For this weeks Exploration Blog, I'd like you to evaluate on 'app' regarding meditation. Some are listed here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/30/the-internet-might-hold-t_n_4461797.html You can also search the internet or various app stores for other ones. Many are free. You are not required to purchase anything for this assignment. I want you to provide a review of the app. What it is designed to do. How effective it is in doing that, and, most importantly, do you believe there is any scientific basis for the success or use of this app?
I think my favorite app was the calm.com app. This website/app provides both visual and auditory calming stimuli. I used this app in my meditation and found it to help me relax and calm my body. This app also provided me with stimuli to focus on in which I may direct unwanted and interchanging thoughts. I thought this app was very effective as I was able to meditate without interruption and it was a very soothing experience. I think there is some scientific basis for the success of the app as described in our books, the mind consistently craves stimulus. In areas such as dark caves or the tanks of water, people may have a difficult and uncomfortable time focusing and being without stimuli. Some may even begin to hallucinate or experience panic (I’m sure I would in the water tanks). I think that if an experiment was prosed on new meditators using this app vs a control group, that generally those using this app would experience better meditative results.
The next app I found intriguing was the do nothing for two minutes app. I think this app should be implemented for students and workers. This app is very challenging for some people however, it may prove beneficial by teaching people to slow down and relax. This app provides people with a much needed break and allows the brain to take a small break before future vigorous activity. In addition, this app could be applied to many aspects of people’s lives. One such way could be decreasing weight gain/obesity. The problem many scientists/healthcare providers have found is that it takes the brain 10-20 min to realize how full the stomach is. If, after one serving of food (say noodles) someone could use this app (doing nothing) but increase the time (if possible) to maybe 10-20 min. Then if they still feel hunger after waiting a certain amount of minutes, then they could eat another serving. I think this app is effective as long as people take the time to do it. If they cannot succeed at first, they need to continue to work on doing nothing for 2 min. I think this app can help decrease stress levels and help increase productivity and overall a higher quality of life. Science wise, it has been shown that power naps are very beneficial for individuals as well as meditation. Taking small breaks such as this provides a similar aspect and may help the individual focus and increase performance.
Terms: meditation, stress, productivity, stimuli, experiment, control group, quality of life
I tried two different meditation apps: headspace and transform. Headspace was recommended by the Huffington post article and I found transform after searching for “meditation” in the iOS app store. Headspace is an app to encourage taking 10 minutes of time a day for yourself. When I first started I had to watch three introductory videos that I found to be quite boring as they were a repeat of information that I had already learned. However, for someone who is new to meditation they could be helpful. The videos talked about not intercepting your thoughts but simply accepting them and moving on. The videos also discussed how meditation is really a relaxation exercise. After you complete the introductory videos you can begin on the daily videos. The videos are about ten minutes long. They introduce a topic and then practice it. For the first video, they introduced the skill of meditation and then guided through an attempt. The narrator had me close my eyes, take a few deep breathes, and then once I was relaxed begin normal breathing again. He also does a very short progressive muscle relaxation and body mindfulness. I found the video slightly annoying, probably because I didn’t need that much guidance in my meditation and I found his talking distracting. Once again though, I feel like this could be very helpful for beginners. Overall, I liked the app. You could customize it to send you daily ‘mindfulness’ reminders and complete the videos at your own pace. In regards to the science behind the app I would say that it is about the same as a lot of the books that we’ve read. There isn’t a explicit focus on science, but the outcomes of meditation have been documented.
The second app, transform, was much less scientific. This app was designed to be used for an entire year of mindfulness. It acts as a meditation journal with a prompt and then space to record your reflections and thoughts. The first prompt that I received was “Today, find the words that come from the heart and follow them home.” This put me off quite a bit as that prompt doesn’t actual give me much to do at all. It is much more based in pseudo-science and more simply the ‘fluff’ associated with meditation. This app also seemed to be pushing online courses and a book by Cheri Huber, the creator of the app. Overall, I was not impressed and would never recommend this app to someone who was looking into starting meditation or mindfulness.
