Balance — a Personalized Meditation experience

This article is for two types of people:

Those who meditate
Those who don’t

Balance is one of the numerous meditation apps available out there for mobile devices.

Meditation apps in plain sense just are a library of guided meditations (recorded mostly by meditation instructors!) available to users to access anytime, anywhere; just like podcasts!

So, why I’ve picked Balance specifically?

There are 2 main reasons:

Obviously, you read the title – Personalized meditations!
1st full year is completely free

Personalized Meditations

One thing that’s special about this app is ‘personalization concept’.
If you start with any meditation plan from the app, you will be asked questions before starting meditations (not in all meditation sessions, but most of them!) which need to be answered by choosing the options on the screen (No, this is not a KBC contest!).

The meditation audio that you will hear will be based upon the responses you’ve submitted. Imagine this to be like a simple decision tree format like below:

From a user perspective, this is no rocket science. But, preparing these audio files would’ve been such a tedious task!

Audio recording is required for each scenario based on user response provided (Common portions of the meditation session will of course be merged into these custom scenarios!).

Let’s do some simple math here – Imagine a mediation session asks 3 sets of questions, having 3 options each.
Meaning this session alone will have 9 different recordings, combine it with the ability to customize the duration of each meditation (almost each plan offers setting a duration of 10 min and 15 min at minimum). In this example itself, there are 18 mediation audio files created for a single session!

Still not convinced?
Each meditation plan lasts 10 days (1 session per day) = 18 files × 10 days = 180 audio files!
There are at-least 20 plans present in the app as I am writing this article = 180 audio files × 20 plans = 3600 audio files! (at minimum!)

A Cherry on the top – You can even customize from whom you want to hear the meditation session (there are 2 instructors currently) = 3600 audio files × 2 instructors = 5400 audio files! (at minimum)

Lastly, imagine the amount of time these instructors themselves put in to record these sessions!

So yes, we just saw above that offering personalized meditation is indeed a task, and this is what that is special about this app!

Offerings & Learnings

Apart from Full fledged 10-day plans, Balance even offers single meditation sessions called “Singles” and for Sleep too. From sessions for Breaking (Bad) Habits, Commuting, concentrating, etc. to sleep sounds (to aid in sleeping), the app offers everything!

One more thing I liked about the app is learnings — provided both before starting the meditation and during the session! I am using Balance daily since April 2021 and everyday I’ve learnt something new (be it about breathing, human psychology, any people skills or even respiratory / nervous system; so much!)

Some sample learnings from the Focus plan

Just a thought that concerns me regarding Balance!

To offer these personalization services, the app gathers data — data about your mood or your preferences too (based on your choices elected before beginning the session). Of course, we know the reasons, too, that they use this to personalize our meditation sessions/plans. Their privacy policy also states that they have adequate controls in place to protect personal data from unauthorized access, disclosure, etc.
Hence, for paranoid users, I would recommend not divulging your ‘real’ info or provide as little ‘real’ info as possible while at least creating your account.

Happy Personalized Meditations!

I am using this app since April 2021. All I can say is I have successfully developed a daily habit of meditating, and Balance indeed played a role (as an enabler) here, and I am not stopping meditation anytime soon!
The app is free to download. The normal annual plan costs $70 while the lifetime plan costs $200.

But again, the first full year is free (owing to the pandemic!). Hence, I don’t see any reason to not try this app!

Go ahead and download it from here, available for both android and iOS: