Meditation has been sporadic at best, and has completely ceased more recently for me. I was looking for ways to instill my old friend - meditation back into my life, when I serendipitously discovered Headspace!
So, what is Headspace?
Headspace is a meditation and mindfulness app co-founded by a Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe. Essentially, Headspace lets you meditate, sleep well, move and focus. Their mission is to improve the health and happiness of the world.
High-level Features
Meditation: Headspace offers both guided and unguided meditation sessions. Quick meditations, meditations for kids and family and group meditations are available. For a beginner, fundamental techniques of meditation are introduced.
Sleep: Assists sleep with sleep casts, sleep music, meditation and breathing to prepare the mind for sleep and sleep stories for kids.
Move: A wide spectrum of activities including yoga, mindful cardio, dance, move minis and quick workouts are offered.
Focus: There are meditations curated to focus at work, soundscapes, focus music, short breathing exercises for getting back to focus and more!
Headspace Walkthrough
Installed the Headspace App from the iOS App store. Headspace starts off by letting me breathe in and breathe out!
Next, the App lets me set my goals and intentions. I said “Staying Focused”.
Headspace sends reminders and thoughtful words of wisdom through the day if I wish to turn on the notifications.
This brings me to my profile page where a series of activities for the morning, afternoon and night are listed. Headspace recommends that I start my day with a short breathing exercise, followed by a “wake-up” video and a meditation session. The afternoon lift includes either a video (like one of those on National Geographic channel) or a quick workout. At night, either a sleep cast or sleep music is featured.
Run streaks are displayed after completing daily meditation sessions.
Apart from the daily recommendations, there are hundreds of meditation sessions available either as singles or as a set of sessions called courses. I picked up a course on unguided meditation consisting of 10 sessions. Andy begins each session with a few deep breaths and leaves us to enjoy and embrace the silence! Unlike guided meditations, there are no periodic reminders to bring back the wandering mind to the “now”.
The stats display a summary of the total time meditated, number of sessions completed and average duration per session.
Pricing
Headspace offers a free 7-day trial for ₹159 per month, and a 14-day trial for ₹899 per year in the Indian subcontinent. I feel the pricing is reasonable given that some of the alternatives like Calm and Waking up costs a fortune!
What’s next?
With an engaging and friendly UI, Headspace offers an incredible experience to its users. Perhaps, I would like Headspace to send me daily reminders to meditate at a specified time. The app could learn from my past meditation sessions, and begin to remind me to meditate considering the (time + location) combination, which instills discipline and consistency in my practice!
Quick workouts, yoga, sleep exercises and other videos are not useful for someone like me who is looking only for meditations.
These are my first impressions of using Headspace. I have been using Headspace for more than a month now as I write this piece. Headspace has been successful in integrating 20 minutes of meditation in my morning routine. I shall leave you with a Headspace thought - “The only reason we sit is to create the right conditions to feel that sense of awareness”.
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