I have shipped a new app! Selfime lets you write a guided meditation in your own words, then follow it quietly or record it in your own voice. It is on iOS and Android now, at selfime.com.
The idea came from a simple gap. A meditation app usually hands you someone else’s voice and someone else’s words. That works well for some people. For others, the words never quite fit the morning they are actually having. Selfime starts from a written practice and lets you change it until it sounds like you.
How it works
You pick a starting point: a guided practice from the bundled library, a blank tape, or a script you wrote yourself. Then you make it your own. Read-Along shows the practice one card at a time at an unhurried pace, with gentle chimes and optional ambience, and you can pause, skip or adapt any card as you go.
If you would rather hear it, you record it one card at a time in your own voice. You can replay or redo each take before you keep it. When words are too much, Breathe gives you a paced session with nothing to read at all, in Calm, Coherent, Box or 4-7-8 rhythms.
Whatever you make stays in a private tape library on your phone. Listen to it straight away, keep it for a bad day, or seal a finished tape for Future You. A sealed tape opens on a date you choose or for a feeling, such as “open when I can’t sleep”. Each tape can also carry a time, a place and a note about how you felt.
Two features stay off until you turn them on. On iOS, the app can log finished sessions to Apple Health as Mindful Minutes. On either platform, it can transcribe your recordings on the device.
What it deliberately leaves out
There is no account, no advertising and no analytics. Recordings and scripts are encrypted in the app’s own storage, nothing is uploaded to a service I run, and content leaves the app only when you choose a system backup, a Recovery Kit or a share. You can also lock the whole app behind Face ID or your fingerprint. I built it this way because the thing you say into it at two in the morning is nobody else’s business, mine included.
The free edition includes six guided practices, a blank tape, three recording slots, one Future You delivery and Breathe sessions up to five minutes with rain. Selfime Lifetime is a single purchase that includes all fifty practices, unlimited recording slots and deliveries, longer Breathe sessions and every soundscape. You do not need a subscription.
Where it came from
The interface borrows from a cassette field recorder, down to the reels, the tape counter and the moving VU meter, all drawn and animated in the app rather than photographed. Nine cassette finishes come free, and Lifetime adds more than seven thousand combinations of shell, label and colour to make a tape look like yours. That is partly nostalgia and partly a design choice. A tape is a small, finite, physical thing, and a meditation you made for yourself should feel like one too.
If you try it, I would like to hear what you made with it. You can reach me through the support page.