Meditation with new technologies: an interview with Gurumind

We talked to Lidia Dols, from the team that developed the meditation app Gurumind.

Stress and anxiety can take many different forms, and that is part of what makes it not always easy for us to know how to manage them. Fortunately, new technologies are also increasingly adaptable and dynamic, so that today there are useful tools to enhance our emotional balance with just a few clicks, wherever we are.

On this occasion we interviewed Lidia Dolson we interviewed Lidia Dols, who leads the development team of the app GurumindThe app is designed to offer meditations and other emotional management exercises that are adapted to the circumstances of each person.

Interview with Lidia Dols, Director of Gurumind

Lidia Dols is the founder and Director of Gurumind, a meditation app designed to offer simplicity of use and accessibility to all kinds of people, without giving up a wide variety of content related to stress management and painful or uncomfortable emotional states. In this interview he talks to us about the development of this application and its features.

How did you come up with the idea of developing Gurumind, and what is the main objective with which this application has been designed?

Observing the pace of life in which we live, the stress in which we are immersed, the lack of time, as well as the habit that many people have of always being connected to a mobile or a PC, we thought it would be a good solution to use the technological means that today we always have at hand to teach meditation, breathing, relaxation and improve the quality of life in an easy, simple way, at any time and without complications.

Who are the people who can especially benefit from Gurumind? Is it an app accessible to all these audiences, even if they have not practiced meditation before?

Gurumind is designed for all ages. There are specific techniques to help meditate, even for people who have never meditated before. The breathing sessions are a good tool to start meditating.

On the other hand, the app is segmented into three main content groups. The first is "for everyone", which, as its name suggests, can be accessed by anyone. Another group is for teenagers, with meditations on topics that mainly affect this stage of life. And another group is for parents and children.

Something that characterizes this app is that it not only offers meditation and relaxation resources, but also adapts to different purposes depending on people's needs. How was the process of selecting the problems that Gurumind helps to manage? What criteria were followed?

We did research with psychologists, coaches and other meditation teachers to find out what people's main concerns were.

We started working on the most frequent problems: stress, anxiety, sadness, fear, lack of concentration, insomnia, low self-esteem... and we put a lot of emphasis on meditations with controlled breathing.

When developing the app, how did you work with experts who contributed their knowledge to create the content?

Once we had defined the topics we wanted to include in the app, each collaborating expert focuses their meditation, according to their experience, their point of view and their personal working method, which makes Gurumind a very diverse app and more likely that users will find the meditations that work best for them.

Gurumind includes a series of emergency meditations. What are they?

Yes, they are Rescue meditations. These are very powerful meditations and breaths; they are just a click away, on the main screen, for those times when you can't waste an extra minute looking for something to calm or soothe you. They are widely used before a job interview, before an exam or before a sudden state of fear or anxiety.

The application also contains content to encourage laughter. How did the idea come about?

I think it is very important to laugh, so we added little capsules of laughter to listen to! Did you know that one minute of laughter is equivalent to several minutes of meditation?