Sit,Walk,Work (SW^2)

Episode Title: Learning to Stay: A Guided Meditation on Containment Episode Description: In this guided meditation, Dominic explores the idea of containment through the metaphor of the body as a house. Rather than trying to fix, improve, or escape what arises, this practice focuses on building internal capacity so we can meet life with steadiness. Listeners are guided through breath awareness, a f...

Distraction isn’t failure. It’s the practice. In this guided meditation, we explore observation without judgment, focus as a trainable skill, and how imagination shapes our inner world. Rather than trying to quiet the mind, this practice invites you to notice what’s already here. Thoughts, sensations, emotions, and the language you use to describe them. We work both sides of attention: open awaren...

Distraction isn’t failure. It’s the practice. In this guided meditation, we explore observation without judgment, focus as a trainable skill, and how imagination shapes our inner world. Rather than trying to quiet the mind, this practice invites you to notice what’s already here. Thoughts, sensations, emotions, and the language you use to describe them. We work both sides of attention: open awaren...

The Beauty of Silence is a guided meditation devoted to one simple practice: paying attention. This episode opens with a brief orientation and then moves into extended silence, allowing space for direct experience without instruction, analysis, or effort. There’s nothing to fix and nothing to achieve. Just an invitation to notice what’s already here. Ideal for moments of stress, transition, or whe...

As we step into 2026, I pause to reflect on the Sit, Walk, Work episodes from 2025 that listeners returned to most—meditations that offered grounding, equanimity, and practical ways to work with attention both on and off the cushion. Top 5 Most Downloaded Sit, Walk, Work Episodes of 2025 1. Guided Meditation on Equilibrium and Heart Awareness A meditation on integrating head and heart through brea...

How often do we judge our meditation—or our lives—against an invisible standard we never chose? In this guided meditation, Dominic Stanley explores the habit of comparison and how it pulls us out of the present moment. Inspired by a story from Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance , this practice invites you to ask a simple question: As compared to what? Through breath awareness, a full-body scan, and a...

Lately, I’ve been noticing how narrow my attention can become. When I’m stressed, overwhelmed, or rushing from one obligation to the next, my awareness collapses around whatever feels most urgent. A thought. A problem. A sensation. A feeling that says, fix this now. Today’s meditation grew out of a practice I’ve been returning to again and again: open focus . Open focus is a way of paying attentio...

This practice began the way so many moments in life do: with the eyes open. I’ve been paying closer attention to vision lately—not just what I’m looking at, but how I’m looking. Our vision shapes how we take in information, which shapes how we think, which shapes how we react. When my attention feels scattered or overwhelmed, it’s often because my field of awareness has collapsed down to a single...

When I guide this practice, I’m always struck by how quickly the mind can spiral — and how quickly the breath can interrupt that spiral. Most of us don’t need more advice or more willpower. We need a small wedge of space inside the moment where everything feels tight, urgent, or overwhelming. Today’s meditation is that wedge. In this episode, I lead you through a breath sequence called 20 Connecte...

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how noisy the inner world can get. There’s so much happening out there—globally, collectively, personally—that by the time we sit down, the mind is already in motion. Buzzing. Planning. Replaying. Solving. Trying to help, even if it sometimes feels like too much help. In this week’s guided practice, I wanted to focus on something simple and powerful: the qual...

There are days when my mind feels like it’s sprinting while my body is still back at the starting line. On those days, I return to this simple practice — moving attention slowly through the body, sensation by sensation, breath by breath. Not to fix anything. Not to force calm. But simply to notice what’s here. When I guide this practice, I always begin with the reminder that there’s no ideal state...

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to show up for ourselves —not in the self-optimisation way we’re usually sold, but in the quiet, ordinary sense. The way we show up when we sit down, close our eyes, and let ourselves be a person again. Not a task list. Not an identity. Just… a person. In today’s practice, I invite you into a gentle reset. We begin with intention—an honest look at what...

In this week’s Q&A episode of Sit, Walk, Work , someone asked a question I hear all the time: “When my practice extends beyond 15 or 20 minutes, my body starts hurting. Is that normal?” Short answer: yes. Long answer: It’s an invitation. When we sit still longer than we’re used to, the body does exactly what a child does when we suddenly give them our undivided attention—it dumps everything it’s b...

