What If Your Daily Meditation App Had A Sista’s Voice?

Judging from collective chatter, it seemed the excitement around 2020’s arrival fizzled into fatigue during the longest January ever. It may be a new decade, but many of us work at the same jobs and balance the same relationships, while facing the same pressures as before. Finding the time to center ourselves and practice self-care should remain consistent as well.

Wellness is becoming popularized in such a way that there are many tools to assist, but how many cater to the concerns of black women? If you use a daily meditation app, for example, does it even have the option to select a sista’s soothing voice as your guide? The Shine App is a self-care resource designed with us in mind. Its founders, Marah Lidey, who is Black, and Naomi Hirabayashi, who is Asian, met at a stressful job and supported each other through their own anxiety issues. Then they looked outward to see how they could make getting support around mental health accessible for all.

If you’re already familiar with the popular daily meditation apps like Calm, Headspace, and Insight Timer, imagine if their content selection included topics that felt especially relevant to the issues you go through, like the pressure Black women often face to be “twice as good” as our counterparts — but not just the heavy stuff, either. Shine does have an audio track about Representation Burnout, and the microaggressions Black women are more likely to face in the workplace. But it also has a mindfulness exercise to listen to during Wash Day, your favorite (or feared) hair-taming ritual. Having content that we connect with, spoken by fellow black female voices, could make it that much easier to actually stick with our meditation and mindfulness resolutions.

Research shows that people from minority groups are less likely to receive mental health care than others, and that diverse mental health care practitioners are underrepresented in the field.  In 2015 the American Psychiatric Association indicated that 86% of psychologists in the U.S. were white and just 4% were Black. This just doesn’t represent the world we live in, and can intimidate people of color seeking support. Mindfulness apps on the whole can eliminate a lot of barriers by bringing emotional health resources right to our smartphones, which we’re on all the time anyway. 

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