Guided meditation apps are there in large numbers these days. These applications provide a similar format of meditation where someone is speaking and you’re following the voice. This way of meditation is a guided meditation. There are a number of things that are wrong with these applications.
Marketing of Mindfulness
The first thing that comes to my mind is marketing. When you see them market these applications, you read an ad that says “Meditate for becoming better” or “Meditate for focus”. This is misguiding people about what meditation is. Meditation is not done with the purpose of getting something in return. It’s just the process of focusing your energy and mind on a certain thing. As soon as you lose focus, you just bring it back and that’s the GIST of it.
Meditation is not a one-stop solution to all your problems. You can’t have meditation as a tool to perform well in physical labor. And it’s not a silver bullet which can make you drastically better in a day or 10 days. By marketing their apps like this, they’re misguiding people about what meditation is and what it helps you achieve. I’ll add that if you’re looking for reducing anxiety or if you’re looking for focus or if you’re an athlete, Mindfulness can help you long term but it can’t help you in a 10 day 20 minute per day course.
Gamification in Apps
The gamification in mindfulness apps is another problem, Apps like headspace shows you how many days you’ve meditated and what is your longest meditation streak. This is making meditation materialistic in nature. And this sort of digital materialism leads to people completing their meditation without meditating just for the streak to go on. This will not help anyone but the application developer. Now instead of thinking clearly about other things, you’ve one more issue in your life which is completing the meditation to keep the streak going. This makes us the opposite of mindful as we’re not able to focus on the present.
Goal-based meditations
Mindfulness or meditation apps always come with a set of goal-based guided meditations. The thing is mindfulness can never be based on a goal, and practicing mindfulness for a goal is not giving the practice a fair chance to help you. Having a goal in your mind doesn’t let you live completely in the current moment and you’re thinking about the future instead. Which is not in line with the mindfulness monks from the east practice.
In mindful meditation, We focus our attention on something [can be your breath] and bring back the focus on it as soon as we lose focus. We focus on the sound that is around us, or we feel the air and environment that we’re in. We live in the present for that amount of time, but in goal-based meditation, we focus on something which is not there yet. And this can stir up uncontrollable things in our mind, we might start dreaming about the possibilities and think about what will happen in the future. It can end up in a feeling of anxiety.
