The latest release from Meditation Treks is out on mp3 album, including Spotify, iTunes, and all the usual streaming providers. Binaural Nature Meditation is the culmination of years of field recordings and months of editing and mastering. The first four tracks are specific meditations recorded from Mother Nature: The rainforest of Costa Rica, The thunderstorm of Texas, The Waves of the Caribbean, and the La Fortuna Waterfall. As if this 5 hours of nature sounds wasn't enough, the album includes four additional tracks: Sleep, Relax, Create, and Focus, which are edited versions of the first four tracks + binaural beats for those brainwave states in the title. The last track is a mix of the nature sounds.

The 2015 album, Sleep, offers four different Guided Meditations for Sleep: Fall Asleep, Fall Asleep with the Light, Take a Nap, and Induce a Lucid Dream. Get in touch with your spirit, which never sleeps, as your body relaxes in bed. Stream ore purchase it now from Bandcamp, or below...

Guided Meditation Treks, Vol 2 has been added to BandCamp. You can find it on the Guided Meditation Treks artist page there! You can also stream it below...

The first album, Guided Meditation Treks Volume 1, is available on bandcamp, and can now be streamed right here in this blog post. This album makes meditation easy. Grab your earbuds (for the binaural beats), sit on a chair, sit on the floor, or lie on your back. Close your eyes and enjoy one of these four meditations right now. Released in 2012.

With over 100,000 downloads, Binaural is currently the most popular app from Guided Meditation Treks. Of course, it's the free one. I am working on a pro version with a "next-level" programming experience for Binaural in the mean time. Some of the feedback I get through this website is used to craft the next releases of my apps, as well as address bug fixes on existing apps. Some of the messages are simply messages of gratitude, which I love. These are some of my favorite feedback messages from users of the Binaural meditation smartphone app:

As a child, one of my favorite albums was a 30 minute cassette tape I bought of a thunderstorm. Many a good night sleep began by cueing it up with my headphones in bed. Since then, I've listened to countless nature sounds recordings. One of them, I recorded myself when I lived in Texas on a cool night in San Marcos. With that recording, I had the idea to create a nature sounds album. This album is in the works with new recordings from Costa Rica.

The fifth release from Guided Meditation Treks introduces you to the "Healing Breathwork" practice, an active pranayama meditation that is used to transmute stuck emotions and behaviors by activating the respiratory system and heart chakra through the practice. This is a powerful meditation that can come with strong physical and emotional effects. These awakening effects could even be life changing. This practice can unlock deep  feelings, so use it under your own discretion, for your greatest good, of course.

Like Vipassana, part of the purpose is to teach you the technique of the breathing practice. If you only do the breath itself, without anything else, you will feel effects, and so the app has a "timer" feature where you can hear a breathing track in the background and time your breath to follow it. The most important part of the technique is for  you to move as much air as possible in and out of the lungs. The goal is to create an oxygen-rich state in your system, which will create specific psychological effects that will bring your consciousness out of your head and into your heart.

Big news for the android apps!

First off, we finally got around to updating Guided Meditation Treks Vol 1 and Guided Meditation Treks Vol 2 Android apps so that all four meditations are included without an additional in-app purchase. This brings android on par with the iOS app, which was updated last year. Now, for 5 bucks, you get all four meditations of the album, which is cheaper than buying the album from iTunes!
​In fact, it's half price!

Secondly, we have released the beta for the next app, Healing Breathwork. You can enroll in the beta by clicking on this link from your android phone. What's really cool about this app is that it is also written in Android's newest programming language, kotlin. And the code is available open source online!

Stay tuned for the production releases of the iOS and Android versions of Healing Breathwork later in 2019.

Guided Meditation Treks is proud to announce the next album: Healing Breathwork. The culmination of years of life experience with this type of meditation modality and a 4-level training from my mentor on the subject, David Elliott, this is the 5th album from Guided Meditation Treks. The topics for this album go deep into both the light and dark elements of our lives that may need healing.

The first track, Stepping Into Your Power, reminds us of the inherent power we have as a soul in this incarnation to "do what we came here to do," and helps us shed any layers of doubt that have been imposed upon us from society. The second track, Grieving and Celebrating a Loss, allows us to take any given specific instance of "loss" in our own life and evaluate where we are in the grieving process, then move on to the next state until (in time) we reach acceptance. The most charged track of the album is Healing Sexual Abuse, where we cultivate space to honestly deal with and move beyond the emotions and situations that arise from having an episode of sexual abuse in our life. Finally, the album ends with a light exercise around Abundance, where we connect the inherent abundance within ourselves to the abundance which surrounds us to create a circuit of manifestation. In each track, the listener is instructed to practice a specific form of pranayama breathwork, which is the featured active meditation of this album.

