Mindfulness Apps I Love: “Insight Timer”

In my last post, I sang the praises of the Calm phone app. However, I admitted that a number of the features are only available to users who subscribe. This was an investment I chose to make because I was dealing with a cancer diagnosis and needed quality meditation support to help with my anxiety.

I also didn’t know about Insight Timer at the time.

For those who are looking for more free options, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better mindfulness phone app than Insight Timer, which I have grown to value highly and use daily. While the app does have a subscription option, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with what it offers to unpaid users.

These are the features that I adore:

1) 15,000+ Meditations! That’s gotta be some sort of record. And there are new meditations being added all the time, which means that you could do a different meditation every day. I constantly keep finding new favorite meditations…

2) Variety, variety, variety! The number of options is mind-boggling. Choose from different teachers, lengths, recording types (meditation, music, lecture), and of course, a gazillion categories that encompass any imaginable meditation benefit, origin and practice, not to mention an increasing number of languages — I speak a rather esoteric language from a small country and was still able to find a couple of meditations in the lingo. Truly, it’s worth searching through the app to see what a broad selection is available. If you’re interested in meditating to it or about it or because of it, chances are Insight Timer has it.

3) The Timer: This is a fully customizable meditation timer that includes a variety of background sounds and meditation bells to choose from, with the ability to set the session length and bell intervals. It’s ideal for those times when you want to meditate without voice guidance. I particularly appreciate that once your session ends, the background sound continues to play in case you want to extend your time.

4) And most importantly, most of the features are FREE! Quite frankly, meditation really should be accessible by all. It doesn’t seem right to limit people’s access to something like this based on their ability to pay for it. Insight Timer does have a “supporter” option, but as the developers explain, the fees support the umpteen teachers and composers who provide content, in addition to keeping the site free for most of us. Read more about Insight Timer‘s philosophy here.

For those who decide to subscribe and support the app, there are a number of benefits available, such as a selection of 10- and 30-day courses, a curated Daily Insight meditation every day, high-quality audio, offline listening and the like.

The only downside to such an overwhelming amount of meditations to choose from is that it can become, well, overwhelming. Additionally, you don’t always know what you’re getting due to the variety of teachers posting material, so you might need to do a little searching around. It’s almost guaranteed, however, that you will find something to suit your needs.