Vision
Building the meditation infrastructure for AI to scale awakening.
The Sacred Act is an iOS application offering a premium meditation experience by honoring ancient wisdom. The platform is designed to observe a person, understand their state through emotion, biometrics, and environment, prescribe the right meditation technique, and guide them through it. Learning their mind and body over time to improve its attunement and guide towards awakening.
Demo
Recorded on version 2.15.0, the React Native build. The app has since been rewritten in Swift.
Inside the app
Every screen, as it actually looks, in the order you meet them. Scroll sideways.
Home
The orb is the whole home screen. No feed, no streak, nothing asking to be tapped.
Say what you notice
Share what is moving in your thoughts and in your body, in your own words.
The offered practice
A technique prescribed for this moment, with the text it came from named.
Your orientation
It knows whether you are sitting, walking, in transit, or just off a workout.
Your duration
Say how long you have. The practice is composed to fit the time you set.
The sit
Guided through the practice, composed and spoken for this sit alone.
Your reflection
Record what you experienced, in your own words. It stays private to you.
The mirror
The patterns in your blind spots, written back to you as they emerge.
The body's record
How your body answered. It learns your baseline and attunes over time.
Share with a friend
Send a practice to someone you would want to sit with.
Read the source
Not a summary of the tradition. The text the practice came from, in full.
Mark what matters
Read and highlight, and come back to what you underlined.
The origins
Where the tradition began, and what else has come down from it.
The guide
Ask about the source texts. Every answer cites where it came from.
Your traditions
Sovereignty over the lineages it draws from. Turn any of them off.
The path
The next practice is two taps away, predicted from your schedule, activity, and time of day.
From the people sitting with it
“The start of my day has been so clear and productive. I feel like a light worker. I don't have this weight of inertia or procrastination.”
TestFlight tester
“The guided meditation: the words and how they are put together is so powerful. I thought to myself: I don't even know some of these words, but my body does.”
TestFlight tester
“This application is otherworldly and made my sister cry.”
TestFlight tester
What's new
- Aug 25, 20263.1.1
Your last practice remembers what you actually said
- The After line on your last practice is now drawn from your own reflection, in your own language.
- When you do not reflect, nothing is written for you. The card simply says you did not share.
- Before and After are each one concise line, so the card stays a glance at the sit.
- Aug 25, 20263.1.0
The library reads back
- Marking a passage is reliable now: drag to mark, drag back over it to erase, without fighting the scroll.
- Anything you have marked can be handed to the guide with Ask about this, and it arrives in the conversation as the passage it is, not as a paraphrase.
- The reader's chrome got out of the way. Chat sits in the corner and the contents live behind the progress pill.
- The reading surfaces wear the app's own colors instead of a page borrowed from elsewhere.
- Aug 25, 20263.1.0
The library opens where you left off
- The top of the Library is a ladder: the practice you sat last, the one next on your path, then something to discover.
- A practice links to the source text it came from, and quietly fills in details it was missing rather than showing you a gap.
- The book link works from the playback cover too.
- Aug 25, 20263.1.0
Waiting, and the doors you pass through
- The lines held in front of you while a meditation is written are drawn from the corpus itself, cycling through the naming, the promise, the settling and the posture.
- The figure drawn for a lying-down posture is now actually lying down.
- Permission cards read what the phone actually says, and when something has been denied they walk you to the place in Settings that changes it.
- The account wall is the real sign-in space rather than a card standing in for one, and it asks for an account before it asks anything about a subscription.
- The app stays in portrait on iPhone and iPad.
- Aug 24, 20263.1.0
Your first sit is received as a first meeting
- On your first ceremony the app asks two questions, once ever: which traditions to set aside, and which names for the sacred are welcome in your practice.
- Your guide now knows a first sitting is a first sitting, and welcomes you into how the practice works.
- After you create your account, a card confirms your name, how it is spoken, and your photo.
- Your pronunciation is suggested automatically from your name, shaped for the guide's voice.
- Signing in on a new phone keeps your history: nothing replays that you have already lived.
