Meditation Timers

I am primarily attracted to the contemplative Christian practices. The heart of this is Christian Meditation. I'll talk much more about Christian Meditation in future blogs. For now, Christian Meditation is about quieting your mind so that God can find some room to have a relationship with you.

If you are getting into Christian Meditation, the only tools you need are a place to meditate and a timer. A good timer should let you know in a non-jarring way when your meditation period has started and when it has finished. It is surprisingly difficult to find such a timer so I created a few that you can download. There is no charge. I just hope you find them useful.

The first five timers are a five minute, ten minute, twenty minute, thirty minute, and forty-five minute timer. Each starts with ten seconds of silence, then three chimes, then the meditation period, then three chimes to end the meditation. The thirty minute and forty-five minute timers both have a single marker chime at 15 minutes. The forty-five minute timer also has one at 30 minutes.

The sixth timer is a little different. It is what I call an e-Meditation. I call it this because it uses four different time periods, each of which is a power of e. E is a number that is frequently found in nature and some consider it a divine number. It is approximately 2.72. If you are interested in the mathematics of e, see this Wikipedia article.

The first period in the e-Meditation is 1 minute (2.72 raised to the power of zero.) The second period is 2.72 minutes (2.72 raised to the power of one.) The third period is 7.4 minutes (2.72 raised to the power of two.) And the last period is 20.1 minutes (2.72 raised to the power of three.)

The e-Meditation timer starts with ten seconds of silence followed by one chime. This chime starts the first period. Another chime will signal the end of the first period and the beginning of the second. Another chime will signal the end of the second period and the beginning of the third. Another chime will signal the end of the third period and the beginning of the fourth (and last) period. Three chimes will signal the end of that period (and the end of the meditation.)

All of the timers are MP3 files, so you should be able to download them and use the way you would any MP3 file. The are large files, so the download may take a while.

In a future blog, I'll discuss how you might use these timers in a meditation practice. But for now, just choose a timer, find a quiet place, and try to let your mind quiet down. This is harder than it seems. I'll discuss this much more in coming blogs.

Here are the links for the timers. The best thing to do is to save them to your hard drive, which you do by right-clicking on the link and then choosing save link. Good luck!

5 minutes (about 5 MB)
10 minutes (about 10 MB)
20 minutes (about 20 MB)
30 minutes (about 30 MB)
45 minutes (about 45 MB)

e-Meditation (about 30 MB)


Pax Christi,
Roger