Someone told me recently that he had been going through a difficult period. He said he had probably heard my voice more than his wife’s because some days he listens to two or three episodes of Pretty Good Meditation. I have heard from a lot of people who turn to these meditations during a hard time, so I thought it would be worth the effort to make them easier to find.
In addition to technical effort, I intentionally used skills from my yoga and meditation practices to help stay focused on the task. I’m sure you know what happens when you sit down to do one simple thing. Before you know it you have twelve tabs open and you forgot what you came for. That was the feeling I was on the lookout for this past weekend when I sat down to build a better way to browse meditations on matthewtift.com.
The New Meditations Page
The “Meditations” tab on my website now links to a page called “Meditations” that provides a new way to browse the guided meditations from Pretty Good Meditation. You can filter by Keyword, Duration, or both. So if you want a metta meditation, or a meditation that runs 5 to 10 minutes, or a body scan that lasts between 15 and 20 minutes, you can find it without scrolling through a hundred episodes.
The page probably looks simple, but it was full of technical challenges. For instance, building the page required calculating the length of each audio file in seconds, storing that in a hidden field, and displaying it in minutes and seconds on the list. I also spent hours removing unhelpful keywords like “meditation” and “mindfulness” that I had added to dozens of episodes without thinking much about it. I had to figure out which fields and filters would be useful without cluttering the screen, especially on a phone. Keeping things simple often takes more effort than adding more features.
Staying Focused in a World Full of Shiny Stuff
One of the training rules for Theravāda monks describes how to act when going into the city:
“One should lower one’s eyes while walking in an inhabited area, looking a plow’s length ahead.”
The monks go into town with a clear purpose, such as picking up medicine. They do not go in to wander around and look at all the shiny new stuff. They take care of what they need to do and leave. That might sound rigid, but I suspect I don’t have to explain to you how easy it is to lose an hour when you had planned to “just check that one thing” on the Internet.
The skills you develop in yoga and meditation classes work the same way, whether you notice your mind wandering during a body scan or catch yourself adding one more thing to a project. Notice the pull to something else, acknowledge it, and come back to what you set out to do. Just like on the mat or cushion, watch the breath and maintain a still mind as much as possible.
That’s what I was working on when I was building the page over the weekend. Like everything I do, the practice of maintaining a website should not add to my suffering. I know that once I start a project, distractions pop up. Another feature here, a redesign there. “Hmmm, I’d really like to remove the intro music from the first 73 episodes.” But instead of chasing every idea, I kept coming back to one question: does this help someone find a meditation that fits what they need right now? If the answer pointed toward “not really,” I did my best to set the idea aside.
Check out the new Meditations page and let me know what you think.
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