Non-app guided meditation recommendations
I used to use the Waking Up app for daily 20 minute guided meditations, and I want to get back into it, but these days I don't use a smartphone most of the time so I'm looking for something similar that I could load up onto the (offline) hardware music player that I use for music and audiobooks. Ideally a number of different similar-length guided meditations (where I could either loop through them in order, or pick one at random for each session). I'm still fairly new to meditation, so I'm probably not aware of all the forms/formats that this kind of thing can take, but the ones I'd been using are 20-30 minutes of mostly silence (but I'm not opposed to the idea of some kind of background white noise) with a guide providing verbal instructions around breathing and relaxation at the beginning, then providing occasional visualization exersizes or affirmations to focus on at occasional intervals.
A few searches shows no shortage of options for this kind of thing (both free and paid), but I'm wondering if anyone has any specific recommendations of something like this that they use or have used and would vouch for the quality. It seems like the kind of category where it would be easy to churn out a bunch of low-effort AI generated slop and disguise it as something else, which I would like to avoid.
I ripped a bunch of my favorites out of Waking Up and threw them on CDs. IIRC, it was much easier than ripping Libby files.
I don't really think I could bother with guided meditations that aren't from Waking Up. I need my determinism hard, my free will illusory, my consciousness a spandrel. I'm not here for self-improvement; I'm in it for self-destruction.
I feel you, I don't think I could take anything too overtly spiritual or new-agey very seriously. Your comment reminded me that I did poke around at the Waking Up site some time ago and realized it didn't look too hard to figure out the urls of the audio files, so maybe I'll go take another peek and dust off the ol' shell script+curl hat.
I listed to sleep guided meditations when I go to sleep, but the ones I listen to also have lots of other guided meditations! They're all 'songs' on Spotify, but you can easily download those and just plop 'em on any music playing device.
My favourite authors (artists? Not sure what to call them hah) are:
Jason Stephenson. He has some fantastic visualisation meditations, as well as a lot of different focused shorter, 20ish minute ones. E.g. for 'Getting ready for the day' and 'Grounding yourself during stress' and 'Thinking positive thoughts'. As well as the classic breathing ones of course.
The Honest Guys. Very similar to Jason's stuff, but I personally dislike the length of most of their meditations - I prefer 45+ min but theirs are mostly 15-20 mins. Which might be exactly what you're looking for ofc :)
Michael Sealey. I wanted to include him just in case, but I should note he does a lot of hypnosis type of guided meditations, not just normal meditations. I'm not sure how sensitive you are to that, personally I am not so I don't feel much of a difference between his normal stuff and his hypnosis stuff, but I have no idea if someone with a heightened sensitivity for hypnosis would enjoy his way of hypnosis or not :p
Hope the above help!
Oh sorry maybe I should point out - almost all of the above artists(? lol) have some type of background wishy washy noise.
Ya know, the 'soothing yoga yin yang vaguely spiritual but maybe not oh here's a soft gong echoing in the distance' kind of stuff haha. Just so you know! I know Jason has a couple of meditations where he explicitly mentions in the title that it's a 'voice only' meditation, if you're not a fan of the yoga-studio elevator music hah.
Thanks for all the recommendations! I'm definitely open to trying it with some background noise to see how it affects me. Like I said I'm pretty new to it and have only really done Sam Harris's app, so it'll be interesting to try some others out. I don't have Spotify but it looks like everyone you mentioned also uploads stuff to YouTube so I can easily grab them from there.
Glad to have helped, I hope my suggestions are useful!!