Meditation Revealed

Membership Preview: Meditation Revealed

Fade is the #1 most popular track on all of buddhify. Discover where this Going to Sleep meditation came from and how it works.

Blue defocused lights

In a few weeks time we’ll be launching a new feature in the app called Together. Part of our new buddhify Membership offer (details coming soon), Together contains video courses, practice themes, deep dives into popular meditations, and stories from across the community, all updated on a weekly basis. Here’s a preview of some of that content: a series called Meditation Revealed in which we share the background behind some of the most popular tracks in buddhify.

We’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told us how much they love listening to ‘Fade’ from the Going to Sleep category of meditations. So when planning the new Meditation Revealed series, we knew we had to open with ‘Fade’.

The inspiration

At its heart, ‘Fade’ is a sense-based meditation. If you listen to its sister track, Sense from Meditation 101, you’ll do a practice where you pay attention to each sense in turn, being aware of what is happening through each different channel of experience. ‘Fade’ takes that very same idea but with two very important differences: the idea of fading and the special order in which you move from one sense to another.

Like most of the meditations that I wrote myself in buddhify, the idea of fading came from my own experience. Sometimes while in bed I found that my mind was quite bright, alert and not really tired at all. So I wanted to work out a way to drift away to sleep but at the same time still be quite aware. Inspiration came when I heard about how in Tibetan Buddhism, there was a whole practice style all about maintaining awareness while you fell asleep called Dream Yoga. While I’d never formally practised in that tradition, I was inspired to see if I could try it.

The technique I played with was seeing if I could make my awareness more and more refined, so that even though there was still mindfulness, what I’d be mindful of would be more and more subtle and as a result my mind would become quieter. I’d be closer to sleep. While doing this for several nights, the metaphor which came to mind was that of turning down the volume knob on a record player or stereo. It’s a bit of a dated metaphor but it works well so I decided to reference it in the meditation. [Side note: there is a version of ‘Fade’ in the Kids wheel called ‘Fading’ and the record player isn’t mentioned since I guessed not many young people would know what that even was!]

So that is where fading came from.

How it works

I personally focus on the fading of my thoughts and mind to help me get to sleep, but when it came to writing the track I realised that there was a lovely opportunity to combine the fading idea with all of our senses. One of the main concepts I had to work out was which order was best. The sequence I went with was: sight / smell & taste / hearing / touch / thoughts.

Here’s how each of the senses plays a part in the process.

  • Sight. I love how ‘Fade’ starts with you opening your eyes, noticing darkness, and then closing your eyes and noticing darkness again. Our eyes do so much work in the day that there is a tangible sense of relief when we close them and I really wanted people to feel that. There is a real magic to slowly closing your eyes while in the dark and noticing what that looks like and how it feels and it is a brilliant way to introduce the core idea of fading since it is so obvious.
  • Smell and taste. Smell and taste are then bunched together given that they are not particularly active but for completeness should be included.
  • Hearing. Hearing is a fabulous object of meditation. Here we start by just resting into listening, receiving sounds. The idea of fading is introduced by listening to silence rather than to sounds and thereby encouraging the mind to quieten down. Since what the mind is aware of affects how the mind is, being aware of silence by default helps silence the mind. As to what listening to silence actually means, I deliberately leave that quite open since different people understand that instruction in different ways.
  • Touch. We then move to fading out Touch. This is done by emphasising positive sensations such as warmth and relaxation. At this stage of the meditation the mind is going to be quite subtle and so placing it somewhere gentle and pleasant helps keep the momentum going. We also bring the classic breath into play at this point since the idea of fading and the breath naturally go together because of its rhythm and how it goes in and out. 
  • Thoughts. The meditation then takes its time, knowing that people are now perhaps very close to sleep. Finally, we turn to the mind. Thinking and thoughts might not technically be a sense but for the sake of meditation, given that it’s a channel of experience, it is convenient to frame it as one anyway. This meditation invites you to treat thoughts just like sound, noticing them, leaving them alone, letting them fade and resting with silence instead.

We then finish off by going back through the senses as a reminder of what we’ve done and another invitation to fade down them all again in turn. And then that’s it!

What I perhaps love most about ‘Fade’ is that your awareness is there right to the end, noticing your experience with classic mindfulness. And should you fall asleep, then it’s like a switch turning off and the hope is that when you wake up, that awareness, that mindfulness comes back right away as if it never left and you can then start the day with care and sensitivity.

