Meditation and stress relief have always been at the core of religious and spiritual movements worldwide. People have sought out peaceful environments to meditate, worship, and find answers to or at least make peace with life’s great questions. Codependent to this search for place is the search for a spiritual teacher or guide; someone to lead you in your practice. Meditation has been useful since the stone age but it’s only recently that scientists have used brain scans to outline physical changes in the grey-matter density of regular practitioners. Instead of going to your local place of worship or searching for a guru, you can now conveniently plug your headphones in your ears for instant enlightenment. Okay, maybe not instant, but really the new “Take a Break!” app by Meditation Oasis will help you relax and face up to the emotional stresses that have been hounding your peace of mind.
This new app was developed by Mary and Richard Maddux who have been practicing and teaching meditation through the use of voice and music for more than 30 years. Their website features many different articles on meditation as well as an online meditation course; they clearly know their stuff. The app itself features a recorded voice that guides you during your meditation period. You have two choices with regard to your meditation time, a 7 minute work break or a 13 minute stress relief segment. The developers assumes your work break can’t also require stress relief, but nonetheless, this is a great app that features a wonderful guiding voice to help you relax. It comes with useful directions in case of technical difficulties, and you can choose music, nature sounds, or silence for your meditative environment. Download for your iPhone, iPad, or Android. So to recap:
Pros:
– Experienced guiding voice helps achieve deeper meditation
– Short time period useful for work breaks
– Some users have gotten so relaxed they fell asleep
– Free
Cons:
– Only two time period choices, 7 and 13 minutes
– Android version does not have the nature sounds feature and you cannot change the volume
You can download Take a Break for iPhone/iPad from the iTunes store, or for Android via the Google Play store.
Have you tried this app yet? Do you find it useful?
Featured photo via Thinkstock, screenshots via Google Play store
Never tried this app before. It could be interesting, I am always down to try free apps. I actually got this sleeping app where you put it face down on your bed under your pillow and it tracks how well you sleep – it’s actually pretty neat!! I am not the DEEPEST of sleepers like I thought I was!