Benefits
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Photo Page
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Media Kit
Made by:
Mindfulness Everywhere
Store Links:
iPhone & iPad
Android
Price:
iOS $4.99 / £3.99
Android $2.99 / £1.99
Writers & Voices:
Rohan Gunatillake, Emily Horn, Vincent Horn, Lodro Rinzler, Lucy Gunatillake, Alexander Irving
Graphics & Screenshots pack:
Download
Media Contact:
holly@garlandpr.co.uk
Website & social media:
buddhify.com
Twitter
Facebook
Release date:
v1 – January 2014 (iOS only)
v2 – November 2014 (Android & iOS)
About the app
Bringing mindfulness to life. Full of custom-made meditation tracks to be listened to alongside your normal day, buddhify is the best on-the-go introduction to mindfulness available today. From waking up to going to bed, the app is full of over 80 short guided audio exercises which help you develop mindfulness, calm and compassion in the middle of wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Already a popular and award-winning app used around the world, buddhify has just been relaunched with all the new content made from direct suggestions from our users. With no hidden costs, users get over 11 hours of content for just one single price, making it not only beautiful to use, but amazingly good value.
– Packed with 11 hours of customized meditation audio tracks for a single low price
– 80+ tracks designed to be listened to alongside your daily activities
– Meditations for at Work, Going to Sleep, When Stressed, Travelling, Walking, Online & more.
– Brand new sections for At Home, Difficult Emotions & Dealing With Pain.
– Presented within a beautiful calming interface
– Detailed graphs and stats providing feedback of usage and progress (iOS only)
– A chance to have your questions answered from our team of experts
– Solo timer when you want to meditate without guidance
– Suitable for all experience levels and especially beginners
Stats. facts & media coverage
Chart topping:
Reached #1 Health & Fitness app in over 40 countries to date
Award Winning:
– 2014 Scottish App of the Year
– Shortlisted for Health & Fitness App of the Year in the Europe-wide Lovies awards.
Driven by its users:
All the new content is a result of 1000s of suggestions from users
Featured by:
Wired, Fast Company, lifehacker.com, Huffington Post, The Independent, Guardian Tech Weekly, BBC Radio 4, Al Jazeera America, The Daily Beast, CBC & many more.
Recommended product of:
The Australian Football League Players Association
Recommended product in:
Thrive, by Arianna Huffington
The Company & the Creator
Mindfulness Everywhere is a small company which designs and creates beautiful, accessible and effective digital products that improve people’s inner lives. Mindfulness Everywhere is headed up by Rohan Gunatillake and is based in Glasgow, UK.
Rohan Gunatillake is a leading maker and thinker exploring how we can use digital technology to improve mental wellbeing. His first book is This Is Happening and on 2012 he was named by Wired magazine as one of 50 people who will change the world.
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History
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Different Uses
The post Different Uses appeared first on Buddhify.
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Why we made the new buddhify
Written by Rohan, creator of buddhify.
Since launched new buddhify at the start of the year, the last two months have been busy ones of bug fixes, refinement and settling the app down so that we can go into our next phase of new developments with a solid foundation. And with so much activity, jumping from every new issue to solve and every new opportunity to chase up, it is always helpful - both for me and the wider team - to remember why we made new buddhify in the first place. It helps keep me grounded and gives me the energy that working on a project like this really does need.
And while I could list all sorts of different answers to why we made the new buddhify, ultimately they boil down to five.
Because personalisation matters.
The whole point of buddhify is personalisation. It is the idea at its heart, the essence of the thing. Our now well-known emphasis on presenting meditation whatever you are and whatever you’re doing is all about helping people blend mindfulness into their life in as personal a way as possible. The limitation however in the legacy version of buddhify was that everyone had the same wheel. And as good as it was, given that everyone’s life is so different, the natural evolution for buddhify was to allow people to personalise the meditation content they had available to them while still retaining the much-loved colour wheel interface. The most important person in buddhify is the person who uses it and for them to get the most value out of the app, they have to feel like it is truly their own.
Because sustainability matters.
When I first started buddhify it was a side project. That side project then became a business. When I first started buddhify, the mindfulness app market was tiny. That market has now become much bigger and much busier. And while we’re probably the most successful self-funded bootstrapped mindfulness app around, the truth is that the other apps in the market have so many more resources than us that it is a struggle to break even let alone grow. New buddhify is therefore a really important investment from us to lay the foundation for us to go to the next level. Call me romantic, but I want to live in a world where popular, high-impact mindfulness apps can be made by values-led family businesses, not just heavily-invested companies based in California. The challenge is growing the revenue from the app, and thereby growing the company while retaining its personality and its heart.
Because independence matters.
The purpose of a good meditation app is to get you to the point where you no longer need a meditation app. This belief is absolutely fundamental to what we do and why buddhify hasn’t followed the crowd and set up as a monthly subscription service. Because when you run a monthly subscription services work, your job becomes doing everything you can to keep users stuck in your system. But that’s not what buddhify wants to do. Our ambition is that the people who use our app become creative independent meditators, skilled enough to stitch mindfulness into all parts of their lives. So expect to see new content coming soon which enable you to do that. Independence also means independence for us as a company. The longer we can continue to grow and do so under our own steam, the more independence we have to take creative risks and be different.
Because innovation matters.
When I first made buddhify back in 2011, it was largely motivated by my feeling that most other mindfulness apps at the time were boring. So buddhify was designed to be a breath of fresh air, colourful, vibrant, playful, different, while still being effective. Today, there are many more mindfulness apps that are well designed and have good content but they still have problems, it’s just a different set of problems. An overemphasis on guided audio instructions which take power away from the user. The narrowing of meditation to being something you only really do by yourself. A cookie cutter approach to business models. We made new buddhify to double down on being different and to show that yes, it is possible to be creative, be effective and be successful.
Because diversity matters.
