You can learn to focus on your breath, your body, or sounds work with difficult emotions and cultivate loving-kindness in sessions ranging from 3 to 19 minutes long. If all the research on mindfulness has persuaded you that you need to meditate, the UCLA Mindful app could be a good place to start.ĭeveloped by the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the app features about a dozen meditations of different types in English and Spanish. The app wants to put a “smile on your mind”-and it might just succeed.
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Smiling Mind was originally created for kids, so they offer a robust selection of kid- and youth-appropriate mindfulness sessions.Ĭreated by a nonprofit by the same name, Smiling Mind is entirely free-so you don’t have the distraction of paid content that’s inaccessible to you as a free user. In the Count Your Senses activity, for example, the audio prompts you to bring your attention to your senses by counting things that can be seen, felt, heard, smelled and tasted. Interspersed with some of the meditation programs are instructions for “activities” like Journaling Exercise, Go Offline, Where Did My Food Come From, and Count Your Senses. While you could use a meditation app as a temporary break from your hectic life, Smiling Mind wants you to take your mindfulness practice off the cushion and into the rest of your day. Smiling Mind also offers bite-sized meditations between 2 to 5 minutes for moments when you’re in need of a quick, mindful pause in the day.ĭownloaded by over 5.5 million people, the app also has a variety of specialized programs for families, children and teens of various ages, healthcare workers, and educators (including curricula they can use in the classroom) all developed with the help of psychologists and health professionals. Most meditations are in the five- to fifteen-minute range, with a few practices up to 45 minutes for advanced meditators. They are organized into structured programs like Mindful Foundations (35 sessions), Sleep (6 sessions), Digital Detox (8 sessions), and Stress Management (10 sessions), but you have the flexibility to choose where to start and to easily jump between programs. The not-for-profit app features hundreds of meditations, enough to keep you engaged without overwhelming you with choice.
Smiling Mind hits the sweet spot for a free mindfulness app in so many ways.
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Paid option: For $60 per year (with a 30-day free trial), you get access to courses with well-known teachers, the ability to download meditations and listen offline, and advanced player functions like repeat mode and fast forward and rewind. If you prefer a quieter meditation, however, you can simply set a timer and meditate to intermittent bells, calming ambient noise, or soothing music.ĭepending on your preferences, Insight Timer’s extensive collection can be either a blessing or a curse-an endless list of choices that leave you overwhelmed or a buffet of tempting options to sink your teeth into. You can even sign up to Circle for Teams, one of their newer offerings, which allows you to create circles (read: groups) to meditate in real-time with friends or colleagues. For those craving real-time interactions, Insight Timer offers live events every hour of the day to join on a whim or plan into your schedule.
You can also tune in to free talks for life advice and inspiration. Once you find a teacher you enjoy-like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, or Rhonda Magee-you can follow them to make sure you don’t miss any new content. Right from the beginning, the app feels like a global community-the world map on the home screen shows a collective of 18 million meditators, and announces, “741k today, 7k now.” After you finish a meditation, you’ll learn exactly how many people were meditating “with you” during that time-and by setting your location, you can even see meditators nearby and what tracks they’re listening to. Insight Timer has a huge library of content: over 80,000 free guided meditations from over 10,000 teachers on topics like stress, relationships, healing, sleep, creativity, and more.
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