Guided Meditation

Six levels, from first sit to open awareness

The levels follow the order of the mindfulness courses MBSR and MBCT: settle and find the breath first, then steady attention, then the body, then thoughts and feelings, then kindness, and finally awareness without a single focus. A week or two at each is plenty. Nothing is locked.

1. 1Arrive: settle in and find the breath.3 min or 5 min
2. 2Steady: count breaths from one to ten.10 min
3. 3Body: scan slowly from feet to head.10 min or 20 min
4. 4Notice: name what pulls you away.12 min
5. 5Heart: wish people well, you included.10 min
6. 6Open: let attention go wide.20 min

Start with what you need

• 5-Minute Guided MeditationFive minutes, a calm voice and a bowl at each end. Press Start: no account, no trial and nothing to install.
• Meditation for BeginnersStart with three minutes. The voice tells you what to do, and there is nothing to get right.
• Sleep MeditationA slow body scan for falling asleep. The voice gets quieter, then a soft bed of sound carries on and fades to silence. Nothing plays after it.
• Body Scan MeditationTen minutes, feet to head, noticing what is there. You are not trying to relax, though you might.
• Loving-Kindness MeditationTen minutes of simple wishes: for a friend, for yourself, for someone you hardly know, and for everyone.

How the sessions are made

We wrote every script ourselves, in plain words, following the structure of the mindfulness courses rather than copying anyone’s recordings. The voice is Kokoro, an open speech model, so it isn’t a person; we chose the softest of its voices and slowed the pace with pauses rather than by stretching the words. Each sentence was checked by a speech recogniser, to catch a mispronounced word, and by an automatic quality score before it went into the session.

Each session is a single audio file with its bells and silences, so it keeps going when your phone locks. The sleep session has its soft sound and its fade-out in the file too. The scenes and the live background sound are made in your browser while you watch, and the minutes you sit stay in your browser as well.

What meditation can and can’t do

The honest answer is: a modest amount, reliably. A review of 136 trials with 11,605 people outside clinics found that, in most settings, mindfulness programmes lowered anxiety, depression and distress and improved wellbeing compared with doing nothing, though not more than other active programmes. For sleep, a review of 18 trials found a moderate improvement in sleep quality compared with time-matched activities. Loving-kindness practice raised everyday positive emotions in a review of 24 studies.

Ten to fifteen minutes a day is a sensible aim. More isn’t needed, and on a hard day three minutes still counts.

If it doesn’t feel right

Meditation isn’t therapy, and it isn’t for every moment. If you feel panicky, numb or flooded, open your eyes, move, look around the room and name a few things you see, or stop. You can rest your attention on your hands, your feet or the sounds around you instead of the breath, and closing your eyes is always optional. With trauma or PTSD, practise with a professional. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says not to use meditation to replace care from a health professional.

If you are in crisis or thinking about suicide, talk to someone now: in the US call or text 988, in the UK and Ireland call Samaritans on 116 123, and elsewhere findahelpline.com lists free, confidential lines.

Sources

• Goyal et al., Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014
• Galante et al., Mindfulness-based programmes for mental health promotion in adults in nonclinical settings, PLOS Medicine, 2021
• Basso et al., Brief, daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non-experienced meditators, Behavioural Brain Research, 2019
• Rusch et al., The effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep quality: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2019
• Black et al., Mindfulness meditation and improvement in sleep quality among older adults with sleep disturbances, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015
• Zeng et al., The effect of loving-kindness meditation on positive emotions: a meta-analytic review, Frontiers in Psychology, 2015
• Farias et al., Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies: a systematic review, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2020
• Britton et al., Defining and measuring meditation-related adverse effects in mindfulness-based programs, Clinical Psychological Science, 2021
• NCCIH, Meditation and Mindfulness: Effectiveness and Safety
• Kabat-Zinn, An outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation, General Hospital Psychiatry, 1982
• Kokoro-82M, an open speech model (Apache-2.0)