Diversity is something that is very important to us. Not only does having a diverse team make a better product, it also means that people who use our app will have a better chance of seeing themselves represented. That really matters. Perhaps today more than ever. While I know that the leadership of other mindfulness products are doing good work to do better, it is still a fact that the majority of successful apps are made and managed largely by men in a market where the audience often skews female. Then there is the mindfulness teacher community which does well on gender balance but not so well on ethnic balance. Like so many walks of life, these are systemic issues and not something that can be necessarily solved overnight. But as a the makers of a highly regarded app in this space, we recognise that we have a responsibility to model the change. That is why our core team is gender balanced and perhaps most importantly our roster of 14 teachers/voices is 60% female and 35% people of colour.
We still have many blind-spots of course but as we grow we hope to continue to do so in such a way that the diversity of our people match the diversity of our community. Because ultimately they are the same thing. So do tell us how we can do better. And we’ll keep doing what we can to ensure that globalised mindfulness isn’t only something that is presented and perceived for affluent, white Western audiences. Because the more people who learn mindfulness, the more mindfulness itself will evolve and change and ultimately, become as relevant as it needs to be in today’s world.
Onwards... together!
The next year is going to be a big one here with the team. We are working on a series of further developments to the app all of which look to support our wish to be more personal, sustainable, independent, innovative, and diverse. And we do it all in service of you, our users. And so whenever you feel we could be doing more then let us know. At its best, buddhify is a living thing, an expression of our understanding of mindfulness, embodied and realised in your practice and your insights. So let's keep the conversation flowing and thank you for supporting us get to where we are today. And here's to many more adventures in the future!
The post Why we made the new buddhify appeared first on Buddhify.
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Meet the teacher: Emily Horn
By Dana Jaffe
Recently, our editor Dana Jaffe sat down with each of the buddhify teachers to find out what they’re all about. Here she talks with Emily Horn about what inspired her to teach meditation, her favorite track that she wrote for the app, and about the business she just started with her husband (and fellow buddhify teacher) Vince.
What made you want to become a meditation teacher?
I never really intended to become a meditation teacher. I started practicing when I was in college and 10-12 years later my teachers — mainly Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman — were encouraging me to teach. I really loved the practice and saw the impact that meditation had on people in their lives, so it felt like a natural progression to offer what I had learned to other people.
What is your preferred style of teaching?
I prefer intimate groups, and also the ability to encourage and facilitate wisdom coming from within the group. When it comes to styles of meditation, I don’t have a preference necessarily. I appreciate how different styles — like awareness, loving-kindness, mindfulness, and inquiry — point to and reveal different aspects of consciousness. In my own practice, they’re all pretty integrated at this point.
Do you have a favorite track or section that you wrote or voiced? What is about it that you like?
I’ve gotten feedback that the ‘Chain’ meditation is one of the meditations that has supported the most people. It is about working with pain. That one always comes up when I think about it, because I’ve gotten such good feedback and it’s supported people in situations that I can’t even imagine. One person was battling brain cancer actually and really struggling with the pain of it, and not understanding what to do. By listening to that meditation, she was able to separate the stories, because it walks you through the different aspects of the chain reaction of pain. It teaches you to go in the direct experience and take away the story. She said that it was one of the biggest things that helped her throughout the whole cancer process. It was very powerful.
You recently set up Meditate.io with Vince. What is the gap that it looks to fill, and what are your hopes for the project?
For one, we’ve seen there’s a lot of people getting turned on to meditation right now through apps. Apps are really great. At the same time, the way that they stand now, to my understanding, is that there’s not a whole lot of interaction with humans. With meditation, in certain points of practice, it’s good to get that mirroring and to get that feedback from that personal connection.
With Meditate.io, we offer circles for people to join. There’s one-on-one teacher support that’s available. If people find their meditation practice through an app like buddhify, Meditate.io can support those people if they want to go deeper, if they have challenges, or if things are going really well and they just want that mirroring because we’re humans. I want to mention too that Meditate.io is online. It works for people all over the world.
A lot of younger people are attracted to it, because even though Vince and I have a background in Buddhist meditation and training, we really do hold that just as a framework. There are many different ways to do this. We have a spacious view. We’ve been told that it is very helpful to have that spacious view. You don’t have to be Buddhist to meditate.
About Emily
A friend of buddhify since the very beginning, Emily’s unique talent has been part of buddhify since 2014. The co-founder of the Meditate.io programmes for deepening meditators and the Asheville-based Heart of Insight Community, Emily has been called a “power player of the mindfulness movement" by Wired Magazine.
You can experience Emily’s contributions to buddhify through the meditations for Eating, At Your Computer, Parks & Nature, Pain & Illness, Stress & Difficult Emotions II, and Needing Presence. You can find out more about her and her work at www.emilyhorn.com and meditate.io.
The post Meet the teacher: Emily Horn appeared first on Buddhify.
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Meet the teacher: Kaira Jewel Lingo
By Dana Jaffe
Recently, our editor Dana Jaffe sat down with each of the buddhify teachers to find out what they’re all about. Here she talks with Kaira Jewel Lingo about mindfulness + education, teaching meditation to teens, and how mindfulness will change as it reaches a more diverse group of people.
So you have a real specialism in mindfulness in education. Where did that passion come from?
I have always worked with kids. Even when I was a kid, I loved taking care of kids. Then I became a nun in the Thich Nhat Hanh community when I was 25 and began to share the practice with children and young people in our family retreat. This is a big part of the practice that Thich Nhat Hanh has been offering, something that the whole family, the whole society can take part in. One of his passions was sharing mindfulness in education, so we organized many retreats for teachers. In 2010 or 2011, he asked a group of us to draft a proposal to create an official program to train teachers in mindfulness. That program came to be called Wake Up Schools, and it’s now been training hundreds, maybe thousands of teachers throughout the world in the Plum Village practices of engaged mindfulness.
I was part of that initial group coming up with the curriculum for what we thought teachers needed to learn — first, emphasizing the cultivation of mindfulness for themselves just as individuals, and then, secondly, ways they could bring it into their work as teachers in the classroom with their students and with other colleagues. After I left the community, I’ve continued that focus. I have led several retreats for teachers in the past few years and mentored teachers to do the Wake Up Schools training.
