Medito

Trying to Learn to Meditate

How many times have you wanted to do something but had no idea where to begin? This was me with meditation. I tried reading about it on my own and doing it myself and it failed miserably. Eventually, I lost all motivation to try due to disappointment after disappointment, which caused my version of giving up.

It wasn't like I wasn't meditating, I was, but it took me longer to get into and stay in that headspace. I felt more frustrated than it was worth at this point.

Meditation was relegated to a “back of my mind” shelf. I prefer not to give up on things so they get put on hold with the hope to revisit them with better knowledge, wisdom, and tools.

App Roulette

The game is to search for an app by topic (meditation for beginners) and try several until I find one that works for me. The problem with going by ratings in Android is that they are so easily tampered with. Simply try again and again.

It's a great way to find new and unknown apps that end up outperforming the advertised ones.

Being somewhat wary of Android ratings, I would be more cautious about their 4.9 star ratings on an entirely free app. This app has no advertisements, no paid extras, just everything, free.

I was completely skeptical. Curiosity made me try it anyway. I mean, what app is totally free and gets that kind of rating?

One that's life-changing.

Meditation, Finally

I scrolled through the reviews while it downloaded and installed, not that installation took much time at all. While I spent more time here than I had intended to, I noticed someone from the developing company attempted to address every issue that someone had posted. There are a lot of developers out there that occasionally address things but this developer is very active in attempting to solve the things presented by users so they can use their app.

I'm a little impressed, but it remains to be seen how it works out.

Getting Started, Beginner & Intermediate courses is the first section I see. This note describes the purpose of the section and parts that may be unnecessary for intermediate users. The section includes an introduction, learning to sit, beginner course, intermediate course, and a 30 day challenge. Each one of these included multiple sessions and some notes to assist. This was only the first of many sections, or packs.

I did the first Welcome session and the next session, 'What is mindfulness?'. Those four minutes marked the beginning of finally being able to meditate correctly.

Medito

Medito currently offers about twenty different packs with both guided and unguided meditation sessions in a range of topics. And, yes, it really is completely free. They were even a winner in Google Play’s Best Apps of 2020 awards.

The first thing that impressed me about Medito was the critical comments in the Google Play store. The majority of those comments were about a certain feature not working correctly. Very little of those critical comments were about the actual content. It should be obvious that this is not going to work for everyone, nothing does.

The packs and sessions are developed by researchers and experts, all volunteers, that continuously work to provide updates with new, useful packs. Medito has forums that anyone can sign up for to offer suggestions or volunteer services.

It doesn’t have what?

Nothing is perfect. Not me, not you, and not this app. While the developers continually work to add new sessions, there’s some things missing that maybe they should sidetrack to.

As awesome as this app is, with features like your current daily streak, your longest streak, and the total minutes meditated, it does not have notifications. What app doesn’t notify you, like, all the time? This one.

With what they have accomplished with their current sessions, I would love to see how they would create frequency sessions for chakras and healing.

Beyond Little Thoughts

The Medito app really was life-changing for me. Finally being able to properly meditate and learn mindfulness set me on a path to better myself, which eventually led me here, writing my experience about it. While things like this don’t happen for everyone, nothing will ever happen if you don’t try, fail, and try again until you find you.

What are your thoughts?