a Soft Tap
We are in this world, not knowing where we come from or why. Do you ever wonder about these questions too? I have & I know my ultimate goal in life is to answer them and become enlightened. The path to enlightenment goes through introspection and becoming mindful & for that, I try to become mindful any time I remember to. The problem is, I usually don’t remember to. My phone is full of meditation and mindfulness apps, but they don’t do the job I need them to.
This has made me think a lot about ways I can automate this. “Automating mindfulness?!” you might ask. Well, not exactly. Automating the remembering part, where I am reminded to come back to the present moment.
You may say, “there are plenty of reminder apps out there, you can try them. There are loads of mindfulness apps too.”
As for the mindfulness apps, they are mainly meditation apps, that are mostly designed to increase our presence during the times we sit for meditation. Of course, they can in general enhance our sense of awareness too, but the most mindful moments they cause us to experience are during the time we SIT for meditation. So, not quite the same thing.
And as for the reminder apps out there, they are usually rather mechanical. You input a title or a message and set an exact time and it will deliver the same message to you at the same time over and over again. After a while, the message will no longer go through. In a sense, we grow tolerance toward it and do not become mindful when seeing it.
So what’s the solution? How can we trigger mindfulness in a fashion that does not get boring?
“Surprise!”
BINGO! We should add the element of surprise to it! I am thinking of an app that sends unexpected mindfulness messages at random times (within a user-specified time range) so that you develop tolerance to neither the message nor the time it is delivered.
I started this startup journey alone, but recently a good friend of mine with a beautiful mind has joined me along with a developer and the three of us are going to build this startup together.
We called it ‘aSoftTap’ & the idea of this app as well as its name are playful adoptions of the “Keisaku stick”, a wooden stick that zen masters use during meditation to tap disciples back into mindfulness.
Well, it is a much gentler version of it. :-)
Follow me here or on Twitter to receive update about the journey of this app.