Written by Rohan, who wrote ‘Fade’. ‘Fade’ can be found in Going to Sleep 1 and is voiced in the app by Lucy.

In a few weeks time we’ll be launching a new feature in the app called Together. Part of our new buddhify Membership offer, Together contains video courses, practice themes, deep dives into popular meditations, and stories from across the community, all updated on a weekly basis. Here’s a preview of some of that content: a series called Meditation Revealed in which we share the background behind some of the most popular tracks in buddhify.

The inspiration

At its heart, ‘Fade’ is a sense-based meditation. If you listen to its sister track, Sense from Meditation 101, you’ll do a practice where you pay attention to each sense in turn, being aware of what is happening through each different channel of experience. ‘Fade’ takes that very same idea but with two very important differences: the idea of fading and the special order in which you move from one sense to another.

Like most of the meditations that I wrote myself in buddhify, the idea of fading came from my own experience. Sometimes while in bed I found that my mind was quite bright, alert and not really tired at all. So I wanted to work out a way to drift away to sleep but at the same time still be quite aware. Inspiration came when I heard about how in Tibetan Buddhism, there was a whole practice style all about maintaining awareness while you fell asleep called Dream Yoga. While I’d never formally practised in that tradition, I was inspired to see if I could try it.

The technique I played with was seeing if I could make my awareness more and more refined, so that even though there was still mindfulness, what I’d be mindful of would be more and more subtle and as a result my mind would become quieter. I’d be closer to sleep. While doing this for several nights, the metaphor which came to mind was that of turning down the volume knob on a record player or stereo. It’s a bit of a dated metaphor but it works well so I decided to reference it in the meditation. [Side note: there is a version of ‘Fade’ in the Kids wheel called ‘Fading’ and the record player isn’t mentioned since I guessed not many young people would know what that even was!]

So that is where fading came from.

How it works

I personally focus on the fading of my thoughts and mind to help me get to sleep, but when it came to writing the track I realised that there was a lovely opportunity to combine the fading idea with all of our senses. One of the main concepts I had to work out was which order was best. The sequence I went with was: sight / smell & taste / hearing / touch / thoughts.

Here’s how each of the senses plays a part in the process.

  • Sight. I love how ‘Fade’ starts with you opening your eyes, noticing darkness, and then closing your eyes and noticing darkness again. Our eyes do so much work in the day that there is a tangible sense of relief when we close them and I really wanted people to feel that. There is a real magic to slowly closing your eyes while in the dark and noticing what that looks like and how it feels and it is a brilliant way to introduce the core idea of fading since it is so obvious.
  • Smell and taste. Smell and taste are then bunched together given that they are not particularly active but for completeness should be included.
  • Hearing. Hearing is a fabulous object of meditation. Here we start by just resting into listening, receiving sounds. The idea of fading is introduced by listening to silence rather than to sounds and thereby encouraging the mind to quieten down. Since what the mind is aware of affects how the mind is, being aware of silence by default helps silence the mind. As to what listening to silence actually means, I deliberately leave that quite open since different people understand that instruction in different ways.
  • Touch. We then move to fading out Touch. This is done by emphasising positive sensations such as warmth and relaxation. At this stage of the meditation the mind is going to be quite subtle and so placing it somewhere gentle and pleasant helps keep the momentum going. We also bring the classic breath into play at this point since the idea of fading and the breath naturally go together because of its rhythm and how it goes in and out. 
  • Thoughts. The meditation then takes its time, knowing that people are now perhaps very close to sleep. Finally, we turn to the mind. Thinking and thoughts might not technically be a sense but for the sake of meditation, given that it’s a channel of experience, it is convenient to frame it as one anyway. This meditation invites you to treat thoughts just like sound, noticing them, leaving them alone, letting them fade and resting with silence instead.

We then finish off by going back through the senses as a reminder of what we’ve done and another invitation to fade down them all again in turn. And then that’s it!

What I perhaps love most about ‘Fade’ is that your awareness is there right to the end, noticing your experience with classic mindfulness. And should you fall asleep, then it’s like a switch turning off and the hope is that when you wake up, that awareness, that mindfulness comes back right away as if it never left and you can then start the day with care and sensitivity.

Written by Rohan, who wrote ‘Fade’. ‘Fade’ can be found in Going to Sleep 1 and is voiced in the app by Lucy.