Meditation & Visualisation

Before you start

Meditation & Visualisation is a marketplace tool. You need Plus and you adopt it from Marketplace → Meditation & Visualisation → Adopt. Until you do, you will see: “The Meditation & Visualisation tool is switched off. Turn it on in the tools catalogue to use yours.”

Once adopted it appears in two places, and it is worth knowing what each is for:

• In the sidebar, as Meditation & Visualisation — this is where you write, record, publish and search. Unlike a genogram, a meditation is not about one patient: it is yours, which is why it gets an entry of its own.
• In the AlchelyMeeting bar, during a session — this is where you guide it. There you only choose and play; nothing is written.
• In the tool dock on your home screen, with two ways in: New meditation and My catalogue.

Creating a meditation

New meditation opens a three-step wizard.

1. How you make it

2. Content

The title is the only required field, alongside the script or the recording. The limits:

3. Publishing

Here you decide whether it stays yours or goes into the public catalogue. You can finish with Create meditation or Create and publish, and change your mind later: publishing and withdrawing are always available from the meditation itself.

The script and the reading pace

Type it, or press Dictate and speak: the browser transcribes as you talk, and Alchely says Listening… for as long as the microphone is open.

Leave a blank line between paragraphs. This is not cosmetic: each paragraph is a unit of the prompter and carries a pause after it, and that pause counts towards the length Alchely works out.

The reading pace

A slider between 40 and 160 words per minute, starting at 90. A guided meditation is read far below ordinary conversation, which runs at around 150.

Under the script, Alchely keeps telling you the word count and how long that takes to read at that pace. It is the same sum the prompter runs in session: the words at that pace, the breath it leaves between paragraphs, and any silences you wrote.

Silences and the bowl

A meditation is mostly what sits between the sentences, and the prompter cannot hold silences for you that it does not know about. You write them into the script, in square brackets. There are two tags, and only two: one the prompter did not act on would be a comment pretending to be an instruction.

• The tag never reaches the screen. The paragraph reads exactly as you wrote it, and the silence is a beat of its own — not a stray [10s] in the middle of a meditation. The prompter shows it as Silence · 8s, counting.
• A silence lasts what it says, at any reading pace. You chose it for the meditation rather than for the reading. It is capped at ten minutes, so a typo cannot stall a session.
• Alchely adds no breath of its own around a silence you wrote. Between paragraphs it leaves a short pause; before a pause you asked for, it does not — the one you wrote is the one you meant.
• The bowl takes no time of its own. The strike happens at a point in the reading, and the silence around it is whatever you wrote around it.
• It only rings while the meditation is playing. Moving the marker on a paused script does not set bowls off in the room. And going back over that point rings it again, which is what going back asks for.

How long it runs

Alchely works out the script's length with the same arithmetic the prompter then runs: the words at their pace, the breath between paragraphs, and any silences you wrote. [gong] does not count as a word.

But a script's arithmetic is not how long a meditation takes. Somebody who has guided this one twenty times knows that with a person in the room you slow down, the breathing lengthens and the last silence runs. So there is a field of its own, Your own estimate, in minutes: optional, and up to three hours.

Recording in the studio

Record opens the studio. It sounds there the way it will sound in session.

• Start begins the take, with the level bars moving as you speak. Pause and Stop do what they say.
• When you finish, the take plays back in full and you can jump to any point in it.
• The background track is chosen afterwards, with the take already made: music is decided against a particular recording, not in the abstract.
• Your voice and Background track each have their own level. Voice starts at full and the track at 25%.
• Record again discards and starts over. Use this recording attaches it.

Uploading audio you already have

Upload a file accepts MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, FLAC, OGG and WebM. The recording goes straight from your browser to storage, with no intermediate screen.

While it uploads you will see Uploading the recording…, and when it finishes Recording ready. Save to keep it. — until you save, the meditation does not have it yet.

The music

A meditation can have a track playing under it, or none. What is offered today is silence or music of your own.

Your own

In the My tracks tab you upload your own music: give it a name (up to 120 characters) and it becomes available in the studio and in the call, under as many meditations as you like. The track belongs to you, not to one meditation.

