Equanimity Project

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.