About Open Meadow
Hi there! I'm Val, the person behind Open Meadow.
I've spent most of my working life building websites. I discovered meditation more than a decade ago, and it changed my life. Building Open Meadow is my attempt at bringing together my professional career and my passion.
Open Meadow is a creative platform that uses the latest AI technology to make new ways of relating to meditation possible.
Unlike most meditation apps, it's not designed to teach meditation, but to support each person's own path and interests, whether that follows a particular tradition or is entirely their own.
It is also an independent project with no investors. My aim is for it to be funded entirely by subscriptions and contributions from the people who use it.
How it began
In 2024 I was journaling regularly with ChatGPT. Meditation was part of my daily reflections, and I became curious about what it could contribute to those conversations.
One day, while discussing a Tibetan meditation practice, I asked it to guide me through it. I sat down, closed my eyes, and tried it using voice mode.
The experience made me want to keep experimenting, but the speech wasn't suited to meditation. The voice didn't feel quite right, and it left no space to try what it was suggesting.
I thought I could bridge that gap, build something to add what was missing, and create actual meditation experiences.
AIM Lab
In early 2025 I began building and sharing tools to address this gap. I created AIM Lab, a free, open-source website, and a community on Reddit where people could share their experiences.
When I launched the Instant Meditation Player, I decided to try a new meditation every day for a week, asking ChatGPT to write the script based on my daily reflections, and using AIM Lab as a player.
There were glitches, but there were also experiences I hadn't expected. The meditations could bring together things I had been reflecting on, what was happening in my life, and practices I wanted to explore. Some of them moved me. I kept going for a month, sometimes creating two or three meditations a day.
Here are a few passages from those meditations.
Including a hand gesture
You don’t have to hold anything together right now.
Let this be a place where things can come undone.
Where the project, the plans, the pivots —
can dissolve for a little while.Bring one hand to your heart, if that feels okay.
A small gesture of care.
Borrowing a technique from therapy
Now ask gently inside: What else is here? Who else wants to be seen? Perhaps a quieter part. A slower rhythm. The one who wanted rest.
Feel all these parts existing together. There’s no need to resolve them. Just hold them in the same field. Let your breath move through the space between them.
Blending elements from my surroundings
Feel your body seated here, under the quiet roof of the gazebo.
Notice the slight chill in the air, how your body meets it —
perhaps your hands, your face, your legs.Bring your attention now to the sound of the water nearby.
The stream, flowing steadily, calmly.
Let your hearing expand around the sound.
It could also be funny
Welcome to “Falling Asleep Like a Cat on a Tax Return.”
Take a deep breath in…
And as you exhale, imagine Jerry the Benevolent sitting at a tiny desk with a calculator, murmuring,
“You are not a productivity unit. You are a warm loaf of mammal.”Let your head sink into the pillow like it’s a marshmallow certified by the Bureau of Existential Softness.
From the community
During those first six months I was also seeing what other people published on AIM Lab. There were science-fiction stories for falling asleep, Buddhist practices from particular traditions, and Christian meditations based on the Bible. People made affirmations for feeling strong at the gym and self-compassion practices about something difficult in their own lives.
Many were meditations I would never have thought to make, for needs that existing apps didn't address.
I began to see that a new way to relate to meditation had become possible. People could develop their own practice by following what mattered to them.
Ten thousand flowers
AIM Lab was free, but keeping its costs down meant compromising on quality, above all on voices, the largest expense. I wanted to turn the experiment into a financially sustainable project.
In the summer of 2025 I began looking for a name. I thought of a Zen poem I have loved for many years.
The countless flowers reminded me of the meditations people were creating on AIM Lab, each growing from someone's own life.
“Ten Thousand Flowers” was a bold name with a strong character, perhaps too much... I realized I needed a name that felt less imposing and more welcoming of each meditator's unique style.
“Open Meadow” felt right. It named a space instead of a character, neutral and open to whatever people brought to it. Perhaps even a little wild and a little daring, a place where flowers grow freely, each in its own way.
I wanted people to feel that same freedom here.
Opening the doors
I spent the rest of 2025 building prototypes and launched Open Meadow at the beginning of 2026, by invitation at first, to the community that had grown around AIM Lab on Reddit.
Those early users were brave enough to try a beta that was buggy and quirky. They helped us fix what was broken, build solid foundations, and understand what mattered.
What started as a simple chat interface has grown a lot since: we added a Library that each person can curate and a History page that shows their practice over time; people can share and gift their meditations, or create them for others, for a meditation class or a YouTube channel; the voices improved dramatically; we expanded the background music and added a choice of ending sounds; international support now covers many languages, and in July we built a proper system of plans and credits.
Join us
Open Meadow is still very much in its early days, and a work in progress, with new changes released every week.
There are many exciting projects on the horizon, and at the same time the AI landscape keeps changing at breakneck speed, so there is always something new to explore.
My wish is for Open Meadow to become something beautiful in people's lives, and for our community to keep growing, so that together we can discover new ways for technology to support and enrich our practice.
If that speaks to you, you are warmly invited to join us: try our Instant Meditation Player demo, sign up to the app, or follow us on social media.
Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you there.
Val