The free Plum Village App has been lovingly created with many volunteered hours of work to allow us all to take Plum Village with us wherever we go.
There are also a range of other meditation apps which can support our mindfulness practice and we list them here.
Often when we are on our computers or smartphones, we become completely lost in our work and completely disconnected from our body in the here and now. You may like to program a bell of mindfulness on your computer or smartphone and every quarter of an hour (or as often as you like), the bell sounds so you have a chance to stop, breathe and relax.
- Mindfulness Bell Menu Bar is a menu bar application to aid you in your mindfulness practice. All you need to do is choose a time interval and a small or a large bell will sound at the prescribed time to invite you to take a moment to observe the breath.
- MindBell rings periodically during the day as a mindfulness bell, to give you the opportunity to hold on for a moment and consider what you are currently doing, and in what state of mind you are while you are doing it. According to the Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, this is an effective means of developing mindfulness.
Mindfulness Bar offers onsite consciousness consulting and classes to asses you and your team’s thirst for more. We’re experts in demonstrating how in-office behaviors impact a bottom-line, and our tried-and-true methods for combining mindfulness techniques with business tools are designed to help business owners and leaders move towards.
There are also virtual Sanghas, guided meditation apps, and other mindfulness apps and tools available online. You may like to check out Plumline if you’d like to find a virtual sangha in the Plum Village Tradition (and don’t forget you can find a local group that meets up near you by checking out our international sangha directory).
Here are some mobile and desktop apps we hope you’ll find helpful in supporting your energy of mindfulness throughout the day.
The Plum Village App (free)
Operating System: Android | iOS
Plum Village is a new meditation app that can support us to cultivate mindfulness, compassion and joy through guided meditations, deep relaxations, practice poems, bells of mindfulness and many other features.
Mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment. It is the continuous practice of touching life deeply in every moment of daily life. To be mindful is to be truly alive, present and at one with those around you and with what you are doing. We bring our body and mind into harmony while we wash the dishes, drive the car or take our morning shower.
In the last decade, countless scientific studies confirmed that a sustained mindfulness practice promotes relaxation, reduced stress levels, better sleep, reduced anxiety, and increased concentration. In general the benefits of meditation have been proven to improve mental health and the overall well-being of practitioners.
The Plum Village app is one of the few mindfulness apps that offer completely free content, including high quality, rare guided meditations offered by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as many other monastic teachers in this Buddhist tradition. It’s a great way to support your daily meditations.
The app features resources treasured by thousands of Plum Village practitioners, like guidance on practicing with the inner child, the famous pebble meditation, the four mantras, the five contemplations before eating, guided deep relaxations (body scan), music tracks with practice songs and chants offered by nuns, monks, and lay practitioners, and even nature sounds recorded in the Plum Village Monastery in France, and other practice centers around the world.
This app can be used by experienced practitioners and is at the same time a great fit for new meditators, offering detailed guidance on how to get started, answers offered by Thich Nhat Hanh to frequently asked questions, and podcasts with more than 300 Dharma Talks..
The Plum Village app works on all iPhone and Android devices.
Other Mindfulness Apps
Insight Timer (in-app purchases | Android | iOS)
Originally a meditation timer, Insight Timer is now a fun, connected way to support your meditation practice, as well as a marketplace for mindfulness exercises, courses, masterclasses, and mindfulness meditation sessions. It includes free guided mediations from Thich Nhat Hanh and other leading meditation teachers. For those new to meditation, there are introductory guided meditations and a supportive community to help you get started. Insight Timer works on all iPhone and Android devices.
Download Insight Timer from Google Play (Android)
Download Insight Timer from the App Store (Apple)
MindBell (free | Android)
MindBell rings periodically during the day, to give you the opportunity to stop, breathe and smile. Stopping with the sound of the bell is an essential practice developed by Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village community, and is at the foundation of cultivating mindfulness, calm awareness, presence, and self-compassion throughout the day.
Additionally, MindBell can be used as a timer for you meditation sessions.
Headspace (in-app purchases | Android | iOS)
The Headspace app is considered one of the best meditation apps for beginners. Its goal is to help us cultivate the life-changing skills of mindfulness in order to reap the benefits of meditation.
Headspace is a paid app: it offers a free version with 10 lessons, but if you become a monthly subscriber, you can access to hundreds of guided meditations for your daily practice, on a large variety of topics, ranging from stress and anxiety to sleep and focus, and even bedtime stories.
There are seven-day check in sessions and daily meditations recorded by ex-Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe, aimed at helping us build healthier and happier relationships with the people we love, and Headspace SOS sessions to help us breathe and find a place of calm and relaxation during meltdown moments. The key methods the app offers are breathing exercises and body scans.
Download Headspace from Google Play (Android)
Download Headspace from iTunes (Apple)
Meditation Apps for Desktop
Bell of Mindfulness (free browser extension)
This is a simple bell that reminds us to take a short pause from whatever we’re doing on the computer, and come back to our breathing. As Thich Nhat Hanh has taught, returning to our breathing reconnects us with our body and mind in the here and now. We have a chance to take care of any tension we find there – we can stretch, smile, relax for a short moment. Apart from using various mindfulness apps, installing a bell on our computer is one of the surest ways to stay mindful of whatever we are doing.
Time Out (in-app purchases | Mac)
Time Out offers easy break reminders, with flexible customization. We can set the whole screen to blur or change colour to encourage us to take a rest from time to time.
Similarly with some mindfulness apps, you can configure how long each kind of break lasts, and how long between breaks, and the breaks can be set to count backwards when you take a natural break, e.g. when you go away from your computer.
Download Time Out from iTunes
Mindfulness bell menu bar (Mac)
Mindfulness Bell Menu Bar is a menubar application to aid you in your mindfulness practice. Simply choose an interval and a small or large bell will sound at the prescribed time to invite you to take a moment to observe the breath.
