Would you recommend an app like Calm or Headspace to get started with meditation?

I’m going to be the contrarian here: no, I do not recommend ever using an app to meditate. Using an app vs simply sitting is (potentially strange analogy here) sort of like being in a restaurant with TV’s vs without. When there’s TV’s, it’s much harder to keep a conversation going because they suck our attention like bugs to a light. Without TV’s, you feel more present, more “there.” Given that, very often, the “point” of meditation (if there is one) is to cultivate a sense of being right here right now, an app seems to me a very uncomfortable and unnecessary middleman.

There is nothing to “do,” no way to make starting “easier.” Just sit, and see what happens, and proceed from there.

To get started. Absolutely. Headspace has been instrumental in dealing with a very hard time in my life. For a secular, scientific look at mindfulness meditation read the book “Why Buddhism is true.”

Here is a podcast with the author:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/is-buddhism-true/

Of course, Sam Harris himself has a meditation app (Waking Up). I think might be the best option for the HN crowd.

Here [1] is the Exodus Privacy report for this app. To be fair, I did like the FAQ on the website.

[1] https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/38025/

Fwiw, Waking Up gets better marks by those metrics than the other popular meditation apps mentioned in these comments: Headspace and Calm.

(Lower is better)

- Waking Up (3+11=14)

- Headspace (11+16=27)

- Calm (9+15=24)

I've tried the Harris app. Everyone can do better than 10-20 minute sessions with Harris rambling in the background, acting as a constant distraction by going on and on about free will and the nature of consciousness.

IMO the HN crowd doesn't have to limit itself to any specific apps. We all have access to books that discuss the hows and whys in much greater detail than any app currently does.

Thanks. Didn’t know that. On my second listen of the book but will check out the app for sure now.

Haven't read that one, but "Buddhism without Beliefs" is also a great read on Buddhism without the supernatural stuff people have attached to it over the centuries.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to give it a try.

Yes, I’d recommend Headspace, to start. It makes it EASY, and really breaks down the technique in simple parts! I was arrogant before that and thought I don’t need a “guided” meditation, but I was wrong. I’ve also been using Waking up recently, though that definitely has a steper learning curve. Headspace is like a “elementary school” while waking up is “middle school” in terms of difficulty. I don’t think I would have been able to form a lasting habit had I started with Waking up. Headspace is so well curated. Today I use both- one session per day each.

I haven’t tried Calm and have no opinion it.

For beginners, I would recommend two things: ambient noise (with headphones/noise-cancelling works best for me), and a soft alarm for the timer. I used to DIY it, but I find the InsightTimer app is a free & customizable solution filling both these needs.

I use the Chimes tone on my iPhone at a low enough volume. Quite gentle to wake up to after a session of meditation.

I've used apps and various bell tones, but now I generally choose Moonlight Sonata: it's quiet and gentle and beautiful and very gradually drags you out of the place you were.

Oak app on iOS is pretty good for these requirements. It is very minimalistic and does not try to push paid features.

I have some very good audio [1] guided meditations (in my own language). I guess they're called podcast in popular culture? Not sure, as they're not publicly available.

Anyway, they're from mindfulness teachers. One teacher my partner had, the other one I had. These can absolutely help. It can teach you the methods of the different meditations without further help or reading (though it was recommended to read up on them in a complimentary book). The ones I have also have a friendly, calm voice. One's even specifically for people with autism (I have a diagnosis).

With regards to apps, I'd mind my privacy. I'd rather pay for an audio fragment than that.

I also do yoga weekly which is concluded with a 10-15 min long meditation. My yoga teacher also has a friendly voice. Sometimes I find his visualization techniques rather... flighty? but then I just follow my own flow and ignore him. Doing it in a group has the advantage that you're into it together, but it has the disadvantage that other people can be noisy at times. One guy in my group falls asleep and snores which enforces pressure on staying calm, as it can upset me, but you could consider that part of the exercise.

Sure--I recommend whatever gets you to practice every day. If that's an app, then use an app. If it's a book or an in-person class/group or a meditation buddy, use that.

I started with an in-person class and audio guided meditations, and then "graduated" to Insight Timer (just white noise with a bell at the end) once I felt like I was getting the hang of it. In the beginning it felt like the spoken guidance was helpful, then after a while it started to feel like it was distracting me or holding me back, so I stopped using it.

A simple timer is all you need, and that's of course optional as well.

It is good to provide a bit of structure to your practice, and the duration of the sit is important. To get started, I think it's much better to offload that worry (have I sat long enough? etc.) to a simple timer. Then you just sit until it sounds.

