Energy Healing

How I Built a Meditation App

How I Built a Meditation App for My Music

From Sketchbook Ideas to a Living Space for Stillness

For years, I had a simple idea in the back of my mind.

"What if my music had a home that actually felt like the music itself?"

Somewhere calm. Somewhere uncluttered. Somewhere people could come to sleep, breathe, meditate or simply find a quieter moment – without being pulled away by notifications, recommendations or algorithms.

Streaming platforms have been wonderful for helping my music reach listeners around the world. But meditation music is slightly different. Often, the last thing somebody wants after finding a peaceful track is another screen asking for their attention.

So I began imagining something different.

Not just another place to store music, but a small digital sanctuary built around the ways people actually use it.

And, like many of my creative projects, it began with a notebook and sketching.

Starting With the Experience

Before worrying about colours, menus or buttons, I started with a more important question:

That changed the way I approached the whole project.

Instead of thinking only about features, I started thinking about moments in people’s lives.

Someone lying awake at midnight needs something very different from someone beginning a morning meditation.

A yoga teacher looking for a long soundscape has different needs from somebody wanting five quiet minutes during a busy day.

So lists became diagrams. Diagrams became journeys. And gradually the app began to take shape.

Before there was an app, there were a lot of pieces of paper.

From Ideas to Sketches

Once the ideas started becoming clearer, I began drawing them. Nothing sophisticated – boxes, arrows, circles and rough screens.

I sketched how somebody might move through the app: arrive, find something appropriate to how they were feeling, begin listening, perhaps add a breathing practice, and then step back into their day.

Some ideas became much more specific.

Turning Sketches Into Wireframes

The next step was translating those rough ideas into wireframes.

This is where the app started to feel less like a collection of features and more like a place.

And everything needed to remain simple enough to use when somebody was tired, stressed or simply didn’t want to think too hard.

One principle kept coming back … “The technology should disappear behind the experience.“

Designing the Breath Guides and Sound Baths

This philosophy became especially important when I started designing features such as the Breath Guides and the SoundBaths.

I didn’t want a breathing exercise buried beneath instructions.

The experience itself needed to guide you.

> Breathe in.
> Hold.
> Breathe out.

A simple visual rhythm, accompanied by sound.

The same thinking shaped the Sound Baths.

Ideally, once somebody begins a session, the screen becomes almost irrelevant but the timer carries on.

> Choose the sound
> Choose the duration
> Choose an optional ending sound (that’s me recording them)
> Settle down
> Listen

That is quite different from designing a conventional music player – and it became one of the most enjoyable parts of the project.

Finding a Way to Build It

Of course, there was still one fairly major problem. I’m a musician, not an app developer.

I experimented with different ways of creating the experience myself, including trying to build parts of it through my website. But I increasingly found myself spending time solving technical problems instead of doing what I actually wanted to do … making music.

That changed when I discovered Movement the app builder company based in Melbourne & Victoria, Australia.

Movement gave me a visual, no-code environment where I could start turning the sketches and wireframes into a functioning app.

And importantly, I could continue working in much the same way I had been working on paper:

try something → look at it → refine it → simplify it → try again.

That made the process feel much more like a creative project than a traditional software build.

"Once the technical barrier fell away, I could return more of your time to composing and creating content. Thank you Movement!"

Watching the Ideas Become Real

This is probably the most satisfying part.

There are things inside the Aroshanti App today that I can trace back to a pencil mark in a notebook. A breathing animation that began as a circle. A Sound Bath timer that began as a box on a page.

The way Sleep, Nature and Healing are organised began as diagrams scattered across my desk.

And even now, the process is much the same.

I sketch → I test → I build → I listen → I change things

Now the technology framework of the app is out of my hands and continuously being developed by Movement, I can focus on the exciting part … new content and new features.

A Home for the Music

Somewhere during the process, I realised I wasn’t really just building a meditation app. I was building a home for everything around the music.

A listener might arrive because they can’t sleep. Someone else might want a breathing exercise. Another person may want nature sounds while they work. Someone practising Reiki might want a long uninterrupted soundscape.

The app allows those experiences to live together without forcing them into the same journey. That was really the idea from the beginning: not simply more content, but a calmer way of finding the right thing at the right moment.