Meditation has long been a practice that requires very little of the external world. It has likely existed for as long as humans have, in some form or other, since it doesn't require technology and lends itself naturally to the mind's tendency to contemplate when no other distractions are present. It's also a tool used to help us transcend our experience of the physical world and connect with something beyond it. The hardcore meditators of ancient history, the Buddha Gautama (Buddhism), Bodhidharma (Zen), Mahavatar Babaji (Hindu yoga), were all known for meditating for long periods with little to no stimulation in remote locations. There's an association with meditation as a practice with a degree of austerity to it.
In the modern world, there's a lower barrier to entry in the form of pre-recorded guided meditation. Apps like Headspace offer narrated sessions, often with soothing music, to direct the listener's mind rather than leaving it to its own devices. These can be deeply soothing and fulfilling, even without the "raw dog" quality of more traditional practice. Still, the opportunity for more authentic experiences remains, whether that's a short retreat, a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat, or moving to Asia and becoming a monk, which is apparently still a thing.
AI
And now here we are in 2026, and AI is all the rage, for better or worse. We have incredible chatbots that can perform virtually any text-based task, and highly realistic text-to-speech far more advanced than the old robotic voices we used to get. As a meditator for over ten years, and a software developer for even longer, it felt only natural to try my hand at building an app that produces guided meditations using AI.
The process is fairly simple, actually: first you choose a chatbot provider, like Anthropic's Claude, and a text-to-speech service. You have the chatbot generate a script from user input and pass it to the TTS service. It's not quite that simple in practice: it takes time to get the pre-prompts right so the chatbot produces a good script every time, guiding it on tone, and how and where to insert pauses. Given a good-sounding, cost-effective TTS provider, the output is genuinely compelling.
But why?
The big question, though: does anyone actually want AI-guided meditations? Meditation is a practice very close to people's hearts, often the anchor of their spiritual lives. Outsourcing the ritual to "evil" AI seems like the last thing anyone would want.
William
Meditation is a demonic modality.
Let me tell you a story. Back in 2022 I went to Peru on my first ever backpacking trip, and went to an Ayahuasca retreat. The owner, William, had dedicated his entire life to setting the place up; he was originally from New York and had moved to the Amazon jungle in northern Peru. One night we were talking about various practices. He was adamant that Ayahuasca was the mother of all spiritual medicines, speaking as if Aya were an infallible potion that would give your soul whatever it needed and cleanse you in ways no other method could.
The topic of meditation came up: "What about meditation?" His answer caught us all off guard. "Meditation is a demonic modality," he said without batting an eyelid. "Unless it's a meditation on loving-kindness and gratitude."
I don't think he meant it as a throwaway line either. For William, this wasn't rhetoric, it was a conclusion from a lifetime devoted to one specific path.
A demonic modality? How could the practice that's been the bedrock of some of the Eastern world's greatest spiritual traditions be demonic? I'm sure some of you reading this, avid meditators yourselves, wouldn't entertain that thought for a second, but bear with me. I think I understood what he meant.
Bad form
...often ending their sit more stressed than when they started.
If you're at the gym and get yourself a personal trainer, it's highly unlikely you'll settle into consistently bad form. It's entirely possible to go to the gym without a PT, as I do now, but you arguably get better results with one and a dedicated programme to follow, as I once had. At least at the gym, a "real world" activity where you can watch yourself in the mirror or whatever, there are plenty of indicators for whether you're doing it right.
Meditation is different: it's entirely internal. In theory the practices are "simple," like returning to your breath, but it's a very common experience for beginner and even intermediate meditators to feel totally lost and frustrated by it, often ending their sit more stressed than when they started. This is almost certainly down to poor form in meditation: a lack of mental equanimity with your thoughts, feelings and sensations, or chasing dragons. Being entirely internal, it's virtually impossible for you or anyone else to notice when you've slipped into poor form, or into a bad modality, if you will.