Removing a track from your shelf does not change the meditations already using it: they keep playing with it.

Guiding it in a session

Inside an AlchelyMeeting session, the meditation control opens the panel. You pick one from your catalogue and press Start.

What you see

• If it has a script, the prompter: the paragraph due marked, and the ones before and after it still readable.
• Tap a paragraph to move the marker there. It works whether you have run ahead or fallen behind, and your patient's screen is told.
• Slower and Faster change the pace while you are reading. The saved one is what its author thought; today's depends on who is in front of you. Slowing it moves the marker back toward you rather than making you chase it, and the change lasts as long as the session: adjusting once is not deciding the script was written wrong.
• Bigger text and Smaller text: three sizes, and your browser remembers the one you read at. A laptop on the desk is not the same read as a screen across the room.
• On a written silence, the prompter shows it as one and counts down: Silence · 8s. When the time is up it moves on by itself.
• A [gong] sounds the room's singing bowl as the reading reaches it, for both of you, without stopping the script.
• The bed is chosen here too, from your shelf — but only for a written meditation. The same script is read in different rooms: the one that wants music with one patient wants silence with the next. Not for a recording: that was approved in the studio with its bed under it, and changing it from the call would be editing finished work.
• If it is a recording alone there is no prompter: “This meditation is a recording. It is playing for both of you.”
• Play, Pause and End. Ending withdraws the track from the call.
• Back to video closes the panel without ending the meditation — the bar keeps indicating that one is playing.

What your patient sees

A card saying a meditation has begun: the title and “Close your eyes and follow your therapist's voice.” It takes itself away after ten seconds — it is a notice, not a screen to sit and watch.

There is no progress bar and no clock, deliberately: somebody with their eyes closed does not need to know there are eleven minutes left, and being told is an invitation to count them. The script never leaves your screen, and neither do the controls: a playback instruction arriving from their side is ignored.

If Alchely sees that your updates are not reaching them, it tells you: “Your patient's screen may not be following along.” The warning clears itself as soon as updates get through again. And anyone joining or rejoining midway is handed the current state without you doing anything.

Your catalogue

The section has three tabs: My catalogue, Public catalogue and My tracks.

Each meditation is tagged with the therapies you would use it in and the presenting problems it is for. If you work in a way the list has no word for, type it: “No therapy matches. Type it and add it as it is.”

You filter by therapy, by problem, by language, by kind — script, recording, or script and recording — and search over title and instructions. The same filters serve your catalogue and the public one.

How long each one runs

Every card carries its length. Where each one comes from is in How long it runs.

Giving one to a patient

A guided meditation is practised, not attended: you read it once in the session, and what does the work is your patient putting it on again on Tuesday night. Share leaves it in their portal.

• You choose which patients get it, and it is a decision per patient: the same body scan can go to six people, and taking it back from one does not take it from the other five.
• In their portal they read it or play it, with your voice and the bed mixed the way you set them. The entry says whether it is With voice or To read, and since when they have had it.
• Read-only, and not a copy. There is no way for your patient to edit it, and what they read is your meditation: change it tonight and tomorrow they hear the new version.
• The tags are shown to them as what they mean — 30s of silence, The bell sounds — rather than raw. A patient reading [30s] mid-meditation reads it aloud in their head, which is the opposite of silence.
• If a recording never finished uploading, their portal says exactly that and asks them to let you know, rather than a “could not play” that would have them retrying something they cannot fix.

Publishing and copying

Publishing a meditation puts it in the public catalogue, which every therapist on Alchely can see.

Publishing yours

• An author is required: with no name to attribute it to, Alchely will not publish. It arrives filled in with your own name — a default you can see rather than a claim made for you: publish under your practice's name, or under none, by changing it or clearing it.
• You choose the licence, and it travels with the meditation and with every copy anyone takes.
• Withdraw from the public library is always available. If you republish later, the date you first published it is kept.

Taking somebody else's

In the public catalogue, View opens it read-only and Add to my catalogue takes a copy, not a link. The copy is private and yours, you edit it for the way you work, and it still says who wrote it and under what licence.

Your own published meditation does not show up in the public catalogue — you already have it in yours — and you cannot copy from yourself.

Problems