Directed meditation is fine, too. Try it out if you like; it's usually best to try a few approaches and learn from each.

I started with Headspace, but feel like I get significantly higher returns without it. Something about having to concentrate on someone else's voice that makes the whole experience a little bit less effective for me.

That said, I'd certainly recommend an app vs nothing, and perhaps as a good way to dip your toes in. I'd just also recommend trying it without the app after you've gotten comfortable with it.

How do you meditate without the app. I tried headspace. It's great but it is too expensive for me.

Not sure what your practice is like with the app. But for a stability practice which is the more common type, I would set a timer and sit with good posture so your skeleton is supporting itself. Focus on your breathing especially within the body. It's important not to meditate from the head but from the body. When your attention wanders and you notice it go back to concentrating on your breathing.

Basically listening what to do - mostly it is focusing on breath. Let go of thoughts. Bodyscan. Well this.

I am not sure why I don't just do it on my own but somehow I dont without a primer

It sounds to me like you will reach a better practice without the app regardless of cost. I would force myself to do it without the app for 20 or 25 minutes, just wait for the timer to go off. Do that a few times and it will get easier. From my experience you will get better results this way as the guides are ultimately a distraction.

You can actually repeat the Basics course infinitely - 10 free sessions. I do one per day, it’s always fresh thanks also in part to the varying “clouds in the sky”.

The waking up app was more to my taste personally. I’m not a consistent practitioner however

I haven't used any of them. I've heard good things about them though from other people using them.

I myself think that meditation is the hardest - and for me the most effective - when I do it with as few external stimuli as possible.

I've recently started using Headspace, and am a big fan.

since 2014 I am using Muse https://choosemuse.com/

It helped me.

I. love. Headspace. Life changing.

Headspace is too bossy.

Brain.fm works extremely well.

I've been interested in learning more about meditating and Raja yoga meditation specifically. I hesitate to read the book in parent as it seems that Buddhist meditation is focused on love, compassion, empathy or some kind of goal. I don't think the positive emphasis of Buddhism is bad. Rather I've been more interested in "abstraction of the mind" and the general non-religious approach of raja yoga. (I am sorry if the previous comparisons are naive/incorrect)

I'd love to know of any western oriented books on Raja yoga, however.

TMI is pretty secular - the author treats Buddhism more as a source of sophisticated ideas about meditation than a religion with goals that readers should adopt. I think there's a chapter in the appendix about loving-kindness practice but most of it is a non-religious guide to how to meditate. It is focused on the goal of enlightenment, but you can still benefit from it even you're not aiming for that.

I recommend the book "Inner Engineering". The book is written by a man that goes by the name Sadhguru. He's spent the last 30 or so year spreading classical yoga around the world. He founded the Isha Foundation. They initiate people into classical yogic practices that involve asanas, kriyas, and different types of meditation. The movement has grown a lot of steam in recent years. Recently Sadhguru initiated 5000 people in Australia in an inner engineering mega program. Usually the programs are much smaller and led by teachers that he has trained for several years. I started my journey with Isha a couple of years ago when I found him on YouTube. He has a ton of content. I recommend watching his [Ted talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rETWfA3Sq8) if you're interested.

To give you a little background about myself, I'm a 27-year-old male software engineer. Before Isha I wasn't religious or spiritual, but I always thought some of the Eastern stuff (buddhism, taoism) I heard sounded interesting. I also had experiences with psychedelics that were very profound to me.

Anyway I found Sadhguru on YouTube one day and everything he was saying just really vibed with me. He's explaining millenia-old yogic ideas in modern terms, and it really resonated with my intellect as well as with my own personal experiences with psychedelics. They talk about nature in terms of space, time, and energy. They talk about the human mechanism and consciousness. They talk about yoga as a method of liberation or enlightenment, the end of suffering.

So then I started going to the programs and doing yoga. I've attended and volunteered at several programs. The people that go to these programs are all regular people like me. Maybe around two thirds are Indian, which makes sense because that's where yoga originated and where Sadhguru is from. I've met other engineers, physicians, professors, businessmen, etc. I would say that the common factor among all of us is that we each have a desire to have some deeper understanding of life, so we are willing to listen to Sadhguru and try out yoga.

It's been an awesome journey. Sadhguru and his foundation have had a huge effect on my life, and I'm very thankful for it.

> I recommend the book "Inner Engineering".

The book does not teach anything. It's largely an upsell to Sadhguru's cultish meditation programmes.

Meditation instructions in the book are something like: a) pay attention to your heartbeat, or your breath, or your little finger for 11 minutes three times a day, b) eat less food, mostly raw, c) draw mandalas on the floor and place a ghee lamp in it and notice how the energy of the room subtly changes. This is a joke, right? It reads like somebody who doesn't know anything about meditation is lampooning meditation.