- Aug 21, 20263.0.0
The app, rebuilt from the ground up
- The Sacred Act is now a fully native app, rebuilt for the feel of the practice itself.
- Four spaces to move between: Home, Path, History, and Library.
- The playback space was redesigned: the tradition and source text stand above the title, and the details of a practice open with a tap.
- At your first sit, the app asks which names for the sacred are welcome in your practice, and speaks accordingly.
- Aug 20, 2026
Sacred Act asks two things, once, and then never again
- Before your first practice, you can set aside any tradition you would rather Sacred Act never draw from. Anything you set aside is never offered, in any form.
- You can also say which names for what the traditions point toward are welcome in your practice, or ask that the language stay plain.
- The names offered follow the boundary you just drew: a tradition you set aside does not appear on the next screen.
- Both answers shape the words you hear, never which practice you are offered.
- You are asked once. Both answers live in your settings and can be changed any time.
- Aug 20, 2026
Connecting a calendar is a permission, not a sign-in
- Connecting a calendar used to sign you in as whichever account you picked in the sheet, which could quietly move you into another account's practice. It is now a permission the app asks for, separate from who you are signed in as.
- You can connect as many calendars as a life actually has, one account to a row.
- What the app senses from a calendar is shown with its consent beside it. Withdraw the consent and the moment stops reaching the guide, not just the label.
- Aug 18, 20262.16.0
A path now guides you along itself
- Each sitting on a path is written knowing the intention you set for it in your own words.
- The guide knows where you stand on the path and what that means: a first sitting opens ground, the middle carries you through the stretch where a path can feel like routine, and the last one gathers the whole walk rather than adding to it.
- What you have found in earlier sittings is carried forward and built on, in the language of the practice you are sitting today.
- Returning to a session you have already walked is met as a choice you made.
- Nothing is counted or scored, your reflections are never read back to you, and time away is never accounted for.
- Aug 14, 2026
An intention laid out as an arc of practices
- Say what you are working toward and the guide lays out a scheduled arc of practices that arrives there, planned backward from the arrival.
- The walk is read in two to four named stretches, each with its purpose and the milestone that stands once it is walked.
- Paths rest on a shelf you can set one down on and come back to, and the whole arc is one continuous line you can see your place on.
- Leaving a path sitting returns you to the path, never to Home.
- Aug 10, 2026
Repairs across the app
- Meditation audio now stops on every way out of a sit, including the ones that used to leave it playing.
- A reflection is answered in kind, and the Mirror is ready by the time you look at it.
- Settings no longer stays dark after you switch appearance back to System.
- A practice shows its real length, its real level, and why it was chosen for you.
- Practices past the first thousand had been quietly missing from the catalog. They are back.
- A practice links to the book it came from through the catalog, so the link resolves whether or not the full text is open to you.
- Aug 7, 20262.16.0
A new writer for the meditations
- Meditations are now written by a different model, chosen through blind comparison across the strongest available options.
- The practice, the moment, and the guide now supply the language instead of relying on stock posture lines.
- Litanies, body scans, and visualizations breathe between phrases instead of arriving as one unbroken sentence.
- Every session opens with its own welcome, and your name follows the greeting rather than becoming the first sound you hear.
- What the guide understands about you shapes what it offers and is never read back to you.
- Aug 7, 20262.16.0
Pacing that meets how you arrive
- How the guide speaks now moves with the state you arrive in, not only what it says.
- Arrive wound up late at night and the welcome comes a little quicker and brighter, then walks down a steeper descent.
- Deep silence arrives when your body typically settles, learned from your own sits, instead of at a fixed point in every arc.
- The deepest stillness is identical for everyone. Nothing about you changes that floor.
- Aug 7, 20262.16.0
Shared links open the app
- A shared meditation link now opens in the app instead of falling through to the web page.
- Aug 6, 20262.16.0
Account deletion works again
- Deleting your account had been failing every time and answering as though it had kept the account on purpose.
- It now removes your account along with your recordings and artwork, under your own credentials.
