Nanea is a timer, not a course. But people arrive at unguided sitting with the same handful of questions. How long. What to do with a wandering mind. Whether silence or rain. Whether a chair counts. They deserve an answer, and most of the answers have a long history behind them.
So: what the practice is, what the traditions say, and what people who sit describe. None of it is instruction. Take what is useful.
What unguided meditation is
Unguided meditation is sitting without a voice in your ear. What is actually involved, how it differs from a guided one, and what it feels like at first.
How to sit without anyone talking
The whole instruction for unguided meditation is short. Where to sit, what to do with the first minute and the middle, and how a sitting ends.
How long to sit
There is no correct number of minutes. What five, ten, twenty and forty tend to feel like, where the twenty-minute convention came from, and how to pick.
Timers, bells and interval chimes
A meditation timer has one job: taking the clock out of the sitting. What separates one from a kitchen timer, where the bells came from, and what intervals do.
Anchors: the breath, a sound, the body
An anchor is whatever you rest attention on while you sit. The breath is the usual one. Sound, the body, and the choice between silence and rain.
When the mind wanders
It is supposed to. What the wandering is, why noticing it is the whole event, and what people do with a thought that will not leave.
Restlessness, dullness and doubt
The difficult sittings. What restlessness, boredom, sleepiness and doubt look like, the old lists that name them, and the adjustments people make.
Sitting most days
How people keep an unguided practice going. Attaching it to something that already happens, what a missed day costs, and why a streak should stay a record.
Some words you will meet
Meditation carries a lot of vocabulary, most of it borrowed from traditions that have been at this for a very long time. None of it is required reading. You can sit down knowing none of these words. They just turn up.
Anchor. Whatever you rest attention on during a sitting. Most often the breath, sometimes a sound, a sensation in the hands, or the body as a whole.
Zazen. Seated practice in the Zen traditions. It covers more than one thing: breath counting (susokukan) is a common entry point across lineages, shikantaza or "just sitting" has no object at all, and Rinzai practice centres on koan inquiry. A bell conventionally opens and closes a period in all of them.
Vipassana. A Pali word for insight or clear seeing. In the Theravada traditions it names the direct observation of experience as it arises, looked at for impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and not-self (anattā). In modern usage it also names the silent retreat courses that teach it.
Shamatha (or samatha). Often translated as calm abiding. Practice that gathers attention on a single thing, rather than observing whatever arises.
Noting. Quietly naming what is happening as it happens (thinking, hearing, aching) and returning. A technique associated with several modern insight traditions.
The five hindrances (nīvaraṇa). A classical list of the states that get in the way of practice: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt. The old texts give a specific countermeasure for each.
Body scan. Attention moved slowly through the body, part by part. Common in secular mindfulness courses, and one of the few practices usually taught with a voice.
Interval chime. A sound partway through a sitting rather than only at the end. Used to mark a segment, or simply to appear once in the middle of a long stretch of quiet.
Sesshin. A period of intensive group practice in the Zen traditions, typically several days of mostly silent sitting.
Sitting. The ordinary word for one period of practice, and the one this app uses everywhere in place of session.