When I first sat down to meditate years ago, I thought the goal was silence — that if I could quiet my thoughts, I’d finally find peace. But over time, I realized peace doesn’t come from pushing things away. It comes from listening — deeply, compassionately — to what’s already here. In this week’s Sit, Walk, Work practice, we explored listening as an act of meditation. The teaching came from Thich...

Some weeks, my mind moves faster than I can catch it. A judgment flashes about someone—a colleague, a friend—and before I’ve taken a breath, I’ve decided who they are and how I’ll respond. But in a quiet moment of meditation, I realized something simple but radical: that thought wasn’t true. It was just my mind, spinning a story. Gotcha That realization shaped this week’s practice: a meditation to...

There are days when my attention feels like it’s been tossed in a dozen directions—emails, conversations, noise in the background, noise in my head. That’s where anchors come in. In meditation, anchors are those steady points we rest our attention on: the breath, the body, and the sounds around us. They remind us that even in chaos, we can choose where to land. When I sit down to practice, I start...

There’s a quiet moment that arrives just after I close my eyes — that instant when I can feel the shift from doing to being. In that space, I’m reminded that everything in our practice is a dance between opposites. Today’s meditation grew out of that very idea. In my yoga class earlier, we explored how opposites shape equilibrium — how the pendulum of life constantly swings, yet somehow we stay gr...

Every season asks something of us. Autumn, in particular, invites a sense of release. It reminds us that letting go isn’t loss—it’s preparation. In this week’s guided meditation, I explore how the transitions of nature mirror our own inner cycles. Through the body, the breath, and awareness, we practice softening into change and remembering that renewal begins with paying attention. Lately, I’ve b...

Today’s meditation brought me face-to-face with a theme many of us try to avoid: loss and grief. These are not abstract ideas—they show up in our daily lives in ways both subtle and sharp. When I think of grief, it’s not just the loss of a loved one. It can be the traffic jam that robs us of the time we wanted to spend differently, the relationship that changes in ways we didn’t expect, or the pro...

This week on Sit, Walk, Work , I led a guided meditation centered on spaciousness and impermanence —two qualities that shape not only our practice, but the way we live every day. We began with the breath. Each inhale and exhale was a reminder that no two moments are ever the same. Impermanence reveals itself here: every breath is similar, yet completely unique. It’s the same truth that shows up in...

When I sat down to record this episode, I wanted to talk about something that touches every corner of our lives: work. Not just the job we get paid for, but the ongoing work of being human — washing dishes, sending emails, having conversations, solving problems. So often, these tasks happen on autopilot. We brush our teeth while planning the day, eat lunch while checking messages, or listen to som...

The Practice of Walking: A Doorway into Presence Welcome back to the Sit, Walk, Work podcast. Today, I invite you to step into the second pillar of our practice: walking as a meditation. We often think of meditation as something we do while sitting still. But what about the hours we spend moving through the world? Walking is one of the simplest, most automatic things we do—yet it can also be one o...

You want to start meditating, but every time you try, your mind goes crazy. You sit down with good intentions, close your eyes, and immediately your brain starts planning dinner, replaying yesterday's awkward conversation, and reminding you about seventeen things you forgot to do. After three minutes of mental chaos, you give up and decide meditation "isn't for you." Here's what nobody tells begin...

Welcome back or welcome to the Sit, Walk, Work podcast. I’m Dominic, and in today’s episode, I’m offering you a guided meditation practice . This session is about shifting our attention away from measurement — the constant evaluations of “Am I good enough?” or “Am I doing this right?” — and into a space of possibility, abundance, and contribution. This week, I invite you to carry a simple guiding...

In this week’s episode, I invite you into a guided meditation centered on gratitude as a living practice . Gratitude often feels like something we should jot down in a journal at the end of the day—but in this practice, we explore gratitude as something alive in the body, the breath, and the present moment. I share how my own gratitude practice began while driving—speaking out loud the things I wa...