A New Meditation App

A while back I posted on an iPhone app developed by the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland for people interested in joining the priesthood. Now meditators have gotten in on the game with a new app for both Android and iPhone intended to get more people meditating. Called "Buddhify," the app provides basic meditation instructions and is being marketed by emphasizing the stress-reducing aspects of the practice.

The Buddhify app introduces users to restful mindfulness meditation practices by allowing them to select from 32 audio tracks to hear instruction from either a male or female voice.

Although its name makes reference to Buddhism, a religion in which meditation plays a key role, the app is intended for use by anybody interested in mental wellbeing.

"The only prerequisite is having a mind," Rohan Gunatillake said. "Its origins are in the Buddhist tradition, but it's totally independent. It's a way of training your attention in such a way that it develops positive qualities in your mind."

The app also has a two-player mode allowing friends to meditate together.

Even though the app makes few references to spiritual realization, if it succeeds at getting more people to meditate those results should follow for at least a subset of them. The dashboard shown above looks a little hokey, but if that means more people see meditation as accessible and take up the practice I'm nonetheless all for it.

One of these days I should see about developing my own set of apps devoted to magical practices. I can imagine, for example, an "Evoker" app that would bring up the appropriate conjurations for spirits and so forth as you reach each phase of an evocation ritual. I could implement it by putting together some kind of standard ritual notation that would allow you to import a specific text file for the ritual you want to perform, and in fact the ritual template I include in Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy would be a good place to start as far as the structure goes. It wouldn't have that big a market, but I can immediately see how useful it could be for serious practicing magicians.