How is it different teaching teens mindfulness and meditation versus kids or adults?
I like teaching all ages, but there is something special about being with teens. Of course, all teens are different, and it depends on the context, but I’ve taught a lot of teen retreats, and when they’re in an environment that supports them to come home to themselves and to be with other teens that are accepting them, interested in them, and supportive of them, they really blossom. I’ve just seen real transformation happen quite quickly.
I think there’s a lot of suffering in teens — a sense of social anxiety, the awkwardness of puberty, and then trying to fit in. I know that was probably one of the hardest stages of my life. There’s so much suffering at that time. When you come into a space where you’re accepted for who you are, and you don’t have to put on a mask or be something you’re not, it’s so different. They don’t encounter those spaces very often. When I’ve taught teens in a school, they’re receptive, but it’s harder because they’re much more guarded. They don’t have this special place and a few days of time to sink into a practice, but it’s still beautiful. Teens can really grasp this also, very deeply and quite quickly, so the environment doesn’t have to be on a retreat, but I have had very beautiful experiences when teens come on retreats. It’s really transformative, and many of our good seeds can come out when we’re in that environment. Teens are, because of their age, very impressionable, and they can really be influenced by a positive environment. Everyone can, but there’s a real beauty to working with that age group.
You often work with activists and all sorts of different types of people. As mindfulness meets a more diverse group of people, how do you think mindfulness tradition in itself might change?
I think it will reflect more of the cultural wisdom and the framework of the people who are beginning to access it. Mindfulness isn’t just this neutral, objective thing that’s applied in the same way in all situations. It came from a particular place. It was practice. It was developed by particular people in a particular historical concept, and it has had a certain cultural flavor to it. As it meets different people, different cultures, different wisdoms, it’s going to reflect and shift and adapt to those groups.
There needs to be a kind of translation sometimes in different environments so that the language is appropriate for the people in that place and coming from the context they come from so that there’s a sense of feeling at home in a practice, rather than it being foreign. Those kinds of translations are happening. There’s wonderful teachers and books and practices and even things like angel cards that are about mindfulness and meditation but that reflect a different cultural context. I think the beauty of how the different spiritual traditions have evolved over millennia is that, if they’re really going to work for people, people have to make them their own.
About Kaira
Kaira is all heart. A former nun in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing and now based in Washington DC, Kaira teaches classes and retreats all over the world. She has a specialism in mindfulness for children and young people having edited Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children and helped establishing Wake Up Schools.
You can experience Kaira’s contributions to buddhify kids through the meditations for Eating, Outdoors, and Growing Appreciation. You can find out more about her and her work at www.kairajewel.com.
The post Meet the teacher: Kaira Jewel Lingo appeared first on Buddhify.
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How meditation can help those struggling with mental illness and addiction find relief
Written by Sarah L., a buddhify user since 2013
Working as a therapist on a psychiatric stabilization unit, I see adults struggling with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, mood disorders, PTSD, and substance use disorders. In the support groups I run, I almost always start us off with a guided meditation.
Mindfulness exercises are valuable and useful for anyone, but most especially for people who are struggling with mental illness or addictions. There's a significant amount of research backing up its effectiveness. While some clients are skeptical of meditation and insist they "can't do it," they almost invariably report that the practice is helpful in managing anxiety, worry, and self-criticism.
The most debilitating problems people experience have their foundations in defects/dysfunction in either emotional regulation or interpersonal communication. If people can learn to identify and name their emotions; recognize that their emotions are fluid and impermanent in nature and not life-threatening; pay attention to how their emotions influence the way they communicate with others; and be able to communicate in ways that are not reactive, defensive, or judgmental in nature, their symptoms will undoubtedly improve.
We frequently play the "Difficult Emotions" meditations, since our clients are stabilizing after a serious psychiatric crisis and often feeling lonely, scared, and anxious. The “Pain & Illness” meditations have been very helpful too, as many clients are concurrently struggling with physical illness or painful physical withdrawal from substances.
In addition to using guided audio meditations, I also use a biofeedback program with my clients that encourages awareness of respiration rate, heart rate, and skin conductance using sensors that are placed on the fingertips and provide real-time feedback to the client on a computer screen through a series of games or meditations. In combination, these mindfulness activities help clients to detach from obsessive or harmful thoughts, and instead maintain some curiosity and a nonjudgmental attitude about those thoughts.
People are often hijacked by their worries and memories, especially in the case of recovery from trauma, and mindfulness is key in grounding them in the present moment. This is especially necessary for survivors of trauma who experience intrusive flashbacks; they need all the tools they can learn to manage those very disorienting moments. Particularly with clients who are underserved or indigent, resources are spread so thin and any interventions that can be practiced independently and without a lot of money are invaluable.
My personal mindfulness story
I began using mindfulness meditation training when I was hospitalized and recovering from a life-threatening illness several years ago. I would say meditation was the singular most effective intervention that started me on the road to recovery. When I struggled with anxiety that threatened to overwhelm me, mindfulness exercises increased my resilience and my sense of self-efficacy. Ultimately, I no longer had to rely on external factors (such as medication) and instead was able to develop an internal locus of control to manage my symptoms. My practice was further developed when I was in graduate school and studied the psychology of meditation in depth at Naropa University, a Buddhist-oriented institution in Boulder, Colorado.
As a therapist in a highly emotionally charged/occasionally volatile setting, it has been an absolute necessity to train myself to carefully attend to my instincts, moods, and emotional shifts. My mindfulness training helps me to model behavior for my clients, who are often unaware of or aversive to their experiences (or, as we sometimes say in therapy-land, "experientially avoidant"). My effectiveness as a therapist is greatly improved, having learned these skills.
Sarah L. is a long-time buddhify user and mental health counselor based in Denver, Colorado.
