The buddhify app can help you to meditate on a busy schedule

No spare time to meditate? Inner calm is just seconds away. Johanna Thomas-Corr looks for enlightenment, 21st-century style
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Johanna Thomas-Corr19 September 2016

There’s an old Zen proverb: “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes every day — unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.”

But, c’mon, who actually has a full hour? Even 20 minutes is as rare and precious as an undelayed Southern rail service. We all know that meditation is good for us, that mindfulness techniques can ease our over-boiling anxiety, enhance our attention, develop our inner resilience etc. But we can’t all be Zen monks, pausing to consider families of snails as they cross our paths.

It was a conversation with one such monk in Thailand that encouraged London entrepreneur Rohan Gunatillake to retool meditation techniques specifically for the demands of the 21st century.

The monk told him not to practise meditation as if he lived in the forest. It was every bit as valid to find an approach that worked in the city.

The result is buddhify (£3.99), a meditation app for people who are already doing other stuff.

Gunatillake insists that the app does not make a travesty of the Buddha’s teachings. “If you are a dedicated spiritual practitioner and are working towards something such as classical Zen enlightenment then 10-20 minutes is probably not enough,” he admits. “But that’s not where most of us are. Most of us are just interested in reducing our stress, managing our difficult emotions and being a bit more calm. And if that’s the case then 10-20 minutes a day can be really effective.”

So you need to find ways to make meditation work within your own environment. In Gunatillake’s recent book, This is Happening (Macmillan, £12.99), he makes a case for “mobile mindfulness”. Instead of guilt-tripping you about how long you spend online, he argues that technology can assist your path to inner calm by responding to your environment.

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Buddhify’s interface asks “What are you doing?” to which you can respond with a whole range of options, from being with your family to just waiting for a friend. “Other products tend to put you on a linear route through their meditation whereas we prefer to be more personalised,” Gunatillake says.

But can we really find serenity in these scraps of time? In those weird minutes between putting the kids to bed and teeing up a half-decent film on Netflix? Well, Lynne Goldberg, the creator of the app OMG I Can Meditate (free to download but a monthly membership of £9.99), reckons you can.

“Studies have shown that the benefits of meditation can be experienced by simply practising regularly for about 10 minutes a day,” she says. “Regular frequency is more important than duration. So 10 minutes a day is better than sitting for an hour once a week. In one study conducted at Harvard, meditators actually changed their brains physically by practising for just 20 minutes for eight weeks.”

Goldberg was a high-flying, type-A stresshead who took up meditation after struggling to deal with infertility, adoption, a miscarriage, divorce and the loss of her career. Her experience inspired her to develop an app with hundreds of meditations and visualisations — all voiced by her — to help break destructive thinking or cycles of behaviour.

She likens her approach to exercise. “It helps us to first train our attention muscle and then progressively guide us to notice what repetitive dramas we torture ourselves with. Within just a week or two, the difference can be felt.”

Many of the sessions are related to specific situations: “My family drives me mad” or “My boss is a jerk”. Here, Goldberg’s soothing Canadian voice advises you to “step back from the conflict” and “feel the powerful flow of breath working its magic through both your mind and your body, easing away all tension”.

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If it saves us from boring our friends with these dramas over seven glasses of chardonnay, it seems worth a try.

Another favourite of the harassed professional is American psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach, who has a huge global following and offers sessions in downloadable podcasts (tarabrach.com) that last anything from one minute to half an hour. She also offers thoughtful lectures through her YouTube channel on everything from “Living with Uncertainty” to “How Rain Can Enable Intimacy”.

Though with all of these apps and podcasts, be careful not to oversubscribe or you’ll receive a panic-attack inducing level of emails and phone alerts. Which is just sooo un-zen.

Follow Johanna Thomas-Corr on Twitter: @JohannaTC

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