See, hear, feel.

Yes — choose Silent under “Label by”. Say the label in your mind and press its key: on a computer ← see, ↓ hear, → feel; on a phone, three buttons sit side by side at the bottom of the screen in the same order, so your thumb finds them without looking. No microphone is used, nothing is downloaded, and everything else — the bands, the stats, the poster, group sessions and fireflies — works the same.

Yes. Tap the clock in the top corner: Voice turns into Silent (the three buttons appear, the mic switches off), and tapping again brings your voice back. Useful when someone walks in, or when you started silently and would rather say the labels. The sit just keeps going — every label counts either way. Next time you start, your usual choice from “Label by” is back.

Yes — at the bottom of the start card, flip Moving to Still. The words stand still; the bands still grow and shrink with your labels, so you can see your practice without the motion. If your device is set to reduce motion, Still is on from the start. Flip it back anytime.

No. If a lot is happening at once and it feels overwhelming, simply choose one thing and let the rest pass by. You set the pace — a label every few seconds is plenty. Saying labels out loud helps keep that pace calm and even.

Very common, especially with thoughts. Either pick something else, or notice the restfulness it leaves behind — for example the quiet mind right after a thought fades (that's a “hear”).

Either — it really doesn't matter. Label one and let the other stay in the background. A sound often comes with a mental picture of its source; you can choose the sound or the picture.

Whatever works for you: the moment you notice something, while you're staying with it, or as it ends. Being late is fine too — you might realise you were lost in thought and say “hear” just as the thought is fading.

No need — you don't have to label the label.

That's fine. Only work with what's actually there; if there are no images, the blank mental screen can be your “see”. Using the same label again and again is perfectly okay. There's no “right” balance of bands — the picture is simply a mirror of your session.

You're not asked to think, and not asked to follow the content of thoughts. If thinking happens, notice it as an activity — its volume, pace, where it seems to be — and label it (inner talk is “hear”, mental images are “see”). Everything you notice, thoughts included, can become part of the practice.

Labels — how many times you said see, hear or feel. Rhythm (0–100) — how even the spacing between your labels was; a steady pace scores high, whatever the speed. Non-stop — your longest stretch of practice without a break: it keeps running as long as you say a label at least every 10 seconds, and starts again after a pause longer than 10 seconds.

In group sessions you also see how many people practiced with you and how many times fireflies appeared. Missed words can look like pauses, so treat the numbers as a friendly mirror, not an exact measurement.

No. What matters is actually staying with each experience for a moment. A slow, steady rhythm is great practice. The stats are a playful mirror, not a score.

Speak each label clearly with a small pause, keep the phone reasonably close, and avoid loud background noise. The little bar next to the timer shows that the mic hears you. Recognition works best in Chrome, Safari or Edge, and the first start downloads a small speech model (~40 MB), which is then cached.

Want to check your microphone? Run the 30-second microphone check — it shows how well your device hears each label.

No. Speech recognition runs entirely in your browser and only listens for the three labels. Nothing is recorded. In group sessions only the counts (how many “see / hear / feel”) are shared — never audio.

Choose “Together”, create a session and share the link. Everyone practices on their own device — you don't hear each other, but you all see the same picture moving. When several people say the same label at the same moment, fireflies appear on everyone's screen.

In a Together sit, when someone else labels the same thing as you within about two seconds, your band glows softly and your phone gives one light tap — a slightly stronger one when two or more people matched you. At most one every ten seconds, so it stays a quiet reminder that you're practicing with others, not a buzz. Your own labels never trigger it. Switch it off in the lobby (Feel the sync · Off). It works on Android and in the SHF CLUB app; iPhone browsers can't vibrate, so there you only see the glow.

Yes. Choose Music · On on the start card, or tap ♪ during a sit. It starts softly in the very first second, grows to its full shape over the first tenth of the sit, settles back over the last tenth and rings out gently after the bell. Don't like today's sound? Tap ⟳ for another one. Music is off by default, and practicing in silence is just as good.

