After the Meditation Apps
After year or two of a meditation app subscription, it starts to feel boring, tiring, and uninteresting.
You still open it most mornings. You still notice the small effects. You are calmer in traffic. You sleep better some nights. You can sit with a difficult feeling for slightly longer than you used to.
But something has stopped moving. The voice in your headphones is the same voice it was eighteen months ago. The ten-minute body scan is the ten-minute body scan. Something feels stalled.
Most people, at this point, blame themselves. They assume they are not practicing hard enough or long enough. The answer is usually different. The app format has done what it can. There is much much more, and it is to be found somewhere else.
What is happening beyond the press
The mainstream talk about mindfulness in 2026 is noisy. McMindfulness critiques. Workplace wellness debates. AI-generated meditation. None of that is too interesting…
The interesting stuff is happening in retreats.
Jhana practice, the deep absorption states described in early Buddhist texts, is in its strongest moment in decades. Jhourney has scheduled multiple retreats through 2026 and reports that two-thirds of participants experience at least one jhana state by the end of a week-long programm. The Barre Center for Buddhist Studies has just announced a samadhi and jhana retreat based on the final teachings of Rob Burbea. Shaila Catherine and Leigh Brasington, both of whom have spent decades teaching concentration practice, continue to draw experienced practitioners into ten-day intensives.
In the contemplative Christian world, the Centering Prayer network founded by Thomas Keating runs in over fifty countries and continues to publish, train, and host silent retreats. Holy Cross Monastery on the Hudson held a retreat in February. The Center for Contemplative Living in Denver has programs running through spring.
Jewish contemplative practice has its own institutions now. The Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Or HaLev, Urban Adamah, and Garrison Institute are running silent retreats that integrate Vipassana with Jewish liturgy, text study, and chant. The third annual Hineni retreat ran in late April. Or HaLev's Awakening the Divine retreat is scheduled at Garrison this summer.
Sufi practice is not very prominent in the English-language press. The International Association of Sufism's 40 Days: Alchemy of Tranquility program ran in California in January, taught by Sufi masters Nahid Angha and Ali Kianfar.
None of this gets much press but all of it is very interesting.
Why these traditions are getting their depth back
The Western translation of mindfulness was stripping. Buddhist practice without the Buddhism. Christian contemplation without the Christianity. The thinking was that this would make the practices accessible. But it also made them shallow.
What I notice in practitioners who move from apps into these older traditions is a slow return of texture. Practice in lineage carries something that practice in isolation does not. A teacher who can read where you actually are, not where the curriculum says you should be. Then, there are other practitioners who have been at it longer than you. Liturgy or chant or text that gives the silence a stable ground. A schedule designed by people who knew, from long experience, what comes up at hour twelve of a retreat that does not come up at minute twelve of an app session.
These traditions were built to take a person somewhere with support, community, and lineage keepers. The apps are built to make money.
A few things you can do
If you have been on apps for a while and feel maintained rather than moved. Consider what that means for you.
Look at the lineages on offer rather than the brands and TV/celebrity Gurus. Find one where you can have a personal connection. One whose theological and cultural background you can resonate with. Many traditions welcome serious students who are not formally of the tradition.
A weekend silent retreat will tell you more about the next layer of your practice than another year of ten-minute sessions on apps.
If you cannot get to a retreat, find one teacher whose recordings you somatically resonate with and stay long enough that the voice becomes familiar and connection feels deeper. Depth is partly the absence of switching.