- Aug 6, 20262.16.0
Your artwork belongs to your account
- Artwork and profile pictures are now readable only by the account that made them.
- The practice catalog stays open to everyone, so a locked app and a first free sit still show what they always showed.
- Aug 6, 20262.16.0
One free sit covers a whole meditation
- A single sit makes several requests behind the scenes. The free one used to be spent by whichever arrived first, which left the meditation itself unpaid for.
- The meditation now spends it, and the small preparatory steps ride along without consuming anything.
- If the ledger that tracks this ever fails it fails toward letting you sit, and it now raises an alarm rather than going quiet.
- Aug 3, 20262.16.0
Every practice has its own relic
- Each practice now carries one piece of art, made once and shared by everyone who reaches it, instead of a new one generated per session.
- 769 of 1,419 practices have theirs. The rest resolve to a quiet placeholder sphere, never an empty frame.
- Consistency is held by conditioning every render on a single photograph of the empty studio. Naming exact colors made the variation five times worse; an image is a reference a model can actually check.
- Framing is measured against 40 approved renders and retried rather than judged by eye.
- Retired the per-person artwork buffer, which had been generating art nobody ever saw.
- Aug 2, 20262.16.0
A meditation's audio belongs to the person who sat it
- Every segment of a meditation is now written under your own credentials. The shared key that could have written into anyone's folder is gone rather than narrowed.
- Playback links are granted per meditation and expire in hours instead of lasting forever, so a copied link stops working.
- A refund takes back the sits it paid for. Letting a subscription lapse does not: you paid for those, and you keep them.
- Aug 2, 20262.16.0
Apple settles what you have access to
- Subscription access is now decided by Apple's own signed receipt rather than anything the app asserts for itself.
- Both sandbox and production purchases are checked, and a test purchase no longer reads as a paid subscription.
- When Apple refuses, the app says which credentials were refused instead of failing quietly.
- Aug 1, 20262.16.0
The access check never stands between you and a sit
- Three separate outages had turned an unanswerable access check into a locked door.
- Unreadable is not the same as denied. When the check cannot be read, you sit, and the failure is reported loudly instead of charged to you.
- Jul 31, 20262.15.0
Every practice gets a card of its own
- All 1,419 practices now carry a short title and a one-sentence summary written for a card, not cut down from one written for study.
- Titles are chosen per source text, because a name is only short enough relative to its siblings. Judged alone, the three sections of one work came back with three unrelated names.
- Shortening a canonical name at its first natural break would have collapsed 202 practices into 68 ambiguous titles. The reduction is a judgment, not a cut.
- Jul 28, 20262.14.0
The library grows to 241 books
- A book whose translation we may not republish now appears in full as a catalog entry: cover, description, origin, and practices all present. Only the reading is withheld.
- The library goes from 168 to 241 books, 171 of them readable end to end.
- Three genuinely free texts published in full: Mesillat Yesharim, Or ha-Sekhel, and Xiao Zhiguan.
- A practice is only offered when its source text is in the library, which takes offerable practices from 464 to 783.
- Read is hidden wherever there is nothing behind it, so no door ever opens onto an empty room.
- Restored the Bhagavad Gita's introduction, which an earlier pass had dropped.
- Jun 23, 20262.13.0
The practice is chosen before a word is written
- One exact practice is now selected from the corpus first, and the guide expresses that practice rather than inventing one as it writes.
- The guide receives the full authored practice, not a summary of it.
- Every choice keeps a record of what was considered and why, so an offering can be explained after the fact.
- Jun 23, 20262.12.0
A corpus the guide can actually reach
- The authored practice corpus now lives in a searchable form the guide draws on directly.
- Your history is projected into a private space used to rank which practice fits the moment, kept separate from the raw data it came from.
- Body signal at the scale of a single meditation is available to the same reasoning.
- Jun 19, 20262.8.9
The Mirror speaks in your own words
- The Mirror now writes short before and after summaries of a session from the words you brought and the reflection you left.
