Equanimity Project

I’ve just released the latest version of the Equanimity iPhone app. This adds two major features which go together - journaling, and a detailed log of your sittings.

A number of people who have been using the tracking features of the timer have told me that they wanted to know exactly when they stopped their daily practice. They wanted to find out if there’s a specific kind of event in their lives that interferes with meditation. The new log has a graphical ‘music tie’ that connects together the sittings that were part of a run, so you can see exactly when it started and ended.

Journaling was the first feature request I got when I showed a much more basic version of the timer to a friend and long time meditator almost a year ago. I was unsure about the idea because I have been to various meditation schools which discourage people from taking notes - they see a risk of encouraging discursive thinking rather than meditative awareness.

In working on this project, I have decided that I don’t want to impose my own view of what meditation should be on people who use these tools. Since I kept getting requests for the journal, I decided to experiment with it myself so that I could learn how to make it work well.

I found that most days, I don’t feel like making a journal entry, but sometimes when there’s a change in my habits, or things feel different, I feel like writing it down. Because of this, the note-taking interface is designed to invite you to take a note at the end of a sitting while allowing you to ignore the invitation if you aren’t interested.

I also found that I do occasionally like to reflect on the notes I’ve made, and that when I do, I generally want to glance at the text of a series of notes to get a feel for them. I’d be lost if I had to remember which day I wrote a particular note in order to find it. To support this, the note listing shows a large preview of the text of each note so you can read through the notes just by scrolling. Many short notes fit completely in the preview, so you only have to open individual notes when they are particularly long.

Because notes are valuable and people have now started to build up a significant history of meditations, I’ve added export options. You can now export your complete sitting history (including notes) as a CSV file which will load into a spreadsheet such as Excel or most database programs. You can also export a nicely formatted email of just the journal entries, which is suitable for printing or copying into a wordprocessor. Finally, individual journal entries can be emailed. This is especially useful for people who want to post their sitting notes on a blog - most blog software allows you to make postings by email, so you can email individual entries direct to your blog.

I hope you find the new features helpful. If you aren’t going to use the journal, there is an option in the iPhone Settings App which lets you turn it off completely.

Please review and or rate the new version in the App store, and feel free to send me any feedback!

Until yesterday, my personal meditation practice was to sit for 35 minutes a day. I generally aim to do it in the morning, but that doesn’t always happen and sometimes I start as late as 11:30 in the evening. Since I’ve been using the timer and tracker, I haven’t missed a day in 54 days.

A couple of days ago, I came across the ‘iEvolve’ 90 day meditation challenge. I don’t know a lot about the group behind this, but I very much like the idea. It’s an online group of people who’ve committed to sit for one hour a day for 90 days, starting on March 1st.

There’s a social network where people are posting comments and advice, and there’s also a #90sits twitter hashtag, which seems very active.

For me, the interesting part of the challenge is the increase in sitting time to one hour a day. The time doesn’t have to be all in one sitting, so I’ve chosen to increase my first sitting of the day to 40 minutes, and then sit again later for 20 minutes. I think that doing two sittings will encourage me to do the first one earlier in the day, which I’ve found to be better for me.

I was very grateful to notice more than one person recommending the Equanimity Timer and Tracker to use during the 90 days and I was inspired to release an update with a new feature:

Using the iPhone Setting App, you can now set a minimum amount of meditation for a day to count in the continuous runs display. You can either specify a number of sittings, or a minimum sitting duration. If you choose a number of sittings, then for the day to count you must meditate at least that number of times. If you choose a minimum duration, then the total amount of time you meditate that day must equal or exceed what you specify, but it can be split across any number of sittings.

For the 90 sits challenge you can just choose “1 hour”.

The setting doesn’t alter your data, so you can change it at any time and the count will reflect the new rule. I’m now at day 1 of my 90 sits - today doesn’t count yet because I’ve only done 40 minutes so far, but when the 90 days is over, I may switch back to 1 sitting a day, so that my whole run is counted (it’ll be 144 days by that point!).

I started working on this feature some time ago in response to feedback from one of the early users (thanks!), and I’ve been testing it for a while. I put the finishing touches on it last night and sent it to Apple for review. Recently Apple has been doing a great job of getting updates out quickly, so I expect to see it go out some time in the next few days. The update also includes some minor improvements to the charts.

I hope you find this to be a helpful addition whatever kind of practice you are doing, and good luck if you are trying the 90 sits!

Tracking Meditation

For the past year, I’ve been trying to get into daily meditation practice. I’d been suffering from chronic stress and depression, and I knew from past experience that meditation could help me recover. Unfortunately, I also found that my feelings of depression also increased my resistance to actually sitting down to meditate.

I started The Equanimity Project because I wanted to make tools that would help me establish a daily practice, and that I could also make available to others.

A few weeks ago, I released a new version of the Equanimity meditation timer for iPhone that I’ve been working on. It has a number of features including some added at the request of people who contacted me about my earlier iPhone app, or emailed me from this website.

The most significant feature of the new timer, which I’ve wanted since I started the project, is that it tracks my meditations, and can show me honestly how I’m doing.

Before I added this feature, my best run (in 2009) of daily meditations lasted only 5 days. Since I added the tracking feature, 42 days ago, I’ve meditated every day.

I think the tracker works because it acts as a kind of mirror in which I can see my own progress honestly. Without it, I tended to deceive myself with thoughts like, “I meditated yesterday, but it’s late now - I’ll do it tomorrow”, and sometimes my self-deception could last days. Now that I have the tracker to show me what I’m really doing, thoughts like these are just silly.

What I didn’t expect was that my meditations are now easier to settle down to. As well as the simple effect of practice, I think a big reason is that I no longer waste energy arguing with myself about whether to sit or not.

I’d like to thank Alexandra Carmichael of CureTogether, for introducing me to the Bay Area Quantified Self group.  My experiences there strongly reassured me of the value of the project and encouraged me to develop it.

I gave a brief talk about the app and why I built it at their latest Show and Tell event.  You can see it here:

And if you want to see the slides that aren’t in the shot, those are here (PDF).

The app itself is available from the app store. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences with the the tracking, so if you try the app, please let me know how it goes for you.

It’s been a long time since my opening posting for the Equanimity Project in Feburary.  The biggest update to the project in that time was the release of the free iPhone timer in September.

I’ve switched over to use the excellent Tumblr as a blogging service.  This makes it much easier for me to post than the system I was using before, so I’ll be keeping the blog more current.

You may have noticed that the domain name for the site has changed.  Much as I loved the equanimity.info domain, people I spoke with found it difficult to type and it was very hard to communicate it in a brief conversation.  Meditate.mx is the new domain name.  You should find it much easier both to remember and to type, and if you want to recommend the site to any of your friends, it will hopefully be less of a mouthful.  The old domain name will continue to work for the next couple of months, but it will eventually expire, and so I recommend bookmarking the pages again soon.

I have opened a new twitter account for the project, meditatemx. Please follow me for announcements about the project, as well as the occasional posting about meditation.