I think it’s very interesting how they corporate this technology-obsessed era to meditation. Even when people know the facts, like meditation helps improve overall life, not many people want to take the time to put everything aside and meditate. You can work on mindfulness training even in public because you do not have to do the typical meditation where you sit and close your eyes. The apps seem to be beneficial no matter what lifestyle you have. I looked at calm.com and I loved the different scenes and sounds. It was beautiful and I could feel my body tingling and relaxing. I wasn’t bored at all even though it was the same scene over and over. Somehow it kept my attention; hence it would probably enhance attention training in the individual who utilize this app. The scenes were of waves on the shore, water streaming, clouds, stars, light spectacles, and more! I couldn’t pick my favorite. I would say that the cloud ones were probably my least favorite. This app is designed to have you meditate while sitting in front of your computer. The website uses soothing music, meditation timers and video recordings of nature. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being effective, I would rate this app as an 8. I believe there is scientific basis behind this app. It has a moving picture that is pleasant to the eye and it has relaxing sounds, which enhances the feel-good neurotransmitters.
I looked the at the app Do Nothing for 2 Minutes, which I found was funny because I didn’t read the “don’t touch the mouse pad” and it would say “FAIL” and start the 2 minutes over again. I really enjoyed these apps because it helped me from being distracted, as what happen in my normal meditation. My mind has something to focus on visually and audibly. It is simply a full-screen video of waves crashing at sunset with a timer counting down for two minutes, along with the instructions, "Just relax and look at the waves. Don't touch your mouse or keypad for two minutes." On a scale of one to 10, I would rate this app as a 5 because I could do anything around me without touching my keyboard and I felt all I was doing was counting down the seconds. I do not think there is much scientific basis behind this app, but I would agree that if you are touching the mouse-pad, you are not relaxing and doing nothing, so that is the smart part on their behalf.
I would recommend these apps to everyone!
I downloaded an app called Mindful. It was a free app and I liked it because it gives you the ability to log your daily meditations. It has a lot of tutorials and things of that sort but I honestly skipped past all of them because the people speaking had really annoying voices and it stressed me out just listening to them! Instead I skipped those parts and instead went to a drop down menu that gives you the choice to pick different lengths of time for meditation and also the choice of it being voice guided or silent. I chose for it to be silent and did a quick 5 minute meditation. The app starts you off with a long drawn out bell tone and then it is silent until the five minutes was up and it did that tone again. After I finished my time it gave me the option to log my experience and it saves that in a “Lifelog.” It also gives you goals to complete different steps each day. I don’t really find this part helpful because that involves listening to the tutorials which I don’t like! When I started the app it made me set up three times a day that I would be able to take a second and be mindful. I think this is cool but it is also going to prove to be extremely annoying because the times it gave me to choose from are times that I’m working or may still be sleeping in the morning and that just doesn’t fit with my day. Overall I think the app will be helpful and I just want to try it out as an extra prompter to try and make time every day for meditating. I know that as finals get nearer I have been convincing myself that I just don’t have time anymore and this will be a good way to keep me on track!
I believe this app could be improved by giving more options as far as something to visually watch or different sounds to listen to rather than a voice. I also think it could be designed better. The layout is not the best and it is a bit annoying to look at. There were a few other apps that looked like they were much better quality but they ranged from costing $1.99 to $4.99 which I don’t plan on spending on any app. I’m guessing that meditation apps are a fairly newer thing and that as meditation becomes more popular there will be better quality apps to choose from.
For this assignment I downloaded an app called “Learn to Meditate”. It had five different classes/lessons which you could read yourself or choose the Australian narrator to read it. There was also calming music in the background when the narrator read it. Each class talked about different topics related to meditation. The first class explained meditation and how useful it is in our lives no matter what we do for a living. It also mentioned seven keys to meditation including finding a special space, being physically prepared, posture, time spent meditating, making time for it, how music can be used to help, and confidence in yourself. There is also an exercise at the end of each lesson and this one was staring at a picture of a candle and releasing negative emotions on your out breath. The next lesson talked about wisdom, knowledge, the meaning of life, love, and happiness. The authors of the app said the meaning of life is simple: loving, learning, and being happy. The exercise in this lesson instructed the reader to imagine they were in outer space before time started. The reader was supposed to imagine they were seeing Earth for the first time and that as they got closer, they in fact were the Earth evolving. The next lesson was about consciousness. It talked a lot about Star Wars and “the force”. The next lesson was a continuation of the previous one. It focused more on the path of the heart which includes desire and aspiration. About half of this lesson was a massive quote from Sri Ramakrisha. The exercise for this lesson was how to use music as an aid in the meditation process. The last lesson was about learning to learn and how we need to be open to change. It listed the cycle of change which includes awareness, willingness, potential, action, and result. The last exercise used the ocean as a tool. The reader was supposed to go to a beach and focus on the power and majesty of the ocean. They were supposed to feel the heartbeat of the earth and breathe to become one with the ocean.
