Our favorite meditation apps.

Headspace

This app has a free 10-day crash course for learning meditation. Each meditation is about 10 minutes long. It includes videos with great cartoons to help you understand what you are doing in a very simple way. If you love it, there are a lot more courses you can buy for a monthly fee.

Insight Timer

This app is 100% free and has thousands of guided meditations of varying lengths and styles. Some have background music and some don’t. If you are a pro, or prefer to guide yourself, it also has a simple timer.

We recommend that newbies start out with basic mindfulness/vipassana or loving kindness/metta meditations. The former creates more attention and presence in your daily life, the latter can help promote more feelings of joy and gratitude.

A neat thing about this app is that it can help you build community around meditation. It shows you who is meditating elsewhere in the world, or even in your own neighborhood.

Mindfulness Coach

This free app was developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs to teach vets how to meditate. It has 9 guided meditations, and information about the benefits of mindfulness, making it a great resource for those who may not be naturally drawn to meditation.