If you feel you have learnt something important through your meditation practice and you'd like your share your insight or experience we'd love to hear from you. Let Dana know via stories@buddhify.com and she'll get in touch.
The post How meditation can help those struggling with mental illness and addiction find relief appeared first on Buddhify.
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Meet the teacher: Vince Horn
By Dana Jaffe
Recently, our editor Dana Jaffe sat down with each of the buddhify teachers to find out what they’re all about. Here she talks with Vince Horn about why he started meditating, video games, and what it is like running a meditation-related business.
What got you into meditation in the first place?
Let’s see. Well, I think it was my family. They were meditating before I came around. Just before I was born, my family got into meditation — sort of like the new age variety of it. I grew up with family members who were meditating. When I was 13, I did an eight-week meditation class with my aunt who was teaching. That was my first formal introduction to it. So basically, osmosis.
First Buddhist Geeks and now meditate.io, you have run a range of meditation-related projects and businesses over the years. How has your approach to work changed over that time?
I'd say I've gotten more practical, less idealistic about work over time, because being an “expert” in the field doesn't mean that I can build a good company. It doesn't grant that immediately. Over time, I've had to loosen my idealism about meditation and just focus more on the nuts and bolts of marketing, of building technological systems, of integrating those systems, and providing good service to people. Just the basics of business — like having a two-year cash flow, a good budgeting system, and good relationships with investors — and all of the different dimensions and aspects of business that are their own skills. Meditation can support those skills, but they don't translate one-to-one by any stretch of the imagination.
Is it hard to mix something that you're passionate about, like meditation, with business?
I'm passionate about both actually. I love business. I think it's really interesting. It gets hard sometimes when I hear criticisms of business coming from progressive leading meditators who don't like business. They think it's like the devil. I find that challenging. But then I remember that I have this opportunity to create something lasting in the world through my business, and I’m grateful for that. Haters gonna hate is basically what I'm saying, and meditators gonna meditate.
I hear you love video games. Tell me about a video game you played recently and what you love about it.
The game that I played most recently is called Destiny. It branched off of the Halo game lineage. It’s on PlayStation. It’s a first-person shooter game. We have a clan on there — almost all of them are meditators — and the name of our clan is Namaslay. These meditating people get together and we just hang out. It’s fun. It’s another extension of our community. I like it because we’re not getting together to be spiritual or to be meditators. We’re hanging out as friends. It’s like a male bonding ritual.
What’s interesting is, I’ve noticed that there’s a contemplative aspect to the game. When you’re going in between matches, you’re in this ship. The ship is floating above earth and then it is very gently gliding to its destination. It takes a long time, way longer than it needs to. I think the makers of the game learned that in order for the game to not feel like video game crack, they have to insert these pauses. I really liked that because Halo, which is a previous first-person shooter game, felt much more like crack. When I would play that game, I felt cracked out. I played for longer and I’d get jittery. One of my friends and I call it the Halo sweats. You play long enough and you start to have this video game sweat, because you’re just so frenetically involved in the game. In this game, it has none of that. I play less. It’s less jittery and cracked out; no Destiny sweats. I appreciate that the game designers figured that out.
About Vince
A long-time friend, mentor and hero of Rohan, Vince has been at the forefront of the progressive meditation for over a decade. The co-founder of the highly influential Buddhist Geeks, he now heads up Meditate.io with his teaching and life partner Emily.
You can experience Vince’s contributions to buddhify through the meditations for Work Break, Waiting Around, Walking I, and Stress & Difficult Emotion II. You can find out more about him and his work at www.vincenthorn.com and meditate.io.
Buddhify for teams
We respect you and your wellbeing. And there is another few words talking about why we are so baller.
The post Meet the teacher: Vince Horn appeared first on Buddhify.
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Stress Awareness Month Week 1 – Try our RAIN meditation
Mindfulness & Stress Awareness Month
For most of us, by the time we've noticed that we've become stressed, it is already too late. We've been triggered, reactivity has taken over and we are being run by our patterns of tension and frazzled-ness rather than the poise and balance that we'd much rather be in charge. So in this Stress Awareness Month, it is worth noting of how much of mindfulness and meditation is actually nothing more than stress awareness! One of the core principles of mindfulness is that the more aware we are of our negative patterns, the less power they have over us. And given that stress is one of the most common negative patterns in our culture, through mindfulness and meditation, by starting to understand our stress, we can then start to not only deal with it, but even transform it.
Introducing RAIN
Of all the buddhify meditations which target reducing stress, the most popular is called RAIN. And the reason it is so popular is that it works. Based on a technique pioneered by US-based mindfulness teacher Tara Brach, it is a four-stage process with the first letter of each stage making up its name: Recognise, Allow, Investigate and Non-Identification.
Rain is ten minutes long and is designed to be listened to in the moment while you are actually feeling stressed.
Listen to RAIN
The power of awareness
Stress and difficult emotions are just part of what it is to be alive. And while meditation practice will help reduce their likelihood of arising, its main benefit is helping us live with the inevitable difficult rather than having to always struggle with it. For as challenging as stress can be, we can also have the tendency to add on an extra layer of tension by stressing out about the stress. So the more we can soften that second layer, the smoother our days will be.
RAIN is a just one of two hundred meditations available in buddhify and can be found in the category of Stress & Difficult Emotions. Buddhify is the only meditation app designed to fit into a busy modern lifestyle. Known for its beauty and incredible value for money, it is loved and used around the world.
The post Stress Awareness Month Week 1 – Try our RAIN meditation appeared first on Buddhify.
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Meet the team: Helen Stander | Marketing Lead
By Dana Jaffe
Recently, our editor Dana Jaffe sat down with each of the buddhify team members to find out what they’re all about. Here she talks with Helen Stander about mindfulness apps, finding meaningful work, becoming a mother, and meditating with your partner.
As a current part of the buddhify team and a previous member of the team at Headspace, you’re extremely familiar with the world of mindfulness apps. How have you seen this space change over the span of five years?