It's a soft, steady background that helps you settle, without giving you anything to follow. Research on sound and attention shows a clear pattern: speech, melodies and sudden changes pull attention away, while slow, even sound with pauses calms breathing and heart rate. Meditation music in studies usually shares the same traits: a slow pulse around 60 beats per minute, a rhythm close to calm breathing, and resonant tones like singing bowls.

So our music has no melody, no voices and nothing sudden. It has a slow pulse, small pauses, a gentle swell at a calm breathing pace and mostly bright, open harmonies; sad-sounding music was found to make the mind wander more.

It also listens to you. Your labels don't play notes; they slowly change the colour of the sound. Lots of see makes it brighter and shimmering, hear makes it wider and more spacious, feel brings a warm, slow pulse. After a while you can hear where your attention has been, a small mirror of your sit. In a Together session everyone hears the same music, shaped by everyone's labels.

Nothing is recorded. A small synthesizer runs in your browser and composes the music while you sit. At the start it rolls the dice: a key and a calm scale, a slow tempo, three or four instruments (drones, singing bowls, soft bells, strings, airy pads), their rhythms and their slow movements. That is one of billions of possible combinations, so every sit sounds new and is never repeated. During longer sits one instrument now and then dissolves and a new one grows in its place.

Voice labels keep working: the music stays in low and middle tones, away from the sounds of “see”, “hear” and “feel”, and its volume never changes when you speak. If the music comes from a loudspeaker and gets almost as loud as your voice, some words can get lost; then turn it down a little. Headphones work best. Nothing about the music is sent anywhere.

shf.club/radio is one endless station that never stops. It starts playing the moment you open it, and Pause is the only button. Music and picture are made in your browser from one shared clock, so everyone listening anywhere in the world hears the same notes and sees the same picture at the same moment. Nothing ever switches: instruments dissolve into new ones every 9 to 17 minutes, colours and shapes drift over half an hour or more, slowly enough that you never catch the change. Some browsers want one tap on the page before sound can start.

Next to the radio there is a small chat, old-school IRC style. Guests pick a name with /nick; members always appear under their SHF pseudonym with an @. ♪ marks people who are listening right now. Try /me, /who and /help. Be gentle: a filter stops rude words, there is a short pause between lines, and the SHF team can delete lines or mute someone for a day. Chat lines are kept for 7 days at most.

Both. The practice is real: each sit trains three attention skills. Staying with what you choose, noticing what is actually there, and allowing it to come and go. The game is how we keep score, so that coming back is fun. Every number in the game stands for something real:

A sit is a workout for attention.
XP and level are the skill you've built. They never drop.
Mana is momentum: what your recent practice carries into your day.
The streak is your habit. One rest day a week is part of it.
A microhit is practice in the middle of life. Thirty seconds counts.
Circles are support. Practice holds better with others.

What we don't promise: that every sit feels good, or that life gets easy. Some sits are restless and some days are hard anyway. The effect comes from repeating it, the way fitness comes from training and not from one workout.

A small promise to yourself. After a sit you can set one: what you want more of, how many days a week, how long, and your cue: “After I have my coffee, I sit.” Then you press and hold for three seconds to seal it.

Why bother? One sit feels good, but the change comes from repeating it, and your mind prefers the routine it already has. People who decide in advance when they will do something do it far more often than people who only mean to. The cue does the remembering for you.

How it counts: a pact day is a day you showed up, which means 4 minutes of practice or more (any practice at all if your pact is a microhit). A shorter sit than you planned still counts. Weeks run Monday to Sunday. The pact sits next to your streak: the streak counts days in a row, the pact counts your own rhythm, like 4 days a week.

It bends. The first pact runs two weeks, then you keep it, raise it or shrink it. Change, pause or remove it any time from your profile. Nothing is lost when a week doesn't work out. A new week starts Monday.

