Meditation is not only good for your mental health, it’s also good for your daily performance. However, if you’re like me, you don’t always find the time to meditate. And meditation in public with thousands of eyes staring at you is just embarrassing.
The TakeTime-app not only helps you meditate – now you can also meditate in public and your surroundings won’t even bat an eye.
Yoga and meditation are for hippies! I know, the statement is pretty loaded. However, before I met my girlfriend, this was my opinion. So, what changed?
When Sally and I met in early 2013, I was all about business. I graduated from Copenhagen Business School in 2008, started my own small company in 2009 and worked with different clients and businesses over the years. Time had always been an issue. Work and karate training always came first. Working 60 hours, sometimes even 80, every week for periods of time wasn’t new to me as nursing clients is an important thing for a company. Odd hours, short lunch breaks and little time for family and friends characterized my life – and I was fine with it!
Then Sally came into my life. We started dating and got to know each other. She meditated once a day, every day. She did her yoga and ate healthy. I was curious. Sally was a very relaxed person and always smiling. I felt tense and thoughts were bouncing inside my head constantly – like an army of five year olds in a bouncing castle high on sugar. I asked her what her secret was and she told me about her daily yoga and meditation routines. Sally also told me how she used to be stressed out, but that was before she started to meditate.
My initial response was that I shouldn’t partake in these hippie-like activities, but once I got over myself, I discovered what meditation did for my mind and how yoga helped me relieve some of my muscle tensions.
For a period of time, I started to meditate daily. It took some time for me to get used to, but I felt a change within me. I was more relaxed, more focused and I felt a bit happier. The change didn’t come overnight, but I eventually felt it.
Memento Mori
I acknowledged the fact that I wasn’t immortal; that I needed to take better care of myself. Although I’d faced my mortality in my 20s, I didn’t feel like I had the necessary tools to make the change in lifestyle. Meditation and yoga were the tools I needed. A study done a Harvard research team concludes that meditation gives you inner peace and improves your mental health. The Harvard researchers and doctors proved how meditation rebuilds the brain’s gray matter. They also proved how meditation provides psychological and cognitive benefits, which persists throughout the day. In other words, I could really benefit from meditating on a daily basis – and I wasn’t alone!
According to a research study done by The Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents in Great Britain, more than 400,000 employees were suffering from high levels of work-related stress in the U.K. in 2011/2012. A similar study done by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, work-related stress is the second most frequently reported work-related health problem in Europe. And four out of ten workers don’t believe that the stress is handled well by their workplace. These numbers are staggering. They indicate that we in Europe have a serious problem with work-related stress – and we’re pretty much on our own when dealing with stress.
As for me, I had to face the fact that I’m a mere mortal, whose heart could have stopped at any moment. Or I could have ended up staring into the wall for an entire weekend, because stress finally had gotten to me. But it didn’t, and I accredit the embrace of meditation that stress didn’t knock me over.
Meditation doesn’t have be to awkward
After a while, I felt that meditating stole too much of my time – time away from work. So I stopped meditating. This was essentially a dumb decision, but I had this nagging, guilty conscience every time I sat down to meditate. I didn’t know for how long I would be “away” – sometimes I could meditate for an hour. I needed a tool that would tell me exactly for how long the meditation would last – and an alarm clock would be too stressful a way to return to the world.
One faithful Sunday morning in 2013, Sally and I got to talk about me not meditating anymore. That led to us to her work as a professional photographer and how Sally’s pictures had a tranquil effect on me. We started to talk about how much easier life would be for a person like me, if meditation apps had her pictures accompanied with harmonic music and sound effects. Sunday morning became Sunday afternoon and after a while, we felt we should make an app that relieved stress and could help people meditate.
The main thought behind the TakeTime app is that time is a scarce resource, which we have to decide what to do with. We have to take some time for ourselves, where we don’t do anything except just being. We need these moments in order to perform better at work, be a better partner in the relationship, a better parent, friend, colleague… TakeTime is the tool I longed for when I stopped meditating. I can now say to myself; I have 20 minutes between meetings, which is more than enough for me to experience the Relax-theme. I know how long the theme lasts, which means I don’t have to worry about losing myself completely to my meditation where time and place ceases to exist until I reopen my eyes.
TakeTime doesn’t require extensive knowledge of yoga and meditation. It is for everyone; for those who just want a break from the daily chores to those with years of experience, who wants to try meditation in a different way.
If you’ve ever tried to meditate on the bus, on a bench in the park or even at the office, you know just how awkward it may feel; sitting there with your eyes closed while your colleagues or random strangers stare at you. TakeTime aims to dispel that awkwardness by letting you meditate behind a screen with a pair of headphones on.
TakeTime is for you, who wants to take better care of yourself; let go of the world and all of its demands and tasks. We all need time to ourselves and relax. However, time for that isn’t given to us – we have to take it. I personally don’t feel awkward when putting on my headphones and the Serenity theme to meditate in public. Like many others in the train or in the café, I too use my smartphone, but I just use it to meditate – it’s just a modern way of meditation.
Kasper Nesager-Hansen
Co-Founder and Managing Partner