It’s been huge — both in terms of the sheer number of mindfulness apps available and the quality of the user experience within the apps themselves. For many people, it's no longer a question of 'is a mindfulness app right for me' but 'which mindfulness app is right for me'.
What originally sparked your interest in meditation?
It was curiosity that first brought me to meditation. About six years ago, I decided on a whim to read a book about Tibet which had a strong Buddhist theme. This caught my interest, so next I read a book about Buddhism and the idea of meditation contained here really resonated with me. Just as I was thinking 'I'd really like to give this a try', I discovered that there was a Buddhist centre at the end of my road in North London that offered drop in meditation classes. I decided to give it a go.
How did your practice continue to evolve after that experience?
I started going to the classes there once a week and really enjoyed them, but found it difficult to meditate at home without any guidance. Through another series of coincidences, I stumbled across Headspace, which at the time was in it's very earliest days as an app after transitioning from an events business. I began using this at home in the mornings before work to help me integrate my practice into my daily routine outside of the classes.
Is that what led you to working with startups and social enterprises in the health, wellbeing, and social impact sectors?
Yes! As many people experience, meditation had a big impact on the way I thought of and approached lots of different areas of my life. This included my career and work life. I decided I wanted to spend my time working on something I considered meaningful, that was helping to make a positive impact on people's lives.
Can you share a story or a specific example of a time meditation and mindfulness has made a difference in your life?
My meditation practice was of huge benefit to me during my pregnancy and birth of my daughter a year and a half ago. It really helped to reduce my anxiety around childbirth and the enormity of the prospect of becoming a parent. I would focus on the changes happening in my body and my baby growing inside me during my practice while I was pregnant which helped me to feel more connected with my daughter before she arrived. Also, I had a difficult birth and meditation, as well as the amazing support of my family, helped me to process, accept, and recover from this.
You and your husband are both interested in mindfulness. Has it changed your relationship in any way?
Yes, in lots of ways. Particularly in how we approach and communicate with each other in difficult situations. I think we're both more considered and empathetic in our response to each other rather than reactionary. This has been especially important with a new baby. When we're both feeling exhausted, it's been so important to maintain a shared sense of care in the way we communicate.
Following up to that previous question, do you two practice together? If so, what is that like?
We do! Not everyday, but more when we feel like we need to reconnect a little. After we've put our daughter to bed, we'll sit on the sofa and do a short meditation together. Recently, we've been using the 'With Partner' tracks on buddhify, which are just lovely. Meditating together took a little bit of getting used to — we both used to get the giggles, but now it's something we're both really comfortable with.
Why and in what situations would you recommend meditation to a friend?
I think I've recommended meditation to just about everyone I know! For me it's been of benefit in just about every area of my life, however I have come to realise that you need to be careful not to try and 'push' meditation on to others. People will come to it in their own time on their own terms, and it's certainly not something you can try and persuade someone to do.
About Helen
An early member of the team at Headspace, Helen now works with buddhify and a range of different health & wellbeing-related startups on marketing, growth and communications strategy. Based just outside London, like Rohan & Lucy, Helen balances her mindfulness work with parenting a young child.
The post Meet the team: Helen Stander | Marketing Lead appeared first on Buddhify.
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Stress Awareness Month Week 2 – Try our Manage meditation
Managing Stress
One of the keys to dealing with stress is recognising that is it just part of life. The aim is therefore not to try and get rid of it completely - since that's just not possible. Instead the aim is to get better of managing it, and that is a real skill. Mindfulness and meditation is a wonderful way to learn more about stress and to develop techniques and strategies to soften its impact. And that is what we'll do in this meditation called Manage.
Introducing Manage
The Manage meditation takes advantage of an important connection - the connection between our body and our mind-state. In particular it explores the relationship between our breath and our mind-state since when we are agitated, our breath tends to be agitated, and when we feel calm, our breath tends to be calm. The trick in Manage is that it also works the other way around and that by modulating our breath, we can also calm our minds.
Manage is only five minutes long and is designed to be listened to in the moment while you are actually feeling stressed... so why not give it a go?
Listen to Manage
The importance of learning
Through meditations like Manage we can start to learn a whole host of techniques which allow us to deal with stress, soften its impact and reduce any resistance we may have towards it. Learning about our patterns and habits when it comes to stress is absolutely fundamental to how mindfulness helps us in those situations since they more we are aware of our stress and - importantly - our stressors, the less power they have over us.
Manage is a just one of two hundred meditations available in buddhify and can be found in the category of Stress & Difficult Emotions. Buddhify is the only meditation app designed to fit into a busy modern lifestyle. Known for its beauty and incredible value for money, it is loved and used around the world.
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Stress Awareness Month Week 3 – Try our Fade meditation
Stress and Sleep
If we've had a stressful day, it can be a very common experience that come the night-time, we struggle to fall asleep. The reason for this is that our mind is full of thoughts, running through everything that happened and everything that might still happen and if good sleep requires anything, it's a quiet mind. It's therefore perhaps no accident that one of our most popular meditations on all of buddhify is this classic from the Going to Sleep category, called Fade.
Introducing Fade
The idea behind Fade is quite simple. Given that we want our mind to be quiet, the meditation takes us through a progress process of quietening down our various senses in turn, so that come the end there will be much less mental noise. It starts with the act of closing your eyes and thus fading out sight and finishes with turning to the mind itself and fading out thoughts. It's a simple process but incredible powerful, so why not give it a go?
Listen to Fade
Fade is a just one of two hundred meditations available in buddhify and can be found in the category of Going to Sleep. Buddhify is the only meditation app designed to fit into a busy modern lifestyle. Known for its beauty and incredible value for money, it is loved and used around the world.
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Managing chronic pain with mindfulness and meditation
Written by Heather G., a buddhify user since 2016
When I was diagnosed with early-onset rheumatoid arthritis four years ago, it was a shock. I was diagnosed at age 34. I couldn’t believe at such a young age that my body could essentially "break down". As a psychiatrist, I was very aware of the mind-body connection and also knew of the link between rheumatoid arthritis and anxiety, which I was experiencing as a result of the diagnosis.