Sadhguru himself is an aspiring cult leader who teaches pseudoscentific twaddle like drinking happy water (because he claims water carries emotional memory [1]), how he can trap evil spirits in boxes with obscure tantric rituals (like Ghostbusters), encountering the frozen spirits of Native American soldiers in a forest [2], etc. He also claims his wife died by attaining Mahasamadhi [3] (allegedly you can meditate really hard and make your soul leave your body). Regardless of the murder charge, having to believe this nonsense to get with his programme seems hardly worth it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C1p4HUHlfE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBKvFnABpcA

[3] https://ksmphanindra.wordpress.com/2017/11/02/the-controvers...

I second this. I have been practicing Isha's meditation technique 'Shambhavi' which I learnt at Inner Engineering program. No matter what, I set aside 45-60 mins everyday for doing basic yoga and meditation for the last 5 months. Firstly, daily yoga made me very aware of my posture(work/excercise/sports) and it has helped me gain discipline in life. Secondly, the inner peace after meditating lasts very long and it mellows down my entire day. I am more aware of my emotions and thoughts. I am very grateful for this.

Second this. I've never binge watched anything on Youtube like Sadhguru videos. You can search for "Sadhguru <just about any kind of difficult life problem>" and he has a take on it that brings you deeper than the one dimensional way you were thinking about it in the first place.

There is also the simpler "Isha Kria" guided meditation available online:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K4hCvdDn7Zc (important introduction)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/wHnl_XugJyE (instructions and guided meditation).

I practised this twice a day for about 2 months before completing the Inner Engineering program and it was a very good experience. I have now switched to Shambavi but that takes longer and comes with more strict practice conditions.

For non-religious, more "empty mind" meditation, you can also look at Zen Buddhism if you haven't already. Zen meditation techniques usually involve focusing on breath or using simple visualizations.

I recommend the book, "Zen mind, beginner's mind" for an introduction to non-religious meditation, written for a western audience.

FWIW, my personal opinion is that meditation is a type of mental training. The specific techniques you should use depends on what you want to train. "Empty mind" meditation is good for training "mental silence", impulse control, and focus. Love meditation trains love, including loving humanity and loving yourself, and shouldn't be underrated. If you have specific goals for self-change, IMO you should use that to create your own "training program" by altering the visualizations used when meditating.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is so wonderful, I highly second this recommendation.

For an Analytical Approach to the study of the Mind based on Patanjali Raja Yoga, you might find the following helpful;

* Yoga and Western Psychology: A Comparison by Geraldine Coster - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.189086/page/n1 - This is an old book so the "psychology" part might be outdated but nevertheless the approach taken to look at Raja Yoga as Practical Applied Psychology is something i believe is the correct way.

* Samkhya Darshan: Yogic Perspective on Theories of Realism by Swami Niranjananda Saraswati - https://www.amazon.com/Samkhya-Darshan-Perspective-Theories-... - The model of the mind in Raja Yoga is based on the earlier Samkhya Philosophy. The "Mind" is considered a layered model with layers called "Mahat, Buddhi, Ahamkara, Manas etc." This book is one of the best on Samkhya.

I don't think the first chapters focus on any kind of goal. They were mostly mechanical stuff that would probably apply to any kind of meditative activity.

I haven't really gone beyond the first few chapters. I think the book, if you really want to go with it all along, gives a few years content of practicing for most people.

It's true there's some spiritual content in it, but I was largely ignoring it and it didn't bother me at all.

>it seems that Buddhist meditation is focused on love, compassion, empathy or some kind of goal.

You may like Mastering the Core Teachings of The Buddha, it ditches all the woo-woo fluff that many people in the US want more than the actual meditation. The book certainly believes enlightenment through meditation is possible (otherwise it'd just be a meditation book with no Buddhist connection). But the author doesn't pull any punches when he shoots down at all the ways people over complicate and brand buddhist meditation as something it's not.

Slate Star Codex review of the book: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-...

the book: http://integrateddaniel.info/book

Not related to Yoga, but I'm currently reading "The Mindful Geek" [1]:

The Mindful Geek details how to derive the benefits of mindfulness meditation without having to join a religion or drink metaphysical Kool-Aid.

I've recently started meditating myself using the Headspace app. It's still pretty early for me to say I've seen any benefits though.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/26261124-the-mindful-...

I’m so confused about why you’d lift spiritual exercises from a tradition you’re so wary of that you compare the propagation of its metaphysics to the Jonestown massacre