Equanimity Project

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!