Stay Focused (free browser extension)
Thich Nhat Hanh has said that we need an intentional strategy to manage our media consumption in a mindful, awakened way. StayFocusd is a free app which empowers you to stick to your intention by limiting the amount of time that you can spend on time-wasting websites. For example, you could set a “healthy” time limit on news sites, of, say 5 or 10 minutes per day. There is also a new, paid version for phones and tablets.
Install browser extension for Chrome | Firefox
uBlock Origin (free browser extension)
Mindfulness Bell Video
Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us that “appropriate attention” is essential to being mindful. We need to be aware of the right things, not the wrong things.
If we want to cultivate a high quality of presence and concentration, we don’t want our attention being taken from us by unwanted advertisements. Ads are usually trying to sell us things we neither want nor need to be happy – or that are even toxic for body and mind. We can limit ourselves to visiting sites that don’t display distracting or unwholesome advertisement and by supporting good content creators by paying for subscriptions that allow us to view their content without advertisement. For advertisements that we can’t get around uBlock Origin is a free app can block out any kind of content including advertisements. It can be turned off on a per website basis so please consider turning it off on websites of independent web content providers for whom advertisement might be their only, and often minimal, source of income.
Download uBlock Origin for Chrome, Firefox or Safari
Even more meditation apps: 10% Happier, the Calm app sleep stories, Buddhify, Aura, My Life (used to be called Stop, Breathe & Think), Waking Up with Sam Harris, Simple Habit, Smiling Mind. Want to see more reviews and comparisons? Check out this extensive directory created by a Plum Village practitioner.
Regardless of the app we’re using, it’s most likely to be successful in our practice if we join or build a community, even just with a few friends, so we could share our journey, our difficulties and successes with them, get inspired, and learn from others.
There are also virtual Sanghas, guided meditation apps, and other mindfulness apps and tools available online. You may like to check out Plumline if you’d like to find a virtual sangha in the Plum Village Tradition (and don’t forget you can find a local group that meets up near you by checking out our international sangha directory).
Here at the Mindfulness Bar we’re serving up good ole fashion silence and awareness with a unique twist on knowledge and experience. The only question is: how do you take yours?
Daily Specials
This 15 minute shot of silence is offered daily any time you need to sneak out and just breathe away from the office. Reserve your 15 minutes of mindfulness in our private Quiet Room, where you can relax in a chaise hammock (yes there is such a thing) and bathe in the soothing sounds of solitude, nature or some cool brain wave music. Rest your body, calm your mind, and retrain your thoughts to be more effective, aware, and intentional throughout your day. It’s basically a mini-vacay for your mind.
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A straight up 30 minute meditation that you can drink up before work, during lunch, or after work. Join us for our signature Zen and Tonic meditation in an intimate, small-group setting, where we’ll learn mindfulness techniques designed to rewire your brain for kindness and compassion. Expect comfortable sitting and soothing stillness, along with some light reading and breath work, as we work together to create a sacred space of awareness and health.
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The Mindfulness Bell Magazine
Group mindfulness classes, served just the way you like it, throughout the day and evening. Our class offerings include yoga, T’ai chi, Qigong, and a variety of other practices that promote mindfulness in motion. You’ll discover the power behind showing up and moving on your mat surrounded by others results in sharing in collective consciousness, collaborative mindfulness, and positive energy exchange.
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*We also feature Happy Hour Specials every day, so be sure to check out our specials online!
Reservations Required
A 45-minute walking meditation to the James River and back—perfect for anyone who needs a little movement with their mindfulness and loves meditation on the rocks of our beautiful river.
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Book a 1-hour, one-on-one narrative coaching session. Your certified narrative coach is expertly trained to help you totally transform your self-talk: de-stigmatizing the memories and beliefs that are no longer serving you, de-coupling any negative narratives from your identity, and redirecting that energy towards what you really want to manifest. (Aka: you’ll learn the science and psychology behind why mindfulness REALLY works to change your life.) In doing so, you’ll actually rewire your neural circuitry, creating more space for the kind of learning, change, and growth that’ll send you in new—positive directions.
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Download Narrative Coaching Handout
Reserve your half- or full-day group workshop. Come to us or we can bring the bottle to you. Learn the science and psychology behind how and why mindfulness really works to rewire your brain. We’ll work on how, with a whole lot of knowledge and a little bit of stillness, you can actually change the behaviors that are no longer serving you. You’ll leave your workshop with the tools you need in order to build a strengths-based culture, at work and at home. Workshops will include thought leader content in workbook format, plus easy steps on how to implement EVERYTHING you’ve just learned into your own life.
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Download Mindfulness Workshop Handout
At Mindfulness Bar, we’re always chasing adventures. Our “local brew” will take you around Richmond, as we enjoy outdoor yoga, meditation, and plenty more that RVA has to offer. (Think: Mindfulness meets hiking, biking, boating, and wine tasting.)
In the mood for some “local spirits” instead? We have local weekend retreats too!
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Can’t get away from the office to get your fix but need a total detox? No problem! Check out our quarterly retreats: we’re headed to Greece, Italy, India, Spain… the possibilities are limitless!
Tuscany Italy Chase Adventure
Mindfulness Bar offers onsite consciousness consulting and classes to asses you and your team’s thirst for more.
We’re experts in demonstrating how in-office behaviors impact a bottom-line, and our tried-and-true methods for combining mindfulness techniques with business tools are designed to help business owners and leaders move towards greater success.
We provide onsite consulting that’ll teach you how to design, deliver, and implement mindfulness spaces and techniques at work and at home.
Request Complimentary Consultation
Download Consulting Options