Anamaya Meditation App – Are You Ready for Peace & Calm in 2015?

Firstly, a very Happy New Year to all my lovely readers. This is the first blog post of the year and I’m hoping you’ve all had a great festive time with those you love and are refreshed and ready for what 2015 has in store.

I was sadly poorly before, during and after Christmas with a delightful fluey virus my youngest daughter decided to share with us all and I managed to come off worst. However, I suppose another way of looking at it is it gave my body a much needed chance to chuck out some toxicity making way for all the positive steps I’m aiming to put in place this year.

Photo Credit: Julia Allum

One of those is going to be meditation and this time I’m hopeful that I’ll finally get to grips with this often elusive practice. In my work as a Holistic Therapist before having my girls, I would find myself lost in active meditation when giving a massage or Reiki treatment, but when it comes to sitting quietly on my own, my busy brain will do anything other than sit for 10-20 minutes to re-group. I’m happy to do this with others in a group setting however when it boils down to it, it's all about forming a new habit and discipline, which appears to be an area I'm sorely lacking in !

My life as a busy Mum of 2 means I can easily give myself excuses as to why I don’t have the time to meditate, however I’ve noticed over recently years since losing my mother to cancer that I have stored up feelings of frustration and some anger that needs shifting. When I had my PND with my first daughter I found counselling, a change in diet and spiritual healing helped me to finally recover after many years of battling this illness. However with the grief of losing my Mum, I’ve allowed myself to push my feelings away giving the excuse that having to look after my youngest who was a baby at the time meant I couldn’t and didn’t need to address the grief.

I’ve realised recently that the remaining frustration and anger I still have needs to be released as it starts creeping into all areas of your life without you realising. So when an email popped into my inbox in November asking whether I’d be interested in trying out a new meditation app from Anamaya which was being released in December, I knew the Universe was telling me it was time to seriously fit this practice into my life.

In this post I’m going to tell you all about this exciting new meditation app and then I’ll follow up with another post detailing my progress. As I’ve been ill for the majority of time since receiving the app, I’ve decided to wait to the New Year to begin my practice. That way, I can be completely committed and focussed.

Anamaya is a Sanscrit word meaning “health” and Graham Doke who is the principle architect of this new meditation app works from the Anamaya Centre in Kensington, London. Formerly a city banker, Graham took up the practice of meditation 15 years ago. After being asked by many of his clients from across the world how they could practice their meditation in their own time, Graham devised this new app to aid this request making meditation accessible to all and to also demystify what it’s all about.

The Anamaya meditation app features 350 meditations, covering 11 different focus areas including a general section, anxiety, stress, relax, loud brain (that’s me!) pain, anger, sports and pregnancy.

Initially when you download the app, only currently available from the Apple Store, you receive the first 7 meditations from the General / Level 1 section of the app free. These never expire however, if you wish to progress further then you pay just £9.99 and this then gives you access to the whole library of meditations, visualisations and mindfulness techniques. In my opinion a small price to pay to have meditation at your fingertips wherever you may be.

You are in charge of how quickly you progress and each area is broken down into 4 levels with seven steps in each level. Each step has an accompanying exercise; either a mindful or visualisation exercise.

A lovely touch added to the app is that you unlock plants as you progress along your meditation journey. Your plant’s health level is determined by how often you meditate. You unlock different species as you progress including a Californian poppy, cherry tree bonsai and a lotus.

The features on this app allow you to set yourself a reminder to meditate, you can customise images and sounds to make your meditation experience more personal or you can turn these off completely. The app also has an inbuilt timer which allows you to independently meditate without sound when you are ready.

The app has a ‘Learning’ section which talks about why you should meditate, information about using the app and how to set up your practice. This app really does cover everything you will need to get going and continue on with confidence.

I’m really excited about using this app and as the first meditations are only 10 minutes working their way up to 20 minutes, I feel I really have no excuse to not give this my "all" for a month.

As mentioned before you can download the Amanaya app from the Apple App Store and there is further information on their website. If you are in the Kensington area their practice website is here. 

20% of all Anamaya proceeds go to Karuna Shechen, a humanitarian association in Nepal that provides education and health care to children living in remote regions of the Himalayas. 

Anamaya are on Twitter and they are also on Facebook.

********

So, do any of you meditate? Do leave me a comment if you do or even if you don’t as yet. Does this new app inspire you to give it a go? Let me know your thoughts.

Until next time x

Disclaimer: I was kindly given a £10 gift voucher allowing me to download the fully Anamaya Meditation App from the iTunes Apple Store. I am very much looking forward to reporting back on my personal progress with this great app.