Estimates suggest that working adults, on average, spend about one-third of their waking life at work. Previous studies have shown psychological distress is highly prevalent in working professionals. Physical manifestations of stress include musculoskeletal pain, headaches, constant fatigue, sleep disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, cardiovascular illnesses, and substance use, while its psychological manifestations include lack of concentration, negative affect, low self-esteem, and aggression among others. Exploring new pathways, such as mindfulness, can lead to the development of novel tools for enhancing employee well-being at work (Schultz et al., 2015).

Mindfulness-based intervention studies have shown exponential growth over the past three decades. Potential benefits of mindfulness interventions range from mental and physical health outcomes to cognitive, affective, and interpersonal outcomes. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods of cultivating it originate in Eastern spiritual traditions. First-generation mindfulness intervention studies focused mainly on treating adult patients in clinical settings. Over the last ten years, there has been a shift in moving mindfulness intervention studies out of the clinic into institutional settings. Mindfulness interventions are multidimensional in nature and involve multiple active components. The mindful yoga component is shown to produce a significant differential effect on the outcomes. As a means of providing a unified body-mind experience, Yoga has few equals (Salmon et al., 2009). The current study examined the efficacy of cyclic meditation, as a unique yoga-based mindfulness intervention for the wellbeing of leadership professionals.

Two studies were conducted across two distinct employee cross-sections of a large Indian multinational corporate. First study was on leadership professionals and the second study was on offshore professionals who are engaged in a high-risk work environment. Effect of a five-day residential yoga intervention and later follow-up after three months of home practice was examined in these two study groups. Participants were assessed for various psychological constructs like mindfulness, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, and perceived stress. Results of the linear mixed effects model showed that all the variables had significantly influenced the perceived stress, except for emotion regulation. Findings suggest that intervention is effective in addressing the stress of professionals by improving mindfulness, positive affect, and better emotion regulation strategy, but due to lack of supervised guidance after the program, there is a high chance of further relapse, which needs further attention to maintain an environment of sustained wellbeing.