I have academic knowledge of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation for stress reduction and sleep, but I have also experienced it firsthand as an arthritis sufferer. Since both stress and poor sleep can exacerbate arthritis and other rheumatic diseases, I wanted to share with others a technique that could help reduce stress and improve sleep, which could then hopefully help better manage their physical symptoms.
Currently, I’m part of a local, peer-led support group for individuals coping with arthritis and rheumatic diseases. Each meeting, the group leaders gather input from members about preferred topics for the next meeting. So I proposed this topic since I have a background in mental health and had seen it work for myself. I joined forces with one of the group’s leaders, who was also very familiar with the subject, and we recently co-led a mindfulness meditation information session for the group.
Mindfulness meditation slows down my racing thoughts, makes me more relaxed, and helps me sleep better, thereby providing me with an additional tool for managing my pain.
The most common questions that came up were around how to do it, how to do it effectively, where to do it, and how to incorporate it into one’s schedule. Even individuals with prior meditation and mindfulness experience expressed concerns about if they were practicing correctly on their own, since they had never had any formal instruction.
To tackle these questions and concerns, we gave a PowerPoint presentation, which helped to define mindfulness and meditation and explain the impact it has at the level of the brain. Following that, I demonstrated the app in real time. I brought in an amp, hooked up my iPhone to the amp, and played several tracks so everyone could practice together.
I think what was most impactful was the simplicity and efficacy of the meditations. One group member tearfully said it was the first time she had successfully relaxed her body and mind. There was also a general consensus that meditation was now much less intimidating, as many group members had reported attempting meditation in the past, but found it difficult to do on their own.
One group member tearfully said it was the first time she had successfully relaxed her body and mind.
Back when I was first diagnosed, I was sick in a way I had never been before, and the fear was overwhelming. It took a while to adapt to the new "me", but I now take the time to care for myself. I exercise, eat healthy, and sleep well in order to manage my symptoms. Additionally, one of the crucial forms of self-care I practice is mindfulness meditation.
Arthritis sufferers like myself commonly experience anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbance as a consequence of their conditions, all of which can worsen their pain. It’s a vicious cycle! Mindfulness meditation guides my mind into a state of focus and helps reduce my anxiety. It slows down my racing thoughts, makes me more relaxed, and helps me sleep better, thereby providing me with an additional tool for managing my pain.
Heather G. is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The two tracks she played for her support group are Replace and Release, both of which she highly recommends to other individuals with arthritis or chronic pain issues.
If you feel you have learnt something important through your meditation practice and you'd like your share your insight or experience we'd love to hear from you. Let Dana know via stories@buddhify.com and she'll get in touch.
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What is mobile meditation?
On-the-go meditation is the core idea at the heart of buddhify. It means being able to meditate wherever you are and whatever you are doing.
Our research shows that the number one barrier people interested in meditation face is finding the time to practice. The reason so many people believe meditation requires dedicated time is because they think of meditation as a formal activity, one where you sit silently in a cross-legged lotus position, with your hands resting on your lap, and your eyes closed shut. If you do a Google Image search for meditation, the images returned all show formal meditation. For various reasons, this is the dominant cultural idea of what meditation is.
The buddhify approach advocates for starting with mobile meditation and then building in your formal practice over time, rather than the other way around.
In an increasingly busy world, it can definitely feel like quiet time by ourselves is one of the scarcest resources. That is why buddhify emphasises on-the-go or mobile meditation as the solution. Having access to meditation techniques, which you can listen to and/or use alongside your everyday activities, you can overcome the challenge of incorporating meditation into your life.
The truth is that mobile meditation has always been part of the mindfulness tradition. If you go back to early Buddhist teachings on mindfulness meditation, there is a clear emphasis that one should look to practice no matter where you are and what you are doing. Mobile meditation is often placed front and centre in certain traditions such as Zen. But the insight meditation tradition, from which most of modern pop mindfulness stems, has in the last several decades prioritised formal practice.
If you go back to early Buddhist teachings on mindfulness meditation, there's a clear emphasis that one should look to practice no matter where you are and what you're doing.
The buddhify approach believes that while formal meditation is very important, a well-rounded meditator should balance both formal and mobile practice. We also know that it is easier to find time for formal meditation once we’ve already got a bit of a taste for it and trust the process. So for sustainability, we advocate starting with mobile and then building in your formal practice over time, rather than the other way around.
The two different types of mobile meditation
At buddhify, we think of there being two different types of mobile meditation — what we call real-time practice and developmental practice.
- Real-time meditations are best suited for the heat of the moment type situations. When you’re going through an intense time and looking solve a particular issue, you can use a real-time meditation to help take the edge off and work through it. These are the kind of meditations you’ll find in categories such as Stress & Difficult Emotions, Pain & Illness, and so on.
- Developmental meditations are different in that they assume you’re doing reasonably okay in that moment. The main objective of these meditations is help you turn whatever situation you’re in into an opportunity for developing a positive quality, such as kindness or self-awareness.
Ultimately, the beauty of meditation is that it works on both of these timeframes — benefiting you in the moment and in the future.
Avoiding compartmentalisation
One of the dangers of only doing formal meditation is it can lead to compartmentalisation. This means that we think of meditation as a special activity that we do in a special place at a special time. Then anything that intrudes upon that — be that noise, being busy, or just real life — becomes the enemy of our meditation.
The big advantage of mobile mindfulness is that it is by definition integrated into your life, since that is where it takes place. And over time, as you become more used to using the techniques in different activities, something magical might happen. Instead of you having to remember to do the techniques, they’ve become so familiar that they’ve become your default way of being. This is what is known as natural mindfulness, and we wish you many adventures on your way there.
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Meditation: Am I doing it right?
Am I doing it right? This is the number one question that people who are new to meditation ask. And the answer is yes.