The album was written, produced, and recorded by Russell Eric Dobda, and is now available on CDBaby, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, and other music distribution sites worldwide. As with all of the GMT albums, there will be an app version for Android and iOS, which will be released later in 2019. Check out the dedicated page for this album to hear a sample and read more detail about the work.

Due to recent changes in the iOS store, as well as feedback from users, the Guided Meditation Treks V1 and V2 apps for iOS have undergone an upgrade. Previously, these apps each came with one meditation, with the option to purchase 3 more. With this change, the app now includes ALL FOUR of the meditations at one price. All previous users of the app will be "grandfathered in" and can receive all of the meditations for free, simply by upgrading to the latest version of the app. As an added token of gratitude, I will be keeping the price at $2.99 until the end of January, at which point there will be a price increase to better keep price parity with the audio-only album versions of these apps, which are generally $9.99, in alignment with most audio albums these days. I'm not exactly sure what the new iOS app price will be, but if you want to get all of the meditations on each volume for under $3, then make your purchase before February 1. Also, I have made the code for these apps open source on GitHub (without the copyright audio of course). Thanks for your support!

I've been an avid consumer of acupuncture for over a decade. As a software developer and pianist, I spend a lot of time at a keyboard using my wrists and arms. This causes tension that runs up my arms, and also around my shoulders and into my neck and back. I believe that regular acupuncture has helped keep me from developing severe tendonitis, or worse, carpal tunnel syndrome. I try to go twice a month, and I've advised friends to use it for their own muscular pain and tension. However, some people are against acupuncture because they are either afraid of needles or have a bad history with them. Recently, I was given the opportunity to try the moxaLight, which applies the concepts of acupuncture via a system of LED lights attached to the body. It seemed promising, not only for those who fear needles, but for myself. Sometimes, I just can't get enough acupuncture. In the past, I'd stolen needles from my acupuncturists to administer it at home, but I learned that this can be dangerous if I hit the wrong points. The moxaLight seemed like a much safer alternative for home-administered acupuncture, so I was excited to try it. With that, I present my review of this product...

Fortunately, I am currently in a nurturing and stable relationship with an amazing, caring, and beautiful soul. However, this hasn't always been the case. I've had a few break-ups, and I can tell you from experience that severing the cord was not always easy. Especially if you are a loving and caring person, it can be hard to let go of someone with whom you once shared everything in your life. I always set intentions around my break-ups to cut loose my former lovers in a way that is for the greatest good of the both of us. Once the realization is made that the world is a better place with us apart than together, the work begins to separate ties. This is not always easy, and in this blog, I present some practical methods and specific (free) meditations you can do to help the process...

With the release of the Vipassana App, and in keeping with the spirit of the late SN Goenka to offer free services that helps others, I have made the code for these apps open source to the public (except for the audio files).

Why is this helpful? It allows anyone to pull down a copy of my code, make a few changes to it, add your own images and audio, then create your own meditation apps! It requires a little bit of technical knowledge to create a basic iOS and/or Android app, but most of the actual work of the app itself is already done for you. This is the actual code used by my production Vipassana apps!

​With the stress and responsibility of our modern lives, many people are suffering from insomnia. If you’re not suffering from insomnia, you may wake up periodically throughout the night. You may not make it to the deep resting stages that are essential to keeping you mentally and physically healthy. Yoga has many benefits and one of them has been proven to improve sleep quality.

A new study has said that yoga can help improve sleep for people who can’t sleep at night. So how does yoga work on the body to allow the mind to relax enough so you can sleep?

To complete the trifecta, the android version of the Vipassana App has been released to production on the Google Play Store! It was quite a journey to practice this meditation twice daily for a year after an intense 10-day retreat to learn it. I had a great time practicing this type of meditation as well as making the app. I even mentored a junior developer who is learning Java/Android development in the process. It was a fun ride, and I noticed many changes in myself over the past year. With that, I bring to you this instructional series which teaches you the meditation technique believed to have been used by the Buddha to find enlightenment.

Download it now from the Google Play store
If you have iOS, you can get it from the Apple Store
If you don't have a smartphone but want the mp3 version, you can find it on CDBaby