- Readings reach through the difficulty toward the capacity underneath it, instead of describing the difficulty back to you.
- Contemplative vocabulary appears only where it fits your practice, rather than sounding decorative.
- A reading no longer serves a stale portrait while a fresh one is being written, and no longer guesses your time of day from the wrong clock.
- Jun 19, 20262.8.7
Cleaner boundaries between voice and silence
- Adjacent pauses now form one continuous stretch of silence instead of several stitched together.
- Segment timing is exact to the sample, so playback is never stranded at the edge of a pause.
- Jun 18, 20262.8.0
Artwork ready the moment you arrive
- The offered practice shows finished art immediately on a cold start instead of waiting for it to be made.
- Jun 2, 20262.7.16
The ends-early bug, at its actual cause
- Meditations that froze or stopped short were traced to a change we made ourselves in May: we took over the phone's buffer management and forced it to read far ahead.
- Reading that far ahead made the phone decide the meditation ended wherever the read-ahead stopped.
- Restored the system defaults the working April build ran on.
- Honest trade: a weak connection may now produce a brief rebuffer, the way every streaming app does, instead of a meditation that stops two minutes from its end.
- May 31, 20262.7.15
Declared length now matches real length
- Every segment was declaring itself 43 milliseconds shorter than it truly was, and the gap accumulated across a meditation until the phone stopped at a length that had drifted from the truth.
- Declared and actual timing are now measured from the same encoded audio, so they cannot drift apart.
- May 30, 20262.7.14
Segments stop claiming to be whole recordings
- Removed a trailing index from every audio segment that told the player a complete recording ended there.
- A real cleanup, though not the cause. A fresh meditation on this build still truncated.
- May 29, 20262.7.13
A growing meditation is never declared finished early
- The playlist no longer marks itself complete while a segment is still missing, which had left the player treating a partial meditation as the whole thing and stopping there.
- Added the tracking that shows exactly when the player stops following a meditation as it grows.
- May 28, 20262.7.11
Stalls can be pinpointed
- A stall now names the exact segment it happened on and whether that segment was genuinely deliverable.
- Reverted an audio architecture experiment from the same day that had rendered speech silent.
- May 27, 20262.7.7
Buffering no longer ends a meditation
- Eight seconds of buffer trouble used to fire the closing gong and send you to the reflection screen. That branch is gone.
- The player now keeps a comfortable cushion and pauses naturally when it cannot, the way every other streaming app behaves.
- The only thing that ends a meditation is reaching its end.
- May 22, 20262.7.6
Buffer sized to the meditation's longest silence
- A fixed 25 second buffer could be drained by a single long pause, leaving no margin at the moment the next segment was needed.
- The buffer is now computed per meditation from its own longest segment, so a 200 second hold gets a buffer to match.
- May 22, 20262.7.5
Errors stop disappearing
- Backend error reporting had been crashing on every single event for twelve days. Fixed, and errors now print regardless so they cannot be swallowed again.
- Playback leaves a trail across its whole lifecycle, so a future stall can say what it actually was.
- May 16, 20262.7.4
The guide reveals itself at the threshold
- The opening reading now shows what the guide sees in itself, not just what it sees in you.
- May 16, 20262.7.3
Original ceremony rhythm restored
- The pause at the start of the ceremony is back to its original length.
- May 16, 20262.7.2
Two readings from one act of seeing
- The guide now writes two readings in a single act of seeing.
- The fuller diagnostic is kept as the guide's private memory.
- A shorter version is what gets revealed to you at the threshold.
- May 16, 20262.7.1
Ceremony reveals the guide's reading
- Before the practice is offered, you hear the guide's own reading of who arrived.
- May 15, 20262.7.0
The guide now remembers its own side
- The guide now keeps its own memory of every session: a pre-meditation reading, a post-meditation reflection, and a longitudinal self-portrait.
- Modeled on the master self-examination practices of six contemplative traditions.
- Companion detection tightened so casual name mentions no longer pull strangers into the room.
- Smoother spoken pronunciation of your name.
