidentiary proof of this proposition. Yes, compassion feels good.

And if that weren't good enough, I then stumbled upon this extraordinary article by David Hamilton, summarizing recent research suggesting that compassion may actually help you live longer. It does this by reducing inflammation (by increasing the fitness or tone of the vagus nerve).

I like the idea that scientists are discovering that love is good for us.

Since writing One-Moment Meditation, I have met many people who were, at first, incredulous at my proposition that you can meditate in just a moment.

Many people assume that meditation takes a lot of time. Others think of meditation as an endurance test--the longer you can sit still, at peace, the more spiritual you are. Many people believe that the amount of time you spend in meditation has to "add up" before you "get it."

The unfortunate consequence of all this is that many people try to meditate and give up, or just don't try at all.

But time and time again, in seminars and workshops, I have taught people that it really is possible to make a make a meaningful change in their state of mind quickly--i.e. to meditate in a minute or less. Once they realize this, meditation suddenly becomes accessible. They realize that they can meditate for a moment whenever they need to, whether they are in waiting rooms, in traffic, in board rooms, or in between bites. They stop postponing peacefulness.

It’s not that easy to move from multitasking to unitasking. Many people try and fail repeatedly.

To unitask effectively, we have to resist the multiple distractions of our environment—the emails, tweets, news streams and the voices of our children, friends, colleagues. We have to resist our own addictive habits. We have to get very clear about what we want to do, and very committed to doing it. But the mental state caused by multitasking seems to prevent us from being clear and committed. It’s a vicious cycle.

That’s why it’s helpful , before unitasking, to take a moment to untask.

Although the purpose of One-Moment Meditation^® is to help you to experience deep peace in just a moment, we start with a minute because a moment goes by so quickly that you’d have to be a master to notice one. A minute, however, is like a moment with handles on it. You know where it begins and ends, so it’s easier to grasp. So the first exercise is called the Basic Minute.

I am delighted to announce the launch of OMM365, a whole new way to learn One-Moment Meditation. I developed OMM365 after many people who had read my book or been to my seminars asked for a more gradual, sustained training—a training that would give them just a little at a time but would keep reminding them to "take a moment" and help them weave moments of meditation into everything they do. That's what OMM365 is – a whole year of training ... delivered in bite-sized pieces. A weekly audio lesson with an exercise that takes you no more than one minute a day. For more info, please click here.

There's a lot of talk these days about "being in the moment," "living in the now" or "going with the flow." Much of this talk implies that life should just be a perpetual party...that the moment is just about the upside of life.

Personally, when I'm having a hard day and someone tells me to lighten up and go with the flow, I just get grumpier. I figure they have no interest in my flow—they just want me to go with their flow. They are probably not thinking about the big flow in which their flow and my flow both flow together.