For those wondering: a "modality" here just means the underlying energy pattern of the experience. A good modality in meditation, very generally speaking, is one that objectively calms you down and brings you closer to yourself, one that actually accomplishes the intended goal of meditation. Many longer-term meditators know themselves well enough to have found a method that achieves this. A bad modality is one where you stress yourself out further for not "doing it right," or, in extreme cases, wind yourself into some borderline psychotic state chasing mythical mental objects. This is why meditation, despite being regarded as a panacea for all problems, is in fact not recommended for people with psychotic mental health conditions: the practice seems to exacerbate those tendencies. Maybe now we can see why William felt that way about it.
What AI actually solves
Is there a way to make meditation less of a black box, and keep people where they need to be: with themselves, in healthy contemplation? It seems to me AI solves this problem for us, in a way I feel on a genuine level, beyond just being the creator of an app that offers it.
With personalised guided meditations, the voice's direction is precisely targeted on whatever's on your mind in that moment. You're cued, warmly and soothingly, to reflect on your desired life areas, whether difficult at present or full of hope; either way, the script generator's intelligence always directs you toward a place of optimal mental function, leaving no room to spiral. The background music is handpicked from a high-quality meditation music library, and the whole session is genuinely enjoyable to listen to. Never in the history of meditation have we been able to experience this kind of tailoring on demand.
Of course, these personalised meditations are a significantly different flavour from traditional meditation; I'd never expect a Zen monk to fully embrace it, and it's unlikely you'll have some full-blown samadhi experience listening to an AI meditation. That said, these generated meditations absolutely have, and deserve, their place: easy-listening, light-hearted, enjoyable sound bites that genuinely touch your heart. I've personally had plenty of easy-to-digest insights being guided by my own creations. They also just sound great, and can be consumed the same way you might listen to a podcast on the way to work.
The mission
My mission with this app is to actually help people become more conscious of the way they live their lives and become who they want to be; the meditation generation is the backbone of it. There are plenty of journals out there, plenty of form-filling apps where you write stuff down, plenty of trackers, plenty of apps that put a sense of obligation on you to change, without actually providing anything to catalyse real change in your energy. Our meditations are specifically targeted to shift your mind out of negativity black holes and onto a mental state built on gratitude and optimism.
Possible hang-ups
AI meditations, AI everything, will absolutely become the standard given enough time.
Being directed in a way genuinely tailored to your life goes well beyond what any mass-distributed guided meditation does. The only real hang-up you might have is if you take moral issue with AI replacing humans, or just dislike the sound of it. On the former: yeah, I can sympathise with that. I started throwing myself into this app's development knowing AI may soon take a lot of software jobs, and since I've been travelling the last three years without long-term employment, I knew I might not be entirely desirable to employers, and jobs might become less desirable to me too. I felt building a business might be the better long-term move. Ultimately it's a change in the way society works, and I can promise you AI will become more and more ubiquitous. AI meditations, AI everything, will absolutely become the standard given enough time. No doubt about it.
On the second point, the sound of an AI-produced meditation: I've spent a stupid amount of time on this, probably more than is reasonable, picking the right voices and tuning the script generation so it doesn't sounds natural. Feeding it all of this is our mind-reprogramming suite: smart journalling, curated meditation programmes, manifestation goals, and more. I think it shows.
Supplement, not replace
What's more: a subscription to a meditation generation service needn't replace your existing practice, only supplement it. As mentioned, the flavour of these meditations, and how they operate, is fundamentally different from traditional practice. Where traditional practice leaves a lot more space for the mind to wander on its own, which can be a good thing if you stay equanimous, personalised generations provide more direct, easy-to-receive insights. Call it handholding if you like, but it's handholding your inner child: the part of yourself that needs gentle direction, accompanied by ease, kindness and warmth.
If any of that resonates, the best way to know is to try it. Create your first meditation and see what comes up.