- May 14, 20262.6.10
Production deploys flowing again
- Multi-day deploy stall resolved.
- May 14, 20262.6.9
Playback hiccups self-heal
- Most network hiccups during playback now recover silently.
- If recovery doesn't take, the meditation still closes gracefully with its gong and reflection.
- May 14, 20262.6.8
25 seconds of forward buffer
- Short network blips are now absorbed completely. The listener hears nothing at all.
- May 13, 20262.6.7
The phone notices when playback stalls
- If playback silently freezes, we know and respond.
- If a meditation finishes short of its requested length, we know and capture the moment.
- May 13, 20262.6.6
Meditations survive a backend restart
- A meditation in progress no longer cuts out if the server restarts under it.
- May 11, 20262.6.5
Server-side errors visible again
- Crash and error tracking on the backend now lands on the dashboard reliably.
- May 6, 20262.6.4
Resilient user-data plumbing
- Refactor that keeps your data flowing through the system even if internal credentials change.
- May 6, 20262.6.3
Meditations save to the library again
- Regression fixed: meditations once again land in your library at the end of every session.
- Save flow now retries on failure and reports problems instead of going silent.
- May 5, 20262.6.2
No more mid-meditation restarts
- Long meditations no longer restart from the beginning partway through.
- May 5, 20262.6.1
Honest copy during outages
- When a service we rely on is down, you see accurate language instead of a misleading message.
- May 5, 20262.6.0
Survive closing the app mid-generation
- Start a meditation, close the app, come back later.
- It finishes on its own and lands in your library.
- Resume-on-open picks up anything that was still cooking.
- Apr 28, 20262.5.3
Production crashes triaged
- Fatal launch crash resolved.
- Save-path failures no longer silent.
- Normal in-flight cancellations no longer report as errors.
- Apr 24, 20262.5.2
Bulletproof audio streaming
- Audio now streams directly from storage with the smoothest possible playback.
- Eliminates a class of stalls caused by intermediary timeouts.
- Apr 23, 20262.5.1
Field polish from the demo
- Fast-meditation saves stop silently dropping.
- Body-scan cadence preserved across voice segments.
- Reflection submit no longer sticks disabled.
- Background sound resumes correctly when you swap AirPods mid-session.
- Apr 23, 20262.5.0
Observability and reliability pass
- Crash and error tracking shipped across the app and backend.
- Every external service now has a safety valve so an outage doesn't take down the whole flow.
- Pre-session biometrics now feed into which practice the guide offers.
- Things that used to fail silently now surface.
- Apr 22, 20262.4.2
Playback survives server restarts
- If the server restarts mid-meditation, your session keeps playing.
- Apr 22, 20262.4.1
Streaming reliability pass
- Eliminated long mid-meditation stalls.
- Long meditations now reliably land at their requested duration.
- Clicks and pops at the boundary between voice and silence eliminated.
- Apr 22, 20262.4.0
Press play, hear audio in seconds
- Audio now starts within seconds of pressing play, instead of waiting for the full meditation to encode.
- Smoother fade-outs on each spoken segment, replacing what could read as a sharp cut.
- Apr 22, 20262.3.0
Streaming foundation
- Per-segment loudness normalization for consistent levels across a meditation.
- Parallel segment generation.
- Better duration prediction so meditations land closer to the time you asked for.
- Apr 21, 20262.2.1
Voice preview routed safely
- Voice preview no longer exposes vendor credentials to the client.
- Apr 20, 20262.2.0
Offerings carry their lineage
- Cold-start intro animation on the home screen.
- Origin, era, and tradition shown on every offering.
- User-facing language: 'prescribed' becomes 'offered'.
- Long-form meditations up to 60 minutes now supported.
- Apr 17, 20262.1.0
How you say it, not just what you say
- Voice prosody capture: the guide hears how something is said, not just what is said.
- You are addressed by your profile name, with a pronunciation guide.
- When you mention someone meditating with you, the guide greets all practitioners present.
- Apr 9, 20262.0.0
First formally versioned release
- Semantic versioning established across the project.