Overall this app didn’t seem scientific at all. It included quotes without citations, quotes from Star Wars, and quotes from Jesus. It was all too hippie, flower child for me to think it was scientific at all. A lot of the imagery it used was nice and the language choice was poetic but I don’t there is a shred of science mentioned. I think bringing more of a scientific edge would have improved this app. I think there is a stigma of meditation being pseudoscience and this app didn’t do anything to disprove that stigma. One of the lines the app closed with was “the original birth mother.” Some of the things it said were just weird.
Terms: meditation, seven keys to meditation, posture, meaning of life, happiness, loving kindness
I decided to look at the chrome app store for some apps since people in class didn’t seem to find much on the mobile app stores (app/android). I actually laughed a lot because these apps lacked so much in creativity and also in just doing what they were intended to do. One of the apps I looked at even spelled meditation wrong! It seems that the market for meditation apps doesn’t really exist on the chrome browser store.
The app that I decided to actually look up and use was called “Meditation, the free online guide to Maditation” (spelled meditation wrong). I at first didn’t notice the misspelling and it had the best reviews of 3/5 stars and 46 reviews. The app has a picture on the front with all of the benefits of meditation. It looks very well done and is what drew my attention in the first place.
Right out from the start I have to say never ever use this app. It is poorly done, and the only reason you should get it is to laugh at something like this. The app starts out with a video zooming in on a 3d figure. It’s a person sitting cross legged and a voice comes over telling you to close your eyes. Shortly after that, it tells you to look and see how the person is sitting on the screen, and then never tells you to close your eyes again. This leaves the person not reflecting, but rather watching the video of a poorly drawn three dimensional person with images floating around its head. The video ends up talking a lot about chakra and it is really hard to relax during. I don’t really know what they were trying to accomplish with this.
Probably the most appalling thing of this app was that it is ad supported. This means that during my (attempted) meditation, ads would play about every 4 minutes. This is incredibly distracting and doesn’t allow the meditator to stay concentrated. It’s sad to think that these people made money from ads with this horrible app.
I had actually already downloaded a meditation app earlier in the semester as I thought it would help me. It is the supplementary app to the H & M book ‘Buddha’s Brain’. I originally bought it because the bookstore sent me the audiobook instead of the actual book and I thought I would be able to use this app to summarize chapters and whatnot. As it turns out, the app was completely useless in that regard, but it did serve to be helpful for this assignment. It seems a little odd to me that there actually are meditation apps, as we hear about all of these meditation retreats where you are required to abandon all technology for some period of time. But we live in a culture dependent on technology, and the practice of meditation has accommodated for that. In this specific app, there are over 50 different practices. Six of these practices are guided meditations where the author (or whoever does the voice) talks to you as you go through your specified meditation practice. The other practices include a ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘self-care’ section. Obviously the how runs you through how to do the practice and the why tells you why the practice is beneficial for you. The self-care section talks about the best way to use the practice and how to make yourself better in a number of areas. Not all of the practices are meditations, as some are simply little readings advising you to be more mindful, or equanimous, or whatever. It has various categories such as concentration, relaxing the self, compassion, skillful assertiveness, equanimity, mindfulness, and cooling the fires. Each of the categories have so many practices within them that you can save to ‘my favorite practices’. As far as my rating of this app goes, it doesn’t really offer any help for one to be a better meditator, other than the information on how to be better in any of the talked about categories. Of course, I suppose if one were to become better in all of these categories, they may find meditation to be easier. However, the book also talked about how you meditate to better yourself in these specific categories, so we kind of have a chicken or the egg thing going on here. I would say this is a decent app, as the book it is associated with is a self-help book, and the app does a good job of providing advice and practices to better yourself in all of the different areas.
It took me a long time to find an app that I liked. There are a lot of great meditation apps out there that only will time and record your sessions, but not as many that give background into how to meditate and are more beginner friendly. What I ended up settling on was the app Preksha Meditation. While this app is slightly more religiously affiliated than others, I found that the apps with a stronger religious tie were more informative. While Preksha is its own, unique kind of meditation, much of the information is related to what we learned in class.
