Shower Meditation: How to Meditate While Showering

Shower meditation is the practice of meditating while showering. It blends the daily routine of taking a shower with mindfulness meditation, combining breath work, sensory awareness, and gratitude to achieve a state of relaxation and focus. Practicing meditation while engaging in an everyday routine is an excellent way to build a meditation habit.

Practicing mindfulness during your shower routine can offer the following meditation and self-care benefits:

1. 1. Increases awareness: Shower meditation can help keep you in the present moment. During a session, you continuously draw attention inward as your mind wanders, improving your concentration and awareness of your physical surroundings and mental state.
2. 2. Improves sleep quality: You can use meditation to improve sleep quality. Meditation helps curb stress, anxiety, and depression—all three of which can cause insomnia. A regular meditation practice can reduce your heart rate, decrease blood pressure, and increase the production of melatonin, a sleep hormone.
3. 3. Boosts mental health: The busy nature of everyday life can make it challenging to find a moment for yourself. Shower meditation can slow down racing thoughts and help rebuff life’s many distractions, giving you more time to focus solely on your own mental needs. A shower meditation practice can help you release negative thoughts and negative energy while enhancing your well-being.
4. 4. Facilitates mind-body connection: In this form of meditation, pay attention to all the physical sensations of showering and take inventory of your physical being. Showering is a sensory experience that can help you practice self-love. Ground your feet on the floor of the shower and take note of the sensations in your body from your feet upward. Focus on the water making contact with your body and the smells and temperature changes in the room.

You can practice shower meditation as an evening or morning routine. Consider the following tips for a mindful shower:

1. 1. Create a relaxing environment. Turn off your phone, perhaps dim the lights, and light candles to create a calm atmosphere. You can also add drops of essential oils to a diffuser.
2. 2. Set an intention. Begin your shower meditation with an intention. Your intentions might be to wash away the stress of the day, relax under the water, or achieve mental clarity.
3. 3. Concentrate on your breathing. Breath work is an essential component of meditation. As you shower under the warm water, take deep breaths. Inhale the shower steam and think about the breath cleansing your mind and easing your nerves.
4. 4. Offer gratitude. Practicing gratitude is a key component of meditative practice. While meditating in the shower, offer gratitude to the water and the soap for cleaning your body.
5. 5. Engage all of your senses. Focus on your senses and perform a full body scan. Feel the water running down your skin, notice how the room smells (a scented shower gel or essential oils can help with this), and listen to the sound of the water.

Find something comfortable to sit or lie on, grab a MasterClass Annual Membership, and dial into the present moment with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of the Western mindfulness movement. From formal meditation exercises to examinations of the science behind mindfulness, Jon will prepare you for the most important practice of them all: life itself.