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...

An afternoon without network connection

This afternoon, the network connection of my office computer suddenly broke down. I spent a lot of time first trying to figure out what happened, rebooting a few times, then calling the service desk and finally having two technicians trying to solve the problem.
However, I was amazed to discover how much I am depending on the university network for my work:
- Word crashed because normal.dot is saved on a remote drive.
- MathCad crashed because my license is on the server.
- I wanted to put some references in Endnote, but I like searching for them online and then importing them into my Endnote library. So without network connection I couldn't do this.
- I wanted to look up some references which I found in a paper, but I couldn't connect to Scopus.
- I also couldn't e-mail the service desk. Luckily my phone was still working.

The most critical part was by far losing the MathCad license. I wanted to make one more calculation for my analysis report, but I couldn't. Since I was waiting all the time (first for action from the service desk, then for the technicians to come, then for a third person to reactivate my computer in the network), I wasted a fair amount of time.

This, however, made me think about how dependent I've become on the network for carrying out my research. With my personal laptop I can do more in case of network failure than with my office computer.