The Preksha app serves many functions. It includes a FAQs page that has lots of helpful information that beginners would have such as how, how long, where, what one should expect and other things pertaining to meditation. There is an ebook page where there are three books you can read on the app. I looked up the books online and found that 2 of the 3 are still in print and cost around $25, so I found that to be an interesting bargain considering that app was made by the Preksha Foundation. It has recitation songs that I think you can meditate to. This part is a little unclear what their purpose is since it’s not explained on the app. There are 8 songs you can listen to, ranging from 30 seconds to 15 minutes. The songs are in a different language, but I’m guessing that they could be treated like mantras if the meditator knew what it meant.
Like most other meditation apps on the market, it included a timer. A unique function to this timer is that it has an interval function, so you can set how much time you need to prepare, how long you’ll meditate and how many sets of meditation you’ll have. This feature would have been helpful for some of the guided meditations out of our book where it led you through focusing on a different, single thought every five minutes that was part of one larger theme. Like loving-kindness meditation, where you first think of the love you have for friends, family, strangers, and yourself, it would have been helpful to have a timer that could alert you to start the next section without requiring you to remove yourself from the meditation to reset the timer. The last features of the meditation app include two guided meditations, both which are around 30 minutes. Overall, I liked how informative this app was, but I still probably wouldn’t use it for my own practice.
For this assignment I went into my app store using my I phone. I simply typed meditation and meditation app free into the search window. A lot came up! I always look at the ratings when trying to chose or search for random apps. So, that’s exactly what I did for this assignment!
The first thing I noticed was majority of the meditation apps were based/centered around sleep. Which was annoying because as we have all learned there is so much more to meditation than sleep, in fact its odd too because we didn’t talk much about sleep. The first app that came up was named “The mindfulness app”. It was the first that came up however there were not reviews, maybe because its new? It costs 1.99, but of course the description and the review post were present. This app seemed pretty awesome. It explained that mindfulness helps lower stress and increase well-being, while also providing statistics that have been shown to come with meditation practice. The app provides multiple types of guided meditation or silenced meditation. It also consists of a meditation journal which seems pretty easy, the phone does all the work. The journal keeps track of weekly, monthly, and even yearly statistics that consists of your total number of meditation practices, your total time spent meditating. It also allows you to schedule reminders, provides you access to a store that will allow you to become familiar with work of other mediators and teachers of meditation form around the world, and lastly it allows you to set a timer to alert you when your meditation practice has ended. The only thing that though me off with this app is the fact that it claims to be rated as “the number one health app in 10 countries around the world”, yet there are no star ratings. However, after reading the reviews from others who had purchased the app I’m feeling determined to try it out. Everything it has to offer for such a small price will not hurt to try out! Also the facts provided for this app are consistent with those we have learned from class discussions and the readings! I do believe this app is worth a try!
A second app I explored by searching “meditation”, was a five star rated app by the name of “Brain Wave -30 Advanced Binaural”, okay Binaural is obviously odd. But the app sounded really cool. This too comes with a price, a little bit higher at 2.99 and additional cost for advanced features but fine. This app has all kinds of cool features! They include sessions for better sleep, increased attention/focus training, relaxation, memory, motivation, and even pain relief from a simple headache to muscle pain! All though different meditation practices that provide specific tones and that “connect” with your brain signals. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but hey people rated the app at five stars and posted the comments they had for a reason right? In short, this app is supposed to synch with specific brainwaves to target the area you are interested in working to help or improve. It has meditation sessions for specific reasons such as reduce anxiety, problem solving, dream sleep, and deep sleep. It also has a variety of background noises to choose from for simple mediation sessions, like the ocean, rainforest, and even city noise according to one review post. The only thing I didn’t read or come across was a journal or meditation tracker of any sort. So that ‘s kind of disappointing. The app seems really cool, however I’m not sure how effective it is because of its million features and categories it claims to heal and improve. Also throughout this entire semester I have not came across nor read about or heard anything in discussion (that I can remember reguarding noise frequencies that synch to brain waves while meditating. It’s something I would be interesting to look more into though!
