One of the hardest tasks to accomplish in our crazy contemporary world is finding a moment of calm and peace. Between cell phones, e-mail, chores, work, responsibilities, television, friends, family, and neighbors, sometimes it feels like we can’t find time for ourselves.

A couple weeks ago at Love is the Key®, we discovered an application for iPhone and the Web that has helped us find that sense of calm. It’s called Equanimity, and it’s an app that helps guide users through a meditative practice.

The main part of the app is a simple timer, which can be set for virtually any minute setting depending on how long you want to meditate. You can then choose to break up that period of time with chimes and bells. The really cool part of the app, though, is how it helps you track your progress.

In an easy-to-read format, the app remembers how often you meditate, how long, and how your time has progressed over the course of the year. The app nudges you to meditate more by showing the longest streak of days you have meditated and how often on a daily to weekly schedule. This data helps encourage you to carve out that time in your day to meditate without making you feel bad if you miss a day here or there. It is a truly positive approach to a positive act.

The app also lets you type notes into a journal for each setting. This can help you track your mood and personal feelings. This tracking has helped encourage us to keep meditating because we now have a record of the positive feelings that we gain both from one session and also now over the course of a couple of weeks.

Taking 15 or 20 minutes of the day to devote entirely to yourself is something that we all know that we should do. Whether it’s with Equanimity or just your own watch and a journal, we hope that you join us in this simple but powerful way to achieve greater well-being.

Here’s a tip to get started: We like to meditate at the end of our lunch break. We spend 30 minutes eating, 15 minutes walking to start digesting, and then the last 15 minutes of our lunch break we spend meditating. We don’t know much about the practice of meditating, but what works for us is to just focus on our breathing and try to let our worries, stresses, and thoughts fall away from us. After this short break, we return to work, and we’ve found ourselves as fresh as we are in the morning and more productive in the afternoons than we’ve ever been!

Do you meditate? What are some tips for success that you have? Share them with us in the comments below!

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