The nudge: if you pick a time, we remind you then, but only on days you haven't sat yet and only until the week's pact is kept. It comes once, through one channel: push if you switched it on, otherwise Telegram, otherwise email. Guests keep their pact on the device; nudges need an account.

Your pact is private. Only you see it.

When you practice regularly, some of it keeps working after the sit: a little more room before you react, a little more attention for what is in front of you. Stop for a while and that carry-over fades. Start again and it comes back quickly. Mana is our drawing of that momentum. It is calculated only from how often you sit, so it is a picture and not a measurement of your mind. Tap Mana in your profile for the short version.

No. You can always practice as a guest — your sessions, streak, XP and avatar are kept on this device. Signing in (just an email code, no password) stores all of it on our side, so it survives a new phone or a cleared browser, and lets you join circles. When you sign in, everything you earned as a guest comes with you.

Yes. Tap ✎ Custom under “How long today?” and pick anything from 1 to 90 minutes (hold + or − to move faster). The tile remembers your length on this device. Together rooms and scheduled circle sits can be any length too. A day counts for your streak from 4 minutes of practice; shorter sits still add to your practice time.

Yes. Tap Custom and choose ∞. The clock counts up instead of down, and the sit lasts until you press End. The bell rings then, and it counts like any other sit. This works for solo sits. Together sits need a fixed length, so everyone starts and ends at the same moment.

Yes — sometimes it's nicer not to see the screen. In Voice mode, start the sit, lock the phone and keep saying your labels; the sit keeps running, counts what you say and rings the bell at the end. (On iPhone, Safari stops the microphone when the screen locks, so keep the screen on there.) In Silent mode you tap the screen, so keep it on.

Keep practicing — the sit still counts. Labeling runs on your device, so nothing stops. If you're signed in, the finished sit waits on this device and is saved by itself as soon as you're back online (just open shf.club again). Your minutes are checked against the real time that passed since you started, so nothing is lost and nothing is invented.

That happens with Voice labeling in a phone browser. While a web page listens to your microphone, Android treats it like a call and keeps all sound on the phone speaker. A website can't change that. In the SHF CLUB app for Android (shf.club/android), the app listens through its own microphone, so music stays on your Bluetooth speaker or headphones. In the browser, Silent labeling (tapping the bands) also keeps music on Bluetooth.

Yes, solo sits work with no connection: in flight mode, in the mountains, in the metro. Open SHF CLUB once while you're online (in the app or in your browser) so it can keep a copy on your phone. After that it opens offline too, with Voice or Silent labeling, music, the bell, results and your poster. Voice needs the speech model, which is saved the first time you use Voice.

Sits you do offline are kept on the phone and added to your account as soon as you're back online. Circles, Together sits, leaderboards, radio and sign-in need the internet.

Only your pseudonym (change it any time in your profile), your avatar, level, streak and minutes this week — and only to members of your circles. Your email is never shown. There is no public profile.

A day counts when you practiced at least 4 minutes, with the labels to prove you were there (roughly one label every two minutes — silence is fine, but an empty session isn't). Sessions are timed on our side, so a tab left open does not count. One rest day per week is forgiven: miss a single day and your streak continues; miss two and it starts over. Days follow your time zone (profile → Time zone — set it manually if you travel).

Microhits (the ⚡ 30-second option) add to your practice time, give a little XP and hold your mana for the day, but they don't count toward your streak or badges. They're for the in-between moments; the streak is for longer sits. A microhit counts once you label at least 3 moments.

Every verified session earns XP: about 1 XP per minute for the first 20 minutes of a day, half that for the next 40, nothing beyond — daily practice beats marathons. A streak multiplies it (up to ×1.5 at 7 days, ×2 at 30), sitting together with friends adds ×1.3, and a sit at least twice as long as your usual earns a depth bonus. XP never decays. Levels need a little more XP each time; at levels 3, 6, 10, 15, 22 and 30 your avatar evolves.