I really liked this assignment! A lot, it is deffinatly my top favorit assignment this semester! Even though majority of the apps are based around meditation linked to sleep, if you poke around there are a number of good ones! The reason I had not choose to download and research a free app is because I feel like they would have less to offer, they were a lot of thing as well, offering the same boring features such as noise and an alarm. So, I avoided them. I did download the first app I reviewed in this blog post. I’m excited to explore it, and if I find anything awesome, exciting, and possibly useful for your class I will be sure to let you know!
The first app that I found to be interesting is one called BrainWave: Advanced Biaural Tone. This app uses specific tones to stimulate brain waves to effect brainwave patters to help with your stress, sleep, energy , focus relaxation and many more. This app was $2.99 so I did not buy it but if it is able to achieve what it says it can, this would be a beneficial tool to add to your meditation. This app has a time, you are able to set the kind of atmosphere you're in, the sleep mode (nap vs deep sleep) and the kind of ambiance you want with a link to your iTunes. Since I did not buy it, I went though the reviews and read a lot of encouraging comments about it. Actually, after reading the reviews, I've considered buying it.
Another one I looked at is called Simple Being. This app focuses more on guided meditations. That's not really a bad thing but it's not for me. However, this app provides tips and helpful hint about your meditation and I can appreciate that. It seems like "fun facts" and those are always enjoyable. The reviews for this app are also quite good but I would still choose the first one over Simple Being. Simple pretty much describes the app and I think I would want more.
My ideal app would be one that had everything BrainWave has with a bit more. I would like a app that has recommendations like, you should try meditation to this music or suggestions to help you enhance your meditating experience. In one app, I saw a FAQs tab and I thought that would be useful too. Another thing I feel that would be helpful is for the app to have a way to track your meditations. Both of the apps could have that function but I didn't read anything about it in the reviews and details. I don't necessarily want to purchase an app but the ones that come free are quite minimal. I'm still considering buying BrainWave. It seems to be the most beneficial and the most bang for your buck!
This week we looked into different meditation apps. I actually started using some of these apps at the beginning of the semester because I was having a hard time meditating and finding the time to meditate. I tried most of the apps on this list and some that weren’t. The apps that were discussed in this article I had mixed emotions on, I tried headspace, meditateapp, and the calm website. I found that calm was my favorite out of these three, the others let you write about your experiences but if you didn’t by the full version you could only do so much such as basic features or just a ten day trial. I found that calm.com was my favorite because of its simplicity. It had a guided meditation, timer, or just calming music to play while meditating. It also had an iPhone app but since I have an android phone couldn’t use this feature. I used all the features on the site and found that they helped me the most. The guided mediation gave you a brief entry into the meditation and then let you listen to calming music and let you take over it also gives you a calming picture to look at if you choose to. The calming picture was nice to watch at first because it helped me to relax and picture myself in that relaxing environment. I used this app to also study to since it played relaxing music that was basically ambient sounds so it wasn’t distracting to me like other music that may have vocals. This was my favorite app from the article, but since they didn’t make a android version of the app I found another app called meditation sounds that just played ambient music with different themes to it. You could adjust the sound such as take away chiming of bells, loudness of rainfall, etc. which I found useful. With this app you could also set a timer, that when the music ended it just stopped silently so if you kept meditating you didn’t get distracted by any type of alarm. Overall I found these last two apps my favorite and I used them the entire semester to help me to meditate, study, and fall asleep. I wish that these two apps had a function that after each meditation session you could rank how you thought it went or your ending and beginning mood.
The mediation app I found I would suggest for beginners that do not have a clue on how to get started. It is entitled Power Nap with Andrew Johnson. It is a guided meditation app that last about a half hour and it is meant for people who have been having a stressful day to find time to relax and unwind before continuing through the day. It is also helpful to those that might not have had a good enough sleep the night before. This would have been helpful for us during the first couple of week of this class before we knew how to meditate on our own. It would also come in handy if a person is having trouble concentrating on meditating that way they have a voice to follow. The voice of this Andrew person is very subtle and relaxing with a slight accent which helps to focus your attention on him. This person also created other similar apps that are a bit more advanced, but you actual have to pay for those and I am a cheapskate. Overall very pleasant, but like I already said it would not be very useful to our class as of now. I would recommend it to some of my friends that do not have experience with mediation on their own and this would help them get off to a good start. I do believe that there is some scientific basis that went into this app, for we know from our own experience that even a half hour of relaxing each day can help rejuvenate us and put a person back on track. You can also see from the positive feedback and reviews from others that it has worked for them.
