Yoga and meditation are related to each other. In yoga, the person has to perform various exercises (Asanas). Although you must sit or stand in one place while practicing yoga, you may feel tired, and your body may sweat after a yoga session. Several yoga asanas require users to keep their eyes closed. Meditation is all about relaxing the mind without exerting pressure on body organs. It can help you sleep better and get rid of anxiety. While meditating, a person must keep his eyes closed. To make sure that you’re meditating in the right way, you should follow the right instructions. Here is the list of the best free apps for practicing meditation at home or the workplace:
Best meditation apps for Android and iPhone
Calm
Calm is the most popular meditation app for iOS and Android OS. It helps you sleep better. It also relaxes your mind with eye soothing animated images, mood refreshing stories, and breathing exercises. Calm downloads the animations and audio files when you connect your phone to the WiFi hotspot/router. It features several meditation sessions. The sessions last for up to 10 minutes. Initially, only the first session is unlocked. You must unlock the remaining sessions by completing the preceding sessions. You can configure the app to download files over WiFi or a cellular data connection.
Calm maintains a history of your meditation sessions. If you haven’t used it while meditating, you can manually add session duration, time, and date. Calm provides a reminder utility to schedule reminders. Once the reminder triggers, you can start meditating. The app can sync your data with Google Fit. If you’re using this app on a low-end phone, you can disable animations from the settings panel for a better experience. Calm allows you to turn on the airplane mode (offline mode). If you turn on this mode, this application will download files of size up to 2GB.
Headspace
Want to relax your nerves and overcome anxiety? Want to sleep better? Try out the free Headspace app. HS is a top-rated meditation app for iPhone and Android that teaches you simple yet effective meditation techniques. Headspace is suitable for beginners. People who have been meditating for a while can also use it. Headspace features many short and long-duration voice-guided meditation sessions. Short sessions last for up to 3 minutes. Longer sessions last for 10 minutes. Headspace allows you to discover new styles of meditation. If you can’t meditate right now, you can set a reminder in Headspace so that you can meditate later in the day or tomorrow. This application has a timeline section where you’ll find your daily goals and details of your previous sessions. If your friends use Headspace, you can follow them and see their progress.
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Insight Timer
Insight Timer is an iOS/Android application that features over 25K guides. It lets you follow instructors, participate in forum discussions, get tips from co-meditators, etc. Insight Timer enables you to explore the voice guides by their topics. It has a detailed statistics section and many features. Here’s our full review of Insight Timer.
Let’s Meditate
LM is a free meditation app for Android phones and tablets that displays a list of voice guides on its interface and an option to download them. Once you download the file, tap the play button, and obey the instructions that you hear. Let’s Meditate enables you to sort the tracks by their names, length, popularity, etc. It lets you remove/delete the tracks you’ve heard. You can configure LM to remind you to meditate every day. LM displays new guides on the main interface. Open the settings interface and tap the “old meditations” option to see older guides. LM lets you pause/resume the track’s playback. You can also forward its playback by 10 seconds. Let’s Meditate has a statistics section where you can see the number of minutes you’ve mediated and the number of times you’ve used the application.
Let’s Meditate is not available on iTunes, but an iOS app called Present offers similar features as LM. In addition to tracks, Present also has beautiful animations.
Also see: Best Yoga Apps for Android
Meditation Music
MM from Relaxio gives users access to nerve-calming high-definition music files. Users must select a file from the list and set the time for which the app should play the file. Once the application starts playing the file, you can sit upright and close your eyes or lay down on the bed. Unlike Calm and Headspace, MM doesn’t ask you to register an account, nor does it downloads additional files from the web. Apart from music, this meditation app sets a beautiful HD wallpaper as a background image for the inbuilt music player.
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Om Meditation All-in-One!
Chanting mantras is one of the most effective ways of meditation. Mantras bring a person closer to God and help in relaxing the body. OM-AIO features several meditation tracks. You must select a track that you find easy to chant. Once you do so, the app begins playing the track, and at the same time, it displays the duration for which the app has been playing the track. The app lets users add tracks in their native language. OM-AIO makes you aware of the meaning of the mantra you’ll chant. It pauses the track automatically when your phone receives a call. This application enables you to set a background picture for the main interface. It also lets you change the color theme. You can configure OM-AIO to repeatedly play a track for a fixed duration.
Other top-rated meditation apps for iPhone and Android that are similar to Headspace, Calm, etc:
Also read: Best health apps for Android and iPhone
Final thoughts: If you’re unable to concentrate on work or you can’t sleep or focus on studies, install and use one of the meditation apps I’ve mentioned above. If used correctly, these applications can reduce your stress and kill anger. They can also motivate people who are going through a rough patch.