Mana is the glow of your hero, a picture of your momentum. Each practice day adds 40 (up to 100); a missed day costs 25, or 10 if it was your rest day. A day with only a microhit or a very short sit holds mana where it is. At zero the hero falls asleep. Nothing is lost: even a microhit wakes it, and your level never drops.

Every sit trains three skills at once, and each hero is one of them.

Stay, the focused one: concentration. “Has one tab open. On purpose.” Keeping attention where you choose.
Notice, the clear one: clarity. “Knows what your coffee tastes like better than you do.” Catching more of what is actually there.
Allow, the open one: equanimity. “Everything is welcome here, including the neighbor's drill.” Less fighting with what you feel.

Pick the one you want more of right now. It doesn't change how your sits are counted, and you can switch any time. Each hero is a pattern: Stay is rings around one centre, Notice is facets, Allow is waves passing through an open shape. All three are drawn live from your own practice: the colours follow your see · hear · feel balance, the glow follows your mana (at zero the eye closes and the hero sleeps until your next sit), and the pattern gains detail through seven stages, Seed to Boundless, at levels 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 22 and 30.

The first heroes (Human, Animal, Abstract) have retired. If you had one, you choose again; your level, XP, badges and wardrobe stay, and every accessory now fits every hero.

Badges are earned from your practice log itself — showing up (days practiced), stability (streaks), depth (long sits), sangha (Together sits) and clarity (a balanced sit, early birds, night owls). Each gives a one-time XP bonus and some unlock cosmetics: palettes, accessories for your lineage and auras. Open the Wardrobe from your profile to dress your hero; locked items show what unlocks them. Guests earn badges too, on this device.

A friend is someone you practice alongside. You see each other's hero glowing or fading with their mana, and a thread grows on every day you both sit (four minutes or more each). One rest day a week is part of it. If it stops, it rests, and your longest thread is kept.

Adding a friend: tap a person on the leaderboards or in a circle and send a request, with one line about why if you like. Or send your own invite link (Profile → Friends → Invite a friend): whoever opens it and signs in is asked once, and then you're connected. A lamp lights on your profile for each person who joined SHF through your link and did a sit.

What friends see: your pseudonym, hero, level, streak, whether you sat today, and the thread you share. Never your why, your sit times, your circles, your email or your other friends. Your pact stays private too, unless you choose one friend as its witness.

Who can send you requests is your choice, in Profile → Friends → Requests & privacy: anyone on SHF, only people in your circles, or nobody (your own invite link still works). You can also switch off the email and push about requests there.

Declining is quiet: the other person is not told. So is removing a friend. Blocking someone stops their requests, and they are not told either. If you shared your link in the wrong place, make a new one and the old one stops working.

Their link opens a three-minute first sit with their name on it, and three lines on how to do it. No account, no microphone question: you label with three buttons. After the sit you can sign in and the two of you are connected as friends, if you say yes. A lamp lights for them when you have sat. In Profile → Friends everyone can see their small lineage: who brought them, and who they brought. Further down the line it is a number, not names.

When your mana is full and a friend's hero is fading, you can send them a spark from their card. It's a hello from you, not a reminder from us. Any sit of theirs catches it, even a 30-second microhit, and you hear when it lands. One spark per friend a week, three a day. A spark gives no XP to either of you: XP comes only from practice.

You can choose one friend to witness your pact (open your pact → Ask a friend to witness it). They see the pact sentence and how many days of the week are done. They never see your why. People keep a promise more often when someone they know can see it. Take it back any time.

If you have a pact but no friends here yet, we can pair you for two weeks with one person whose pact is close to yours (Profile → Friends → Requests & privacy → Rhythm partner). You see each other exactly as friends do. After two weeks the pairing ends by itself, unless you both tap “Stay friends”. It only happens if you ask for it.