Terms: Meditation, attention, sleep
I was really disappointed with most of the meditation apps that I looked into for this week. Most of them did not help me in my meditation journey, and a number of them simply functioned as daily reminders to meditate. I was looking for an application that would allow me to track my meditative experiences. However, upon review of a number of meditation apps I quickly came to realize that this wish my not be technically feasible at this time. Mediation apps seem to provide a timer function, an alarm function, and some inspirational quotes. But, the problem I have with this is that a majority of these function are things that already exist on my phone. Knowing that I wanted to avoid guided meditation, because it would annoy me during my meditation sessions, I looked for meditative apps that hopefully give me advice on how to go deeper into meditation, but no iPhone apps (that I looked at) seemed to offer any advice, few gave any real help at all. These apps were also not scientific in nature, and shared no benefits of meditation.
Terms: Meditation App, Guided Meditation,
I have been playing around with an app called Mindfulness Daily. This app is free for iPhone and functions best as a meditation reminder. Mindfulness Daily has a few semi useful features like a guided meditation for beginners and suggestions as to when you should meditate and ideas to meditate on. It suggests that we take a few minutes I the morning to meditate and begin the day, followed by a short (5-10 minute) calmness or meditation during the day and a reflective meditation session before bed. The best aspect of this app may be its meditation tracker. You can input when and how long you have meditated or been mindful during the day.
This app is not specifically for meditation, rather it is for mindfulness and focuses on becoming mindful throughout the day. It has programmed reminders that pop up throughout the day and have a 15 second timer, during which you are to stop, breathe, and take in the moment for what it is. The goal is to achieve living in a moment and not constantly focusing on what comes next. The app keeps a running daily count of moments of mindfulness to allow you to analyze and reflect on each day.
I think this app could be useful if they expanded the recording abilities. It would be very beneficial if the app could be used as a meditation journal as well as a format for recording the number of times and duration of your mindfulness throughout the day.
I really enjoyed looking through the meditation apps offered for Androids. I think that it was very interesting to learn about the different meditation apps. The first app I tried was called Buddhist Meditation Trainer. The Buddhist Meditation Trainer app is like your very own personal mindfulness trainer that guides you through relaxing meditation. It features 10 levels of enlightenment and includes deeper quotes during each meditation session. I think this app would be great for beginners. This app started you off with 3-minute meditation sessions for the first level and once you leveled up the meditation timer would increases. During each meditation sessions it shows a really cool picture Buddha, that way if you trying to focus on an object while you are meditating you can focus on the pictures provided. During the meditation session there are quotes of wisdom that are really inspiring. For example, “pay no attention to the faults of others, things done or left undone by others.” Another feature I liked about this app was leveling up. Once you leveled up you would unlock more pictures and more quotes, plus your meditation session timer would increase so you get feelings of accomplishment. Another great feature about this app was the option to share your progress via Facebook.
The other app/website that was really incredible was calm.com. The website calm.com had the best app for meditation practice. I have never heard about this website before and I was little upset that I did not find this website sooner, since I had a little trouble meditating during the beginning of the semester. Once I enter the website I was really amazed by its content. The music that played in the background was really relaxing and the noises that went along with the music gave out a perfect vibe and environment to begin meditation. It actually made my meditation session go by quicker and smoother. I really liked that the website give you the option to do a guided practice or a self-timed practice. I tried the guided practice. The guided practice lets you choose from 2, 5,10,15,20 minute sessions. The instructions that are given during the session are great. The instructor’s voice is really peaceful and the background music and sound effect are so peaceful. When I close my eyes and listen to the instructions, and focus on the music and sound effects, I feel that I truly get lost and do not think about anything else. Before I know it the 20 minute meditation session is over. I cannot emphasis enough on how blow away I am by this website. I think that it is the perfect meditation tool whether you’re a beginner, novice, or expert. All in all, calm.com was the best app in my opinion; however I believe that the two apps that I mentioned above are great apps for meditation practice. They had both calming music and appealing backgrounds. The both would have been good for people that are beginners or experts. Also, they both had the option of sharing via Facebook to help spread knowledge about the benefits of meditation.
Terms: meditation apps, Buddhist Meditation Trainer, www.calm.com, guided meditation, music, background pictures