- The first formally numbered release after the build era.
- Apr 9, 2026
Pre-2.0 closing polish
- Graceful dissolve animation for the emotion to feeling transition.
- Spatial whisper echo added to the meditation audio.
- Adaptive questioning in prescriptions.
- Post-meditation emotion tracking.
- Apr 8, 2026
Reflection screen + AI insight
- Post-meditation reflection screen redesigned around a one-line interpretation of your just-finished session.
- Background sound ducks when the guide is speaking.
- Apr 7, 2026
Background audio crash fix
- Audio session no longer crashes when controls collide.
- Light mode added, matching system appearance.
- Apr 5, 2026
Duration race conditions resolved
- The duration you select now reliably matches the audio you receive.
- Apr 3, 2026
Background sounds + smoother particles
- Background sound system: forest, creek, om, woodflute, Tibetan bowl.
- Particle animations smoothed on older devices.
- Apr 2, 2026
Haptics + audio preloading
- Haptic feedback added across the app.
- Audio preloads so the first sound plays the moment you press start.
- Mar 31, 2026
Stereo voice + reliability fixes
- Stereo spatialization on the meditation voice for a wider, more present audio image.
- Phantom-restart bugs in generation fixed.
- Mar 29, 2026
TestFlight resubmission build
- Build resubmitted to TestFlight after a versioning conflict.
- Mar 28, 2026
Lock screen Now Playing
- Meditations can now be controlled from the lock screen, even when the app is backgrounded.
- Feb 28, 2026
Faster image generation
- Image generation is now three to four times faster, at roughly half the cost.
- Feb 27, 2026
Particle field + production hardening
- Particle field visuals refined.
- Generation pipeline hardened against partial failures.
- App name and permission strings finalized for production submission.
- Feb 26, 2026
Health data + profile redesign
- Heart rate, HRV, sleep, and other biometrics now flow into the profile.
- Profile screen redesigned around the canvas of the mind, the meditation history, and the biometric context.
- Feb 25, 2026
Reliability and polish
- Every request now survives transient network blips with retries and timeouts.
- The guide addresses you by your profile name.
- Speech-to-meditation flow no longer fails silently.
- Feb 24, 2026
Voice-to-meditation flow
- Speak, particles disperse, the guide offers a meditation.
- Waveform response, progress ring, and prescription display refined.
- Feb 6, 2026
Prescribe a practice from what you share
- The first AI-powered prescription flow shipped.
- Backend deployed for production.
- Feb 5, 2026
Apple Sign In production wiring
- Apple Sign In available on the login and sign-up screens.
- Dec 12, 2025
Silence library experiments
- The pause-between-sections work begins.
- The first canonical silence file seeded.
- Dec 12, 2025
Visual identity hardens
- GT Ultra typeface rolled out across the app.
- Iconic mark and wordmark assets in place.
- Particle sphere redesigned with circular particles and a subtle glow.
- Energy centers (chakras) page brought into the same visual language.
- Dec 11, 2025
AI chat with cross-conversation memory
- The chat now references prior conversations to understand who you are.
- Past Chats screen with date and title list.
- Persistent chat history.
- Dec 6, 2025
Meditation generation simplified
- One-shot meditation generation replaces the chunked-audio experiments.
- System prompt expanded to draw from sutras across multiple traditions.
- Dec 5, 2025
Canvas of the Mind
- Every practitioner now has a personal canvas.
- After each meditation, the guide subtly adds one small mark.
- Over time, the canvas becomes a unique relic of your practice.
- Nov 29, 2025
Authentication and ambience
- Apple Sign In wired up.
- The first background sound assets uploaded: forest, creek, om, woodflute, Tibetan bowl.
- Nov 26, 2025
Project genesis
- The repository is initialized.
- The first Liquid Glass design experiments on the home screen.
Research
Why this matters to us
The Sacred Act exists to scale awakened awareness by making the practices of humanity's contemplative lineages accessible and personal to the modern mind.
This is the responsibility of stewardship in the age of technology.
