Sway
Meditation in motion
$2.99 From PauseAble, pauseable.com Made for iPhone Needs iOS 8.0 or later
A lot of meditation apps want you to sit perfectly still, close your eyes, and listen to some blissed-out voice reminding you to keep breathing. If that’s not your idea of relaxing, Sway is worth a look. It doesn’t mind if you keep your eyes open. It doesn’t have any talking at all, just peaceful, calming tones and sound effects that put you in almost a trance-like state. And you don’t have to stay still. In fact, you have to keep moving to keep meditating.
Sway is an interactive meditation app, focusing your attention on slow, repetitive movement, kind of like tai chi, one of its inspirations. This makes it a more natural fit for noisy environments than guided meditation, which works best in a quiet space. To keep a Sway session going, you have to keep your phone in constant motion — not too fast and not too slow, or a tone and message on the screen prompt you to adjust.
You start with a three-minute goal, which increases by one minute each day, with an ultimate goal of 20 minutes. Best of all, there’s no subscription fee, just a one-time purchase that gets you six levels that unlock one by one — but if you don’t stay at it, you drop a level, in order to encourage good habits.
Movement is the focus, but we wish the app had a “work mode” where we could put the phone down but keep Sway’s sounds playing, because we think we could listen to them for hours.
The bottom line. Even in noisy surroundings, Sway brings us inner peace.