When starting out with something like meditation, we have all sorts of expectations of what it should be like. For example, it’s common to think that somehow just by starting meditation, our mind, this thing crammed full of seemingly non-stop thoughts, bouncing around from this emotion to that emotion, will magically transform into the mind of a Zen master, quiet and calm, perfectly still like the ocean on a windless day. Sound familiar at all?
Results such as epic levels of calm and wisdom and kindness will come in time, but the key to doing it right is doing it at all. Finding time and the opportunity to practice at all is perhaps the hardest thing. Like many styles of training, the process of meditation is much more important than the result. So if you manage to do some meditation then you are doing it right. Yes, you will get better at it as things go on, but that is how all types of training works.
Ultimately it’s not for buddhify or any other outside party to tell you whether you are doing it right. The person who will best know if you’re doing it right is you. And you’ll know because you’re making progress, you’re learning, and you’re having fun. So trust yourself. You’re reading this. You’re doing it right. You’ve got this.
Here are some words of encouragement from a few of the teachers you’ll find in buddhify:
Emily Horn | buddhify teacher
- There could be times where you’re really on it with meditation practice. You’re practicing every day. It feels like you’re gaining momentum, and you are. Then there are days where it feels like you can’t concentrate. Everything is completely different than yesterday. Just remember, you aren’t doing anything wrong. Whatever happens, that’s part of the practice. Do the best you can. Don’t beat yourself up. Relax. Again, your body remembers, and that’s part of the process. It doesn’t mean you’re not progressing. Just keep at it the best that you can, and it will continue to change your life.
Rohan Gunatillake | creator of buddhify
- There’s an infinity of excuses not to practice. Even if it’s doing 20 seconds or 20 minutes, just the act of doing it is massive in itself. People often want the magic formula. You must do 20 minutes, 3 times a week. I think we want to find our own rhythm when it comes to meditation practice.
Lucinda Poole | buddhify teacher
- Don’t fret over ‘unsuccessful’ practices where the mind wanders more than it doesn’t. Be OK with the variation and unpredictability of the wandering mind – some days it is calm, present and focused, others it is jumping all over the place. This is OK!
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How meditation can help you navigate the difficult
Many of us get into meditation because we are dealing with something difficult. It can be something physical such as pain or illness. Or it can be something more mental such as anxiety or low mood. Perhaps it is a combination of both, as often the separation between mind and body is not as clear as we would like to think. Along with seeking medical support for any issues you are facing, mindfulness and meditation can be a useful tool for learning how to work with difficult emotions.
Here are three valuable insights from the mindfulness tradition that you may find helpful.
1. Don’t take things so personally
It is not always easy to see our experiences as not being part of us. When faced with physical pain or a difficult emotion, such as fear or helplessness, through mindfulness we can start to observe it rather than be consumed by it. There is a world of difference between feeling that ‘I am angry’ and seeing that ‘there is anger’, between ‘my pain’ and ‘the pain’. In the technical language of meditation, this is called non-identification. The intensity of painful sensations or difficult emotions and all the thoughts and stories that come with them are really powerful and can carry us away. But when we are able to observe our experience more neutrally, we become more relaxed and light around things which we previously identified with very tightly. Observing what is happening to us in this way does not mean dissociating or denying our experience, all that changes is the lens through which we look.
2. Seeing pain just as pain
When we are in physical pain, often the most challenging aspect of our experience is not the original sensation, but the emotional pain that comes alongside it. What first appears as an uncomfortable sensation in the body, can quickly be followed by feelings of helplessness, self-criticism, and resistance to the pain. These reactions add layers of tension, worry, and distress, which can often feel more painful than the original sensation. Just as learning to see thoughts as thoughts, through meditation practice we can also start to see painful sensations just as painful sensations. By being able to stay at the level of basic sensation, we stop giving any more meaning to those additional sensations than necessary. Seeing pain just as pain can be a challenge, but one way to become better at it is to be as interested as you can in the detail of what the sensations feel like. Act like a scientist, observing what the boundaries of the painful sensations are and looking at them in finer detail.
3. Thoughts are not facts
Working with the habits of obsessive thinking is one of the most powerful ways that mindfulness can help, and it centres around being able to see the simple truth that thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are just thoughts. They pop up in the mind depending on our mood and our circumstances, but we give them more power than perhaps they deserve when we see them as absolutely true. While it is unlikely that meditation will get rid of our thoughts altogether, it can give us the awareness to see thoughts as they arise and the stability to leave them alone rather than get caught up in them. This is especially important for the negative thoughts about ourselves and our situation. Life is hard enough without believing every single thought we have and so the more we see for ourselves that that thoughts are not facts, the more freedom we will have.
Look after yourself
We hope that these reflections on meditation and the difficult have been helpful. Being able to change our relationship to the difficult can take time. And alongside inner development, part of your process might be changing your environment and circumstances so your other conditions are more conducive to your wellbeing.
Healing is possible and just by being here is great evidence that you are already on the road, not only by exploring meditation but also all the other things you do to take care of yourself. And remember that using a meditation app is not a substitute for seeking professional medical help so if you need to do that, then please do.
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Why are you meditating?
Right from the start of the mindfulness tradition, emphasis has been placed upon intention. This is because intention orients action. In other words, why you do something leads to what you do and how you do it. Without a clear sense of why you meditate or insight into your intention or motivation, your practice can lack energy and become directionless. It is therefore worthwhile to spend time reflecting on and understanding your own motivation.
The ‘why’ matters. Here are some ways to explore your intentions.
Connect with your motivation
So … what is your ‘why’? Everyone’s ‘why’ is different. You may have a grand motivation such as a universal desire to generate kindness and awareness in the world around you. Or you may have a motivation that feels much smaller such as wanting to get to better sleep for a change. It doesn’t matter how big or small your motivation feels, what matters is that it feels alive. Meditation practice can sometimes be hard work and there are an infinity of excuses not to fit it in. But if we really feel our motivation and it matters to us, then we will give it the energy and attention it requires. And when you put in the effort, you will get the results.
