Meditating with Your Mac

Published May 23rd, 2007

I’m a firm believer in the power of thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of meditation each day will change your life. The word meditation has baggage, and might conjure up rooted mental forms in some. Mental forms that are difficult to banish. Thus it doesn’t have to be thirty minutes of meditation. It could be thirty minutes of quiet time. The beauty of language is its fluidity. While I won’t often advocate taking a cue from professional politicians, in this case, shape language in whatever way helps you hurdled the obstacles in your path. Frame the activity with whatever words make it palatable.

I’ll refrain from veering into a discussion of meditations power to increase your productivity, improve your sex life, and turn you into one totally fly guy, and simply throw down a simple, and free way to use your Apple computer to support the practice. I’m sure there’s a millions ways to go about this, and I’d love to hear about them all. I’m not saying this is the only way, which might be funny in light of the context, I’m just sharing a method I use. If you’ve got your own then by all means offer it up.

So, assuming you want to meditate, and you use a Mac, and you’re like me, and it’s practically fused to your hip, then go download, and install the 3-2-1 Countdown widget. This is a simple, functional widget that does one thing simply. The perfect companion to a quick quiet time session. Next download the Bowl Chime Sound file on this site. Be aware however that if you do so you may be violating a dozen arcane and bullshit laws, just as I am by having it on this site. Who knows? I obviously don’t care at this point in time. (( For the anxious or curious among us I bought a Meditation CD many years ago and this is the money shot, or money sound. Looking at it one way, this sound is now my property and I’m giving it away, over and over again. Some don’t see it this way.))

Now, put the “Bowl-Chime.m4a” file into your Mac’s “Sounds” folder, which you can find by following this path: “User/Library/Sounds.” Once you’ve dropped that file into your Sounds folder head to the Dashboard, flip the 3-2-1 widget over by clicking the little “i” that pops up when you hover over it, and choose “Bowl Chime” from the drop-down list. Set a time, and begin your journey to bliss, better sex, and eternal life, or something along those lines.

So to recap in list form:

  1. Download 3-2-1
  2. Download the Bowl Chime
  3. Put Bowl Chime file in your Library’s Sounds folder
  4. Set 3-2-1
  5. Meditate

3-2-1 Countdown Widget

I’m sure there’s a meditation widget out there somewhere. Someone must have made one by now. There’s a memory of yoga timer itching my brain, but I can’t be sure. I might be making it up. I like this method because I enjoy the bowl chime sound. It’s nice as an all purpose alarm/reminder, and you could probably set up an iCal alarm script with it, for one example. Anyway, something easy to accomplish. Put it on a list, and cross it off in ten minutes, you’ll feel better for it.

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A. Moses Griffin (base64 image) Amos Moses Griffin fennis.dembo@gmail.com
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