Treat Yourself to Relaxation: Silva Relaxation App

Silva Relaxation is a free app that can be used as part of your meditation practice.

If you enjoy these recordings with headphones, you can use them as a means to relax and shut out the outer world while you are on-the-go.

The relaxation exercises guide you through an extended version of a body scan, and then help you to be centered in your breathing.

After a stressful day of thesis writing, or an overly busy conference or meeting, I've used these recordings to let go of the day and get some quiet time.

Pranayama iPhone app

It's been a while since I wrote about mindfulness and meditation, and the reason is that in all the thesis stress, I've been slacking off.


However, I recently started doing some breathing exercises, based on the instructions from an iPhone app. It is called Pranayama by Saagara and -of course, as a cheap graduate student- I use the free, lite version of the app.


Here's what I really like about the app:

1. Guided with just two sounds

The app uses a sound for inhaling and one for exhaling. As a result, you can simply close your eyes and focus on the breathing meditation.

2. Different levels

The free version offers two breathing schemes, and for each scheme you have 5 options for the length of breathing. So, even though it has way less options than the full version (of which I read in the comments that it still has ads in there, so probably it's a bad buy!), it does have enough material in there to keep you entertained for quite some time.

3. Time

You can chose from different options between 5 minutes to 60 minutes to time your breathing meditation session.

4. Automatic tracking

The app also has a log, that gives an overview of what you have exercised so far. However, I just checked my own log and apparently the memory is cleared...