I started kind of accidentally this new project about making guided meditations in Finnish a month ago. My mama was looking to try guided meditations, but even though there are tons of English meditations available, the ones in Finnish ones were quite rare. Basically, I was able to find only five free guided meditation clips in Finnish? And even though my mom speaks some English, listening to the guided meditation is not too relaxing if you have to work hard to translate what the heckkk they saying on a clip all the time... So I was like OK I'll record mama a meditation myself instead. I googled the best way to do a recording and the first option to pop up was the Anchor.
Anchor advertised to be an all-in-one platform where you can create, distribute, and monetize your podcast from any device for free. Seemed legit and easy to use, so I went for it. For my first meditation clip, I basically translated one of my favorite English meditation and just recorded it straight away and published it through Anchor. The very next day I recorded a sleep meditation because mom had complained about troubles to get to sleep.
Well, I'm not so sure mama really used these clips I made BUT I was positively surprised to notice that some other people had actually been listening to them. Anchor distributes the public podcasts to six different platforms such as Spotify - so apparently, some people had found the clips on their own and listened to them! Very cool :)
The fact that the people had stumbled upon my podcast without me ever advertising it, showed that people are searching for Finnish meditations, and there's a lack of them. This gave me inspiration to records a few more! I tried to make a few different variations of meditations and used some English meditation clips as help and inspiration. In a month, I ended up recording and publishing eight guided meditations to my podcast. And so far they have been played 569 times by 68 different people!! I am super stoked about this :)
It is amazing to notice that people have found and listened to my meditations and maybe these clips have added a bit of mindfulness to their days. I am looking forward to recording more and I even ordered a separate microphone to improve the quality of sound. So far I have not been able to listen to my own recordings without being all cringey about the sound quality and my voice cracking etc.... Shiiiiit is hard to be such a perfectionist :( But as Jen Sincero says: there's a fine line between perfectionism and procrastination sooo I am very proud of myself for publishing those imperfect recordings anyways :)
I had this weird awkwardness about this blog too. Like I was writing here all alone for six months without publishing the site because I was so embarrassed by the site not being all cool and perfect... And after the brief moment of courage, I did publish the blog, and then waited all stressed up that people will run to laugh at me and tell me how my blog sucks... Surprisesurprise nothing bad happened and I actually even got a few positive comments ❤︎ Haha so just saying that a lot of perfectionistic tendencies are rooted in fear and insecurity which ain't that cool... And even though often starting something new might feel scary, after you actually do it, you will end up being like tf I was waiting for... Honestly, there is nothing to lose.
Now back to the main topic about the meditations! Here are some links for the people who want to check out the Meditaatiot SUOMEKSI -podcast (meditations in Finnish):
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/jennyjakkila
Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/meditaatiot-suomeksi
Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zMzliMGNlOC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==
Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1530251215/meditaatiot-suomeksi
Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/90wa25wk
RadioPublic: https://radiopublic.com/meditaatiot-suomeksi-WwLP5a
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4ZCC4NXpf2atRPy8axjHHt
More is coming.
Here are some more autumn color spotting piccos from the last weeks too :)