By now, most people have heard of the benefits of meditation (stress reduction, enhancing focus and concentration, and even reaching ecstatic states of consciousness). It all sounds good but how do you fit it into your day? How does one get started? Can you practice meditation if you are coming from a different spiritual practice? The good news is there are some apps listed below that are easy to use and get started with and represent either a secular approach or different faith traditions.
Some of my clients struggle with conflicts between meditation and their own religious practices. I want to honor that and offer some possible alternatives. The act of meditation can be part of Eastern practices and philosophies, and it can also potentially be practiced as part of a Christian, Jewish or Muslim theology. One does not have to recite any mantras or pray for blessings from deities, but one can simply engage with a mindfulness practice without infringing on their own religious or spiritual practices and beliefs. While meditation is commonly regarded as an Eastern practice, there is a great Christian contemplative tradition (e.g. monastic retreats, silent prayer, the Rosary, etc.), one simply can call it “quieting the mind”. While many mindfulness apps are based on Eastern methodologies of meditation, no one religion has a corner on mindfulness.
APPS
The apps below offer both secular and religious support for meditation and mindfulness practices. We trust your inner guidance to select the right program for you.
Abide (Prayers and Promises of Christian Meditation) Abide gives a library of prayers on different topics including worry and anxiety alongside daily meditations. You can choose the image, sound, and length of mediation. Abide was started by two former Google employees who wanted to use their skills in a different way.
Calm is a popular meditation app whose meditation sessions “focus on acknowledging and sitting with the thoughts and emotions you’re experiencing at a given moment”. The Calm app uses Vipassana and Loving Kindness techniques. Like most such apps, there are guided meditations and visualizations, music, classes, and more.
Insight timer offers lots of free audio file meditations and music tracks, including walking meditations, body scans, intention setting, and healing and forgiveness. There’s also a timer which lets you meditate in silence with a start and ending chime of your choice. Insight timer also offers a few meditations that are shamanic in orientation, like this one for example, https://insighttimer.com/meditation-topics/shamanicmeditation. It also offers a Jewish mediation
https://insighttimer.com/jillzimmerman/guided-meditations/jewish-meditation-light-from-darkness.
Headspace offers a practical and secular approach to mindfulness, although is co-founded by a Budhist monk. It has guided and unguided meditations focused on anxiety, mindfulness, stress release, better performance, etc.
Mindful Muslim is the world's first Islamic mindfulness app developed to help 1.8 billion Muslims improve their emotional and mental well-being through gentle guided audio talks of Islamic stories.
One Minute Pause was developed by Author and therapist John Eldredge in response to his own felt sense of needing to take a break from the hecticness of life and re- connect with his higher power. Eldrege found the idea in his own practice at the end of each workday, where he took a minute in his car to calm and center himself and release everything he was feeling to God. He created an app to take a one minute pause with a photo of nature or some relaxing music, then move along to 3, 5, or 10 minute options later.
Sattva offers a collection of guided meditations, chants, Vedic mantras and music to enhance your meditations. This app has a Vedic background. One unique thing of this app is that it includes mudras, which are hand positions or gestures that facilitate the flow of energy in the body and release blocked energy. They can be incorporated into yoga and meditation practice.
Shine is women- and minority-owned, with a focus on promoting positive mental health to minority audiences.They’re holding a healthy space for people who want this particular focus. From their website: “Shine is a daily self-care app with meditation, mindfulness and journaling exercises from a diverse set of experts. The topics covered in the app's audio library include Black wellbeing, navigating COVID-19 anxiety, focus, improving sleep, finding joy, and more.”
EXERCISES
Apps not for you? Try a simple exercise instead! There may be many ways to come into a place of quiet and reflection in your own faith tradition that do not require an app. Here are two of my personal favorites from my own practice.
Cloud gazing. This is my favorite thing to do in south Florida, as we have an abundance of all kinds of puffy and otherwise fantastically interesting clouds to observe. I read somewhere, sometime, of this practice as an actual meditation. (Good thing I’m not in grad school anymore and don’t have to provide the source for this practice that I have had since childhood!) It goes like this:
Lie on your back in the grass and look at the clouds. As you observe the clouds, you can let your mind wander in, toward creating shapes, animals, or letters. You may find as you are lying there in this most childlike state (of what we can call mediation) that you are still thinking about that particular thing which was worrying you. Or you may find that it has floated away like one of those puffy clouds. What I have personally observed from this practice is that I can really get to worrying or fretting about something while I’m sitting at my desk, but it disappears almost immediately, or I’ve shifted my perspective on it when I change my position and look up. It’s quite simple, really; just changing your focus often works to quiet the mind. The beauty of nature is healing as well, not to mention that fresh air and sunshine, the permission to relax, and the return of a childhood pastime.
Breathing is that thing that we do all the time every day. There are quite possibly a million variations on breath practices, especially from a yogic tradition, but also including things like the practice of breathwork designed to induce an altered state of consciousness or breathing exercises and positions for athletes and singers that come from a more medical orientation. There are countless volumes of books written on this simple and powerful phenomenon, but I probably know the practice best from having worked with children for something like three decades. It goes like this:
Take three deep breaths. It really is as simple as that – just bringing your attention to something that you do all the time provides that little bit of space that can calm you down. Another variation on this is:
Lie down with your hands on your belly or your heart and just breathe. As your breath goes in and out, watch your hands go up and down. If you are breathing quickly, just gently try to slow down without force, judgement, pushing or struggle. Just naturally slow down as you are able. There is no need to count, hold, squeeze or do anything else. Just allow yourself to blob out for a minute, and just breathe.
As always, I trust you and your guidance to pick the very best thing for you. I also encourage you to engage in some sort of practice to connect to the calm, still place within you. If you have any resources or recommendations, please feel free to reach out.