The beautifully designed and comfortable device resembles a rubbery stone that’s clipped to the waistband or to a bra a suite of sensors inside detects the expansion and contraction of the abdomen, and other sensors, akin to those in a fitness tracker, detect steps, activity, and body position. The idea behind Spire is that this bodily rhythm reflects the rhythm of the mind, and if we can be aware of and change our breathing, we can impact our mental state in turn. Its technology detects breathing, the only bodily function we have conscious control over that both reflects and impacts our state of mind. While most wearable tech products sense only activity, Spire provides a more holistic picture of your day. The only downside is that although Mind advertises that it does remember your preferred meditation length, it didn’t work for me I had to reset it each time. Focus on your breathing” and finally “You are almost done,” followed by a gong. Drag the color-gradated slider, which resembles a comb (the only oddity here), to the desired length of your meditation session and hit “Start.” There’s no countdown clock and no voice prompts, and there are only two instructions, both silent and onscreen: first “Relax. The simplest of meditation apps, Mind is essentially just a timer. You choose the length of your session, the circle’s color and pulsation rate (which takes some adjusting to match to your inhales and exhales), and an ending chime, then tap “Start.” While it may be distracting for some to watch a screen rather than the mind during practice, the graphic focus may be helpful for eyes-open meditators. There are, refreshingly, no instructions or countdown clock, and the settings are minimal. Whereas most apps instruct you to close your eyes and observe your breath, Zentered has you focus on an onscreen colored circle that expands and contracts in sync with your breathing. Zentered is the perfect app for those who can’t bear to be parted from their screens, even for meditation practice. And birdsong aside, the presence of a $300 blinking headband near your cushion might just be motivation enough to sit down. But the complications and gadgetry of Muse also add a sense of ceremony and novelty to meditation practice, which for many can be such a simple activity that it’s easy to avoid doing it. And once the headband has registered and all you want is to start meditating, it’s tedious to go through the one-minute “brain calibration,” which is required before each session and involves brainstorming about categories such as holidays, kitchen utensils, and sports teams after a few days you get tired of musing on these topics. That being said, the app does track your session-to-session progress with bar graphs of “calm time” and provides motivational challenges and rewards, like badges indicating the number of birds during each session.Ī major drawback to Muse is the setup: it can be frustrating to get the headband’s sensors to register each area of your scalp. It can be hard not to get excited by the silence and birdsong, which in turn makes your brain more active, which causes the storm sounds to flare up part of the point is developing equanimity in the face of your ever-changing mind. A calm mind produces silence punctuated by birdsong. The app responds to the headband’s sensors: the less active your brain is, the more subdued the sounds are. Muse’s meditation focuses on “calming the weather”-which takes the form of sound effects (wind, rain, waves)-in your mind. Muse is like a Fitbit for meditators: a mobile app paired with a Bluetooth-enabled brainwave-sensing headband.
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