I try to meditate every day. It does me a tremendous amount of good in terms of my overall mental health and general daily sense of having my shit together. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t tried it. It’s not hard and you don’t need to be good at it to get benefit. Nowadays in fact a whole industry has sprung up around commercializing meditation, which is pretty weird, but probably a good thing on balance? Apps like Headspace and Insight Timer turn your mobile device into a meditation aid, and can be genuinely helpful. I’ve tried both. Headspace is good, and probably the most popular. Andy Puddicombe, the voice of the app is a good teacher, but with it’s cute animations and required monthly payment plan it all feels a little slick and packaged for me. This slickness is probably useful as a kind of mindfulness ‘gateway drug’, smoothing the path for people who might otherwise not try it. Probably my chief complaint about it, along with the whole ‘mindfulness’ movement is the desire to erase Buddhism from the meditation picture.
Buddhism is the tradition out of which the current mindfulness trend grew and while it is a pretty user friendly religion with it’s acceptance of science and relatively open, un-dogmatic approach it still brings a lot of non-commercial concepts like suffering and death to the fore. There’s a great article by Mike Powell called “Meditation In The Time of Disruption” for The Ringer which articulates many of these thoughts about the commercialization of meditation better than I can. I understand why these companies want to strip away Buddhism from their marketing plan in order to present it’s techniques in a vacuum, but I think it’s a bit unfortunate. I have been interested in Buddhism since I was a teenager, starting with reading the Zen books I found in my father’s library. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps is probably my favorite of those. About five years ago I went through a period of intense change in my life, much of it difficult and all of it happening over a period of about six months. I went through the death of my father, separation from the mother of my kids, the loss of a long time job and a process of internal transformation in a very short time period. During this time I dove more deeply into Buddhism and it offered thoughts and tools to deal with what I was going through, meditation chief among them, but also a kind of loosening of my clenched desire to control and a greater acceptance of the constant change that comprises life. Since that time I’ve been meditating off on and on, with the goal of doing it daily but also long periods where I stop and start again. Generally speaking as life gets more challenging or stressful I’m reminded to meditate, and it helps a lot. Lately I’ve been under various degrees of stress and have been meditating very consistently.
Insight Timer is the other mindfulness app discussed by Powell in his article and I prefer it over headspace. It takes a different, less curated and more open and social approach to meditation. When you open the app it tells you that ‘4,612 people are meditating now’. This reminder of your participation in a larger community I find pleasant, and the pages of the app are filled with profile pictures of other meditators and their comments on the various meditations on offer, which are, appropriately generally very nice and helpful. Comparing Headspace and Insight Timer we find a parallel to the ‘open format vs walled garden’ dichotomy we find across the tech world. In this regard Headspace is more like Apple with it’s slick design and focus on a tight, carefully controlled experience with a single host. Insight Timer on the other hand takes an open approach hosting thousands of different audio files of meditations across a huge variety of topics, similar to the approach of the PC ecosystem, Android or the Open Source movement. Less slick but also less controlled and walled in. Buddhism is present on Insight Timer, but only as one of many possible types of meditation. I vastly prefer this heterogeneous approach.
The meditations I’ve been listening to on Insight Timer the most lately are by Tara Brach who blends Buddhist and western psychological practices. The recordings on offer by her are wonderful and I’ve been really enjoying meditating with them. She’s written a book called ‘Radical Acceptance’ which I’ve heard great things about and would like to read soon, so maybe we’ll return to her in these pages. In the meantime, if you’re thinking about giving meditation a try, both Headspace and Insight Timer are great places to start, though having tried both I’d say I prefer Insight Timer myself.
