YouTube is a great place for finding and listening to guided meditations.
We have multiple guided meditations on there ourselves!
All you need to do is search for the terms “guided meditation for” and the topic you’d like to address. It could be abundance, anxiety, or a broken leg. Just write “guided meditation for abundance” and you’ll get many results. You can then filter based on the style, length, and your personal preferences.
However, the ads that often play on YouTube videos can be very disruptive to your experience, especially if you’re trying to relax. (Note: we never put ads on our videos, to help create a better experience for you)
On desktop devices, this is easier to deal with – simply install an ad blocker on Chrome like AdBlock or ABP. These approved extensions can significantly improve your experience both on YouTube and on the rest of the internet, blocking almost all the ads you’d normally encounter.
However, if you’re listening on your mobile device, which is quite common, considering the convenience of just listening to a guided meditation on YouTube on your phone, this can be more frustrating, as the default YouTube player will be full of ads and ad blocking extensions don’t work on the mobile version of chrome.
Here are a few options that can help solve this problem, assuming you don’t want to pay for YouTube Premium:
- Play the videos on the Firefox browser
Firefox is a browser by the non-profit Mozilla that is dedicated to providing a good browsing experience without collecting or selling your personal data, which is how Chrome helps Google make money off your behaviors.
FIrefox allows you to install ad blockers on their mobile browser as well, which means that any videos you play by visiting YouTube.com, will not show you any ads.
The downside of this approach is that watching videos on a mobile browser isn’t quite as convenient as on a dedicated app, there are some features that are missing and it can feel a bit clunky.
In addition, Firefox provides a bit of a different user experience than Chrome, so that can take some getting used to. I tried this option for a while but ultimately gave it up, because it didn’t feel convenient enough for me.
2. Play meditation videos through a 3rd party app
Another great solution is to use an alternate app to YouTube, which allows you to watch or listen to videos without any ads.
New Pipe, for example, lets you download an app directly to your Android device and watch YouTube videos without any ads. You can navigate away from the app without the videos pausing, which is normally a feature only on YouTube Premium. And you can even switch to an audio only mode, which saves battery and data and is perfect for guided meditations that are primarily about the audio.
The main challenge with New Pipe is that you can’t subscribe to individual channels, so you won’t get updates when new videos come out from channels you are interested in. This shouldn’t be a huge issue for the types of meditation recordings you are listening to, because New Pipe lets you create your own internal playlists and save your favorite videos to there, allowing you to easily revisit your favorite meditations.
You can download New Pipe here.
A platform that works in a similar way is YouTube vanced. Both New Pipe and YouTube Vanced only work with Android, but YouTube vanced recommends an iOS solution that works in a similar fashion called YouTube++, but it can definitely be more complicated than just installing an Android app, as it requires a few additional steps to get it running.
Here are some of our favorite guided meditations
From our own channel:
From the rest of YouTube:
