Powerful things come in small packages, things like Tabasco sauce, AA batteries and dynamite. You can now add the Five-Second Meditation to the list. Take just one minute out of your day every day for three weeks and see how your life changes. One minute is nothing, right? It’s less time than you spend brushing your teeth (hopefully) or waiting for class to start. All this practice requires is willingness and a good memory. Actually, you can even scratch the good memory part as long as you have the willingness.

Before you get sick of wondering what I’m going on about, let me explain what the Five-Second meditation even is in the first place. Bentinho Massaro, who we have talked about before on the blog, is the one who came up with it. What it involves is giving up all your thoughts for five seconds. Just press pause on them and let your mind go completely blank for a moment. He actually says to do this for two to five seconds, but for some reason I think you can handle the challenge (Two seconds, what’s that? Is it even enough time to close your eyes?).

The catch, if you can call it one, is that you have to repeat this process throughout the day for a total of 12 times a day. That’s where the one minute figure comes from. Repeat five seconds twelve times and you get sixty seconds or a minute. Still not an unmanageable chunk of time by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe you’re still reluctant. Maybe you have better things to do with that one minute like scratch your nose or look for a pen.

Let this convince you it would be a minute well spent. Well, first of all taking attention away from all those thoughts that are usually running wild in your mind is what we said we would be referring to when we talk about meditation (this was in an earlier article) and we already know what goodness meditation can bring to your life. It’s a practice that can be done no matter how happy or sad you are. It’s simple and can be done anywhere.

Now by meditating throughout the day, what you are doing is stopping whatever train of thoughts you happen to have going on at the time. This enables fresh thoughts to enter your mind. It reminds you that you have a choice to nurture certain thoughts or on the contrary stop their progression. Bentinho compares this to cutting a strand of beads. All you need is one cut to release all those beads. In a similar way, all it takes is five seconds to stop a negative spiral of thoughts in its tracks. For the more technologically inclined amongst us, you could also compare it to restarting a computer. If it was running slow because you had too many applications open, this will make it run much faster. Same for your brain!

So try the Five-Second Meditation and see what a powerhouse you become with no negativity standing in the way to your dreams.