meditation timers

In my solo practice, I've tried a variety of ways to mark the time.

Most recently, I've used the Lesson One guided meditation from the Insight Meditation correspondence course (about 45 minutes, with non-intrusive comments from the instructor here and there), a meditation timer app for my Treo with various appropriate sounds at certain times I programmed, and this evening tried the Treeleaf Zendo downloadable timer.

The guided meditation and Treeleaf Zendo timer are both downloaded to my Zune (an mp3 player). With noise-canceling headphones, I can more or less block out the world with this method, which isn't quite like being in the zendo and introduces weird side-effects like hearing internal body noises like breathing more intimately than you ever really asked for. But the noise-canceling headphones are optional, and your mileage may vary with this option anyway.

After the final bowl ringing, the Treeleaf Zendo timer has a female voice saying, "Thank you for sitting with the Treeleaf Zendo, a Soto sangha, Jendo Cohen, teacher," and provides musical credits, the website URL, etc. It's a little odd, but can be easily enough avoided by stopping the track when you're done.

The guided meditation is broken into a few discrete tracks, so once you know which one(s) you want to sit through, you can just make a playlist and get sitting.

Of them all, I find my Treo app to be the most universally useful. I currently have it set to signal me through a 60-minute session of zazen and kinhin (with no special need to signal sanpai, as it simply takes place as the final activity).

There's something to be said for the guided meditation approach, though. A well-trained teacher interjects in a manner intended to help one get through a sitting session, which can be useful.

And as anyone with an mp3 player or sound-enabled computer can play mp3s, the Treeleaf Zendo provides a no-cost, perfectly good option.

There are lots of meditation timers online and even physical devices that ring chimes & such, but these are a few I've tried recently and found satisfactory.

Audio Dharma has one I haven't tried in actual sitting practice, but downloaded & checked for any obvious quirks. I found none. These are also free of charge mp3s. Audio Dharma Meditation Timer