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If you want ways to reduce your stress levels, improve your mental health, or even discover your own personal path to spiritual enlightenment, then meditation is the key.
The hardest part of trying anything new is knowing where to start. The good news is that in this digital age, just about everything is available at our fingertips. Even though meditation is an ancient practice steeped in history, the best resources are now available digitally.
This is why I want to talk about a meditation app called InsightTimer. I used it to learn how to meditate, and I couldn’t be more impressed by the app and blown away by the results.
If you’re ready to learn how to meditate, here’s everything you need to know about InsightTimer and some alternatives.
What You Can Expect from InsightTimer
People voted InsightTimer the “happiest app in the world” and has more than 250k 5-star reviews. This is proof that it’s one of the best meditation apps on the market. It’s easy for me to see why, too. I’m a huge fan of the app because not only did it teach me how to meditate, but it also keeps on giving and guiding me through more techniques.
It has the largest free library of guided meditations offered by any app with more than 24,000 tracks and more added daily. So, there’s more than enough content to work through without running out of new tracks or having to upgrade to their premium plan.
You can start off by listening to one of their guided meditation tracks and following the instructions. Or, you can sign up for their free, 7-day, introductory meditation course. This is a thorough journey that takes you through all the basics of meditation. I recommend this for beginners and it’s how I got started.
The outline of their meditation course looks like this:
Lesson 1 – You learn how to breathe and recognize the sensation of breathing and how it should feel while you meditate.
Lesson 2 – You learn how to focus on the external environment and the role your senses play while meditating.
Lesson 3 – You learn how to detach from your thoughts and increase your focus and attention.
Lesson 4 – You learn how to connect your mind and body, perform a body scan, and release tension.
Lesson 5 – You learn how to explore your emotions and identify your thoughts and feelings.
Lesson 6 – You learn how to consciously cultivate a feeling or state with a technique called “intention setting.”
Lesson 7 – You learn how to find your inner stillness using a mantra. This helps you reach a deep place of stillness within yourself.
I started meditating by working though this 7-day course. It taught me everything I needed to know about meditation and answered all my questions. After I learned how to meditate and understood the feelings and experiences I should expect, I branched out and started using other tracks from their library.
As you can see, this app has a lot of depth for meditation beginners and experts alike. It’s open to meditation teachers and musicians to add as much of their content as they wish. This gives them a platform and a huge audience to share their work with and gives us, the users, lots of free content.
Free Alternatives to InsightTimer
Although InsightTimer has made more than enough of their content free to use, there are some alternative options. I recommend checking out these:
YouTube
YouTube is always the go-to, free resource for any video or audio content. There are hundreds of thousands of meditation tracks and resources to browse. The only real downside is the advertisements that pay for the content. It can be a real mood killer when you’re in a state of relaxation and an ad comes on.
Spotify
Spotify is an audio platform that has a huge collection of meditation tracks, albums, and pre-built playlists. The downside to the free version is that there are advertisements and you can’t manually select tracks from albums (they play in random order). However, it’s still a great resource for meditation audio.
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