I started my meditation journey with Headspace, so it has a special place in my heart. Still today it remains one of the best introductions to meditation, slowly and thoughtfully introducing ideas and techniques with each day of practice. The style of teaching, the tone of voice, and the pacing of the sessions have all been expertly honed.
But still for me, I found it just wasn’t working.
What Headspace taught me was the value of meditation. But its static content didn’t fit into my dynamic life. I felt like the skills I was learning weren’t transferable into the rest of my day.
The problem isn’t that Headspace is bad. But I found that:
- The techniques felt disconnected from what I was actually dealing with
- I outgrow the limited library for specific contexts (only 1 walking meditation!)
- The rigidity created friction, which killed habit, which killed practice
It taught me the value of meditation, but then quickly became the reason I stopped meditating altogether.
Discovering AI meditation
This is what led me to start exploring more personalised options, and to look into how AI may be able to help.
I started with the basics. Heading over to ChatGPT and asking it to write me a script. Of course, it wasn’t very good.
I gave it some more guidance. Some more information about me, such as my journey with meditation so far, what I’d been up to recently, and what I had hoped AI meditation could do for me. This time, the response that came back was much more personable. It reframed the things I had told it through the lens of mindfulness. It allowed me to see things slightly differently, and in a way I hadn’t thought of before. Simply, I was impressed.
But of course this was a long shot away from a Headspace session. The biggest difference being that this was a paragraph of text on my screen, and that Headspace was a voice in my ear.
I then spent the next 6 months building a system that brought these two things together. The details are technical and long, and not the subject of this post, but the results were what really surprised me.
Having guided meditation sessions that actually fit the moment is a profoundly different experience than what I was used to. The topics discussed, the techniques used, the length of the session were all perfectly tuned to me.
The ability of the AI to take in my situation as context, to reframe it through the lens of mindfulness, to deliver it in the style that fits with me is something that traditional apps like Headspace just cannot offer. The ability to have your situation shown back to you from a different perspective is sometimes all that’s needed to help bring in some clarity.
After developing InTheMoment to the point of being able to use it for consistent daily practice, I’ve found that it’s become such a powerful tool for helping me to actually apply the teachings and techniques of meditation into my own life.
Meditation, for me, is a way of thinking. It’s a frame of mind. And AI meditation allows you to see how you can apply that framing to everything in your life. From tiny routine events like walking the dog, to more significant ones like moving countries, AI meditation allows you to see these things differently. It allows you to cut through the background chatter, and to see these events clearly for what they are. And like anything, through regular practice you begin to be able to do this alone, without trying.
Bringing structure to AI Meditation
One thing though that I did miss was the structure of following Headspace’s courses. The order of practice with Headspace was not random - it had clearly been well thought out. The lessons were ordered specifically to build upon each other. To introduce new ideas slowly and gradually. And the techniques within each were specifically chosen to match.
This is something that I sought to bring to InTheMoment. How could I add structure and consistency, whilst still allowing for the sessions to be personalised and adaptable?
I decided to solve this in two ways. The first was ensuring that every session has context of the previous ones. Understanding the user’s most recent sessions is critical to ensuring that subsequent ones have a sense of continuity in their teachings and techniques.
The second was the introduction of playlists. These are structured courses, where each session inside has a human written focus. These are consistent for all users of InTheMoment, meaning that two people following the same playlist will be taught the same teachings.
The content of the playlists lessons is not rigid, but instead like a curriculum. The sessions will follow it, ensuring that every point is introduced and explained, but the exact method of delivery is not fixed. This allows for the content to stay structured, but for the delivery to still be personalised to the individual listener.
The combination of these two features means that practice with InTheMoment now feels structured and directional. There’s a thread that links together yesterday’s practice to today’s, and this week’s to last week’s. It turns individual lessons into a structured journey, whilst remaining adaptable and personalised.
It’s for this reason now that I can never go back to Headspace. It served me well, and I think it’s an amazing service that works great to introduce people to the ideas of meditation. But the added use of AI meditation was what actually allowed me to apply the teachings of meditation to everyday living.