But a prime example of its usefulness for me personally is being able to see how the dosage of my daily zazen peaks on Wednesdays and Thursdays (obviously with the assistance of the zendo sittings), followed by a steady decrease to reach the weekly minimum on Tuesdays. Sounds suffocating, or even a little too much like the Big Brother? Maybe. As with many ‘self-feedback’ apps for running and cycling etc., Insight Timer logs all the meditation sessions for which you used the timer and neatly presents the data in bar charts, daily averages, frequencies and total time. Having read the above, one would be justified to think, ‘So he bought an app as a vanity item with some pretty sounds to abandon a perfectly functional mobile phone alarm.’ However, it turned out that an even more useful function of Insight Timer was its statistics page. There are other functions such as guided meditation or ambient sound while the timer is running, but as I am so used to silent zazen, I have not even once attempted to use those. You can place the sounds at the beginning, the middle (if you are sitting for longer than the usual 30 minutes for instance), and the end of your zazen session at home in lieu of our friendly doans at zendo, to go off after chosen lengths of time. To my ears, the closest sound to kesu belongs to dengze – but this only becomes available after an in-app purchase at £2.99. Insight Timer provides eight different Tibetan singing bowl sounds to choose from. (Such an emphasis on logic somehow feels rather misplaced in a Zen group, but never mind.) I was trying hard but not entirely successfully to make zazen a habit in my daily life (and I am still trying!), so it was only a logical conclusion that I went on a search for a meditation timer app with the sounds similar to that of the kesu bell at zendo rather than the alarming sound of… well, the mobile phone alarm. At that time, I had also just learnt from a few books that habits necessarily depend on being triggered by certain behavioural cues – rituals in our case. Just before I started using Insight Timer, I had heard both John Suigen and Andy Tanzan talking about how they repeated the same ritualistic elements from zazen in the zendo – offering candle light and incense at the Butsudan, ringing a small bell, and reciting the verses – at home as much as possible, and how they felt those rituals helped their zazen.
Anyway, it is also very popular within the SWZ Sangha, so this piece might be more relevant for the last remaining few members who do not already use it. How do I know it has been 98 days? More on that later. Insight Timer ( ) is a meditation app that I have used every single day for 98 days now. But can they also be useful in a more traditional style of Zen practice? Here is Woo’s experience: Smartphone apps have become very popular and widely used, especially by Mindfulness practitioners. Here Woo-Young Tetsugen Yang looks at some of the technology of meditation.
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