Balance is the app that helps you meditate, really

I wanted to write this review for a while, but I never found the right key to tell this story. Today I found it.

Balance is an app, by the same creators of Elevate, Elevate Labs, which puts itself in direct competition with Headspace. It implies an app that helps build a path of meditation, day by day, starting with sessions of 2-3 minutes and continuing with increasingly long, complex and advanced meditation sessions.

Before using Balance, I had already used Headspace for a few weeks. I had done some sessions, but I hadn’t found myself very well. Or rather, the single sessions of meditation were extremely productive, but since the first sessions, the commitment required to do a complete path was excessive.

Meditation should be a habit and, as such, must request minimal effort to be performed. It must be a pleasure to do it, not a duty. It must occupy a minimal time in the day and must make sense with respect to the life you are leading.

Headspace seemed to me much more like a set of lessons that, in a few minutes at a time, teaches you to master, more or less like an automaton, all the main techniques of meditation: Awareness, Breath Control, Visualization, Body Scan, and so on. I must admit that, in a few sessions I managed to master, at least for a limited time of 5-10 minutes, these techniques.

But then, when I thought about the next meditation session, I imagined it as if I had to do a task, perform an assignment. Often, I was happy not to do it. And if you are not happy to do a thing you would like to do, then it is better not to do it.

I let two years pass: in the meantime, I used and abused Elevate, this app that proposes to me every day grammar, syntactic, mathematical, conceptual tests, and which allows me to ‘activate’ the brain in the morning and keep it trained on logics of thought that I do not use frequently.

Since I liked Elevate, I wanted to give Balance a chance too, as soon as it came out, because I imagined that the habit-building format had been the same.

Balance is free if you only want to do some simple sessions, while it costs about €52 per year if you want access to all sessions, all advanced programs and all single sessions. I have been trying Balance for a few months now, and I would have liked to write something already from the second-third week of use, but I couldn’t find a particular reason why to tell. At that moment, I used Balance more or less every day, I had come to complete the first two initial modules, Foundation I and II, and I was starting to do the sessions of the third module, Foundation III.

If the first sessions were extremely pleasant and above all easy to carry out (about 3-5 minutes duration), subsequent sessions were about 10 minutes, almost always. From a temporal point of view, I am not at all worried about inserting a 5-minute relaxation session into my morning routine - I watch one less video on YouTube when I am still in bed. But 10 minutes are already a bit more.

Sure, obviously 10 minutes are nothing compared to complete meditation sessions that last even an hour and more, but I am not trying to reach Nirvana - I am just trying to find a way to gather my ideas in the morning or in the evening, and be better with myself.

Both at the beginning, even before the start of the first session, and at the beginning of each subsequent session, Balance proposes questions to answer, to check my progress status on the various techniques and to understand how I feel today. This tool is extremely useful, because it serves the system to create an audio session that is in line with the needs of the particular day, and which takes into account your slowdowns in learning or your skills learned over time, maybe increasing the pauses between one phrase and another or proposing fewer exercises in the session.

The reason why I wrote this article only today, almost 3 months after the first opening of the app, is that today I find myself having to limit the number of meditation sessions I can do, and I miss this. I am not relieved, I miss it.

I would like to be able to meditate more, I would like to be able to gather my ideas in the morning and also in the evening, but I still haven’t found a way to fit these sessions, which have now become 10-15 minutes, into my daily routine. For now I have found an intermediate solution: 5 times a week Elevate, twice a week Balance. Maybe I meditate on Mondays and/or on weekends and, for working days, when I am always in a hurry and have little time for myself, I inserted Elevate.

So yes, I liked Balance, so much that I miss it. And I wish I could use it more.