Meditation has changed my life, for all the reasons you may expect. And the Waking Up App has been the tool that finally stuck for me.

In this article, I want to share my experience with the app. I’m not an affiliate. I earn nothing from Waking Up for this review and I have no association with them. I’m just a customer.

The Waking Up App was the first meditation, app, course, whatever that made it click.

Perhaps it was the right app at the right time. Maybe another meditation options would have yielded equally powerful results in the right circumstance.

I’ve tried a few others, but Waking Up just worked for me.

Today I’d like to share a few reasons why.

What Is The Waking Up App?

The Waking Up App is a meditation and mindfulness training platform created by neuroscientist, philosopher, and author Sam Harris. Unlike many meditation apps that focus solely on relaxation or stress reduction, Waking Up is about is about self-awareness and examining the nature of consciousness. Of course, that sounds abstract, and it is. It’s through guided meditations on Waking Up that I came to understand it.

Instead of just another app to “relieve stress” or “train your mind” Waking Up helped me examine my mind.

Just doing basic “breathe in breathe out” meditations never got me closer to understanding what meditation was all about. If you’re just doing meditation as one more tool to “optimize” your life, then, well, you’re missing the point. That was me. I missed the point until Waking Up.

Here are a few elements of the app that helped it click for me.

4 Aspects I Love About The Waking Up App

1) The “Lessons” That Go Along With The Meditation

In the 30 day introductory course, every meditation is paired with a “lesson.” These are 5-10 minutes long and Sam Harris touches on a certain theme.

For example, he talks about the book On Having No Head by Douglas Harding. At first, I was confused by the instruction in the meditation to “turn attention onto itself.” Yet, when he put it into the context that all of our sensations don’t arise from our head, and made that a lesson, it started to make sense.

I give this one simple example to say that I don’t think having a meditation timer is enough to understand mindfulness.

On some level, they are concepts that can be taught, and then practiced in meditation. That’s why I love the lessons. They’re like being in school for mindfulness and meditation, like lectures from a well-practiced professor.

I think any meditation app, course, or program that lacks a simple way to explain the act of meditating itself is going to miss the mark.

If you just have a “Daily meditation timer” for me it just wouldn’t have cut it.

2) The Introductory Course (and the After The Introductory Course)

In addition to the lessons, I like that the Introductory Course (as well as the “After the Introductory Course) formed a linear progression.

With the meditations and the lessons, it was starting from square one, where I was.

The Waking Up App has a “daily meditation” option, but I never use it. I much prefer to go through a course that’s building on something.

I repeated each of these courses several times. I’ve done the intro course four times at this point. Every now and then I come back to it.

3) A Variety of Teachers and Types of Courses

While the Introductory Course is all Sam Harris, what really sold me on Waking Up for the long-term is when I started to hear from dozens of other experienced meditation teachers who have courses on the app.

It’s much more than “Sam Harris’s meditation app.” It’s more like a Netflix for meditation.

In the “After the Introductory Course” I first got exposed to all of these teachers. If a meditation stood out to me, I saved it and often looked at the course it came from.

That’s how I found Stephen Bodain’s “The Direct Approach” meditation course on the app. I’ve gone through that course three times now.

There are Courses Beyond Meditation, Like Journaling

I have journaled daily for years. It’s one of my cornerstone habits, not just as a writer, but to process my emotions and experiences as well.

Recently, I’ve been going through the “Journaling for Insight” course, which provides a writing prompt each day.

4) The Push Notifications — Weird, I Know

Waking Up is one of the few apps where I have notifications enabled. If you click these notifications, they pull up a quick one minute “reminder” meditation.

One of the key lessons from Waking Up is that meditation isn’t something you “do.” It’s about bringing more awareness into everything we do. It’s a constant practice. I’ve found regular reminders, like these push notifications, helpful for this. A one-minute reminder I’ve found can bring me hours of more presence.

You Can Try it For Free

I used Waking Up for free for the first 30 days. You can try the introductory course and see if it’s for you. If you like the meditation plus lesson format, then I think you’ll like the full suite of features and courses.

If you do try it and the Waking Up App doesn’t resonate with you, don’t give up on meditation entirely.

There are countless apps and options out there. What some people told me was transformative didn’t land for me at all. Understanding our own minds is at the core of it all, and that’s a lifelong practice we should all dedicate ourselves to.

I Have the Yearly Membership

Once I decided I liked the app, I signed up for the year, which cost $129. I know this sounds like a lot, but I subscribe to zero TV streaming services. I don’t buy many “things.” (If fact, I reject most things.) Yet for cornerstone habits like meditation that help me view the world with a different lens it’s worth it.