Take time for reflection
Remember to take some time to reflect on your motivation. There are two ways to do this. The first is when starting a specific meditation session. Take just a few moments before pressing play to think about what you are aiming for and to state your intention. Doing so will give you a bit of a boost and help you get the most out of your practice. The other way can be done at anytime, even right now. Take some time to think about why you are interested in meditation in general. Having a strong sense of your motivation can be a catalyst in helping you to make or maintain a meditation a habit.
Keep checking in with it
Motivation will change over time. People often start meditating because they are looking for support with a particular problem such as wanting to sleep better or to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions. As people practice more and those initial issues become less acute, their motivation might evolve and change into something else. This is all part of our practice maturing. As you become more experienced, it is important to continually check back in with your ‘why’ to ensure you keep progressing in ways that align with your desired path.
The buddhify why
So what is our ‘why’ at buddhify? The ultimate purpose of meditation from buddhify’s perspective boils down to one word: love. Through meditation practice, we start to understand ourselves better. We become kinder towards ourselves by seeing our patterns, improving those which we can, and learning to accept those which we can’t. As we develop our practice, we see the humanity we all share, and we become more aware of and kinder towards others. Ultimately, meditation is perhaps best described as being all about developing insight, wisdom, and kindness so we can better love ourselves and those around us. So in a word, it’s about love.
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Why we made the new buddhify
Written by Rohan, creator of buddhify.
Since launched new buddhify at the start of the year, the last two months have been busy ones of bug fixes, refinement and settling the app down so that we can go into our next phase of new developments with a solid foundation. And with so much activity, jumping from every new issue to solve and every new opportunity to chase up, it is always helpful - both for me and the wider team - to remember why we made new buddhify in the first place. It helps keep me grounded and gives me the energy that working on a project like this really does need.
And while I could list all sorts of different answers to why we made the new buddhify, ultimately they boil down to five.
Because personalisation matters.
The whole point of buddhify is personalisation. It is the idea at its heart, the essence of the thing. Our now well-known emphasis on presenting meditation whatever you are and whatever you’re doing is all about helping people blend mindfulness into their life in as personal a way as possible. The limitation however in the legacy version of buddhify was that everyone had the same wheel. And as good as it was, given that everyone’s life is so different, the natural evolution for buddhify was to allow people to personalise the meditation content they had available to them while still retaining the much-loved colour wheel interface. The most important person in buddhify is the person who uses it and for them to get the most value out of the app, they have to feel like it is truly their own.
Because sustainability matters.
When I first started buddhify it was a side project. That side project then became a business. When I first started buddhify, the mindfulness app market was tiny. That market has now become much bigger and much busier. And while we’re probably the most successful self-funded bootstrapped mindfulness app around, the truth is that the other apps in the market have so many more resources than us that it is a struggle to break even let alone grow. New buddhify is therefore a really important investment from us to lay the foundation for us to go to the next level. Call me romantic, but I want to live in a world where popular, high-impact mindfulness apps can be made by values-led family businesses, not just heavily-invested companies based in California. The challenge is growing the revenue from the app, and thereby growing the company while retaining its personality and its heart.
Because independence matters.
The purpose of a good meditation app is to get you to the point where you no longer need a meditation app. This belief is absolutely fundamental to what we do and why buddhify hasn’t followed the crowd and set up as a monthly subscription service. Because when you run a monthly subscription services work, your job becomes doing everything you can to keep users stuck in your system. But that’s not what buddhify wants to do. Our ambition is that the people who use our app become creative independent meditators, skilled enough to stitch mindfulness into all parts of their lives. So expect to see new content coming soon which enable you to do that. Independence also means independence for us as a company. The longer we can continue to grow and do so under our own steam, the more independence we have to take creative risks and be different.
Because innovation matters.
When I first made buddhify back in 2011, it was largely motivated by my feeling that most other mindfulness apps at the time were boring. So buddhify was designed to be a breath of fresh air, colourful, vibrant, playful, different, while still being effective. Today, there are many more mindfulness apps that are well designed and have good content but they still have problems, it’s just a different set of problems. An overemphasis on guided audio instructions which take power away from the user. The narrowing of meditation to being something you only really do by yourself. A cookie cutter approach to business models. We made new buddhify to double down on being different and to show that yes, it is possible to be creative, be effective and be successful.
Because diversity matters.
Diversity is something that is very important to us. Not only does having a diverse team make a better product, it also means that people who use our app will have a better chance of seeing themselves represented. That really matters. Perhaps today more than ever. While I know that the leadership of other mindfulness products are doing good work to do better, it is still a fact that the majority of successful apps are made and managed largely by men in a market where the audience often skews female. Then there is the mindfulness teacher community which does well on gender balance but not so well on ethnic balance. Like so many walks of life, these are systemic issues and not something that can be necessarily solved overnight. But as a the makers of a highly regarded app in this space, we recognise that we have a responsibility to model the change. That is why our core team is gender balanced and perhaps most importantly our roster of 14 teachers/voices is 60% female and 35% people of colour.
We still have many blind-spots of course but as we grow we hope to continue to do so in such a way that the diversity of our people match the diversity of our community. Because ultimately they are the same thing. So do tell us how we can do better. And we’ll keep doing what we can to ensure that globalised mindfulness isn’t only something that is presented and perceived for affluent, white Western audiences. Because the more people who learn mindfulness, the more mindfulness itself will evolve and change and ultimately, become as relevant as it needs to be in today’s world.
Onwards... together!
The next year is going to be a big one here with the team. We are working on a series of further developments to the app all of which look to support our wish to be more personal, sustainable, independent, innovative, and diverse. And we do it all in service of you, our users. And so whenever you feel we could be doing more then let us know. At its best, buddhify is a living thing, an expression of our understanding of mindfulness, embodied and realised in your practice and your insights. So let's keep the conversation flowing and thank you for supporting us get to where we are today. And here's to many more adventures in the future!
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More Pages to Explore .....
