Zen : Your Way

After the first week of development I took a massive detour and built a whole Zen : Your Way curriculum. That is what I spent the month of July on, really. Now I am deciding not to ship it. We are going to stick to the basics of mindset and form. I almost fell into the trap of building a meditation library.

What Your Way Means to Me

Most apps offer a huge menu, and I think that works against people. A just-sit approach without pretension tends to last longer. Couple that with real everyday benefits and you have something golden.

Somehow I had to do the deep dive into curriculum building to realize that cutting down to the basics is a better approach. There is a lot to learn about meditation, and there are many traditions. In that month lost building a curriculum I tried to approach meditation from different traditions: Insight, mindfulness, Zen, and more. But try as hard as you can and that approach can only give you the typical library apps the App Store is littered with.

Instead, today, in terms of content, the product bet looks like this:

• Offer basic instruction (posture) to learn to just sit on the cushion.
• Marry that with real-life return: being present in ordinary moments.
• Let skills transfer both ways, so cushion and daily life feed each other.
• Offer a single progressive path you can follow to deepen. So not the huge menu I had in the app before and deleted now.
• Keep the Your in Your Way: sometimes come back to bare sitting with no instruction, and if bare sitting is too hard today, take another step on the path with a companion.

Path is not a menu. Breaks are allowed. Unguided sits are fine. Deepen when you can. Sit bare when you need to. Ask for company when the bare sit fails you.

Why I Am Putting It Down

I already said library is a non-starter. A curriculum can become a library if you are not careful: different folders, same hunger to consume. Scope discipline again.

There is also real tension between traditional teaching and a short daily return practice. I will not resolve that with a slogan. I feel it, and I am living with it while I focus on what people can use off the cushion every day.

What stays free does not wait on the detour. Just sit on the cushion stays available. The path is optional company. I am not leading with a price. The sit is not the upsell.

Catching Myself

This is me catching myself almost building yet another library. I still believe in the progressive path. I also believe shipping the whole thing early would recreate the shopper in a different outfit: a streak of sits without a path, a menu of options without true guidance.

So I am going to ship what I have now: a simple basic learning path, maybe seven days, then an invitation to return to just sitting on the cushion. And off-cushion guidance in the form of the daily return to the present.