There's an app for that!

For a while now I've wanted to try meditating. Everything I read about it, both from the woo woo spiritual angle and from the hard core scientific angle, talks about how good it is for you. Your body is filled with lots of good calming chemicals (hormones) that do wonderous things.  It reduces the hard core edgy chemicals that us semi uptight folks typically flood our body with.  A quick google search of meditation benefits reveals '100 Benefits of Meditation'.  100!  That's nothing to sneeze at.
Some of my favorites:

• Increased brain wave coherence.
• Mind ages at slower rate
• Purifies your character
• Reduction of free radicals, less tissue damage
• produce lasting beneficial changes in brain electrical activity

 And that's just 5 things I plucked off the list. There are a hundred of those suckers, each one better than the last. You can see why I would want to snatch up this wonder drug.

So, last week I didn't sleep very well and decided it was time to give this meditation thing a try. There are different ways to 'learn' to meditate. You can take classes. You can pay to download meditation sessions. Before diving in to far, I decided to try some free youtube videos. (I wasn't watching, just listening). But before I got too deeply into my first youtube session the nice meditator man started talking about god. And, well, I am not going to talk too much about me and god in my public blog, but I will mention that when someone starts talking to me about god via youtube, the whole meditation thing pretty much falls apart.

And then I had a brilliant thought.  There's an app for that. I pulled out the old Iphone. Searched for meditation and virtually plopped down $1.99 for a mindfulness meditation app. I can now meditate in increments of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 minutes. My little meditation app man is very  hands off. He starts me off getting me all comfy and focusing on my breathing.  He talks to me gently about being relaxed yet focused like a mother watching a young child and then pretty much disappears. Except every couple minutes he surprises me and pops out of no where!  Usually (magically) just as my brain just begins to wander away from my breathing to some future chore I need to do or thing I need to dread. He pops in and reels me back. He tells me that's just fine, not to change my experience in any way, but gain control of my damn thoughts already.

I think I've done it four times this week and so far I give it two thumbs up!  We'll see how long I keep it up. But watch out, I may be perfect soon!