After a sit you can leave an echo for your circles and friends: one tap for how it was (restless, clear, sleepy, calm) and one line if you like. One echo a day. Others read it only after they have sat themselves that day, and can answer with one tap (✦ “heard you”). There is no public feed: an echo is seen by your friends and the people in your circles, for two days. A circle's owner can remove a line in their circle.

A sit your circle planned has a small chat in its lobby, open from 15 minutes before the start, and again for 10 minutes after the bell. Then it closes, and the lines are deleted within a day. Only members of that circle can read and write there, under their pseudonym. During the sit there is no chat.

Once in a while everyone on SHF sits at the same moment. For now it is every Sunday at 8:30 in the morning, Panama time (13:30 UTC), for 30 minutes; we may move it, and the home card always shows the next one in your own time, from a day before. The lobby opens 15 minutes ahead and the sit starts by itself on the dot. Leave whenever you need to. Guests are welcome. Circles can also plan a long retreat sit once a month from the schedule form.

Everyone who chose a hero practices for that hero's group. The score is minutes this week per active hero, with at most 20 minutes a day counted per person, so neither one long sitter nor a big group decides it. Active means a sit in the last 30 days. If you change your hero, your sits count for the new group from the next Monday. A leader is named only when every hero has at least two active people. The prize is a thin ring around the winners' heroes for a week. It's a game on top of the practice: your own sit is the point.

Mana is full after about three days of practice in a row, and stays full while you keep showing up. Every day that ends with full mana, your hero hands you a card: a small question or line to carry into the day. There are 30, and you find them all in Profile → Cards. Some full-mana days also open a gift: the Moss palette (3rd), a wooden bell for the end of your sits (7th), another poster style after each sit (14th), the Tide palette (21st) and a deep bowl bell (30th). Gifts are cosmetic: XP still comes only from practice. They are worked out from your own sits, so nothing extra is stored.

Yes: open your pact and tap Save as image. You get a card with your pact sentence, this week's days and your hero, to keep on your phone or send to someone. Your reason (“why”) stays off the picture.

In the first days of a week your hero asks one thing: where did practice show up in your day last week? You tap what fits (“I paused before reacting”, “I enjoyed something small”…) and can add a line for yourself. Only you can read your answers. We count how many people tapped each answer, to learn whether practice reaches daily life, and nothing more. You can skip it.

A circle is your group of friends, your sangha, your Tuesday people. Create one from your profile, give it a name and a short description, and share the invite link or code (click either in the circle to copy it). Inside you see everyone's avatar, streak and minutes this week, who practiced today, and whether a sit is open in the lobby right now. Circles are private — only members see them. You can be in as many circles as you like, of any size.

Two ways. Spontaneously: press “Practice together” in the circle, pick a length — the lobby opens and, while someone is in it, your circle sees “a sit is open” with a Join button. Scheduled: “+ Schedule a sit” with a date, time and length. Everyone sees the time in their own time zone, can say “I'm in” and add it to their calendar (📅 — on Apple devices it opens in Calendar, elsewhere in Google Calendar). Better still, “Subscribe to this circle's calendar” under the list adds a calendar that fills itself with every sit, including recurring ones, and stays in sync. The lobby opens by itself 15 minutes before and the sit starts on the dot — no host needed; whoever is there sits together, latecomers join the running sit. Sits with two or more people earn ×1.3 XP.

Recurring sits: when scheduling, choose “Repeats” — every day, weekdays, weekends, weekly, or pick your own days. The time stays fixed in the creator's time zone (so 7:00 stays 7:00 through daylight-saving changes) and everyone else sees it in theirs. Sits appear two weeks ahead; “I'm in” asks whether you join every time or just once, and the × asks whether to remove one sit or the whole series.

Several ways — and you choose which ones you want.

Home screen pill: above your name, shows the next sit and turns green when a lobby is open.

Email: if you said “I'm in”, you get a calendar invite, a reminder one hour before, and “It's time” at the start. Turn it off in Profile → Notifications → Email reminders.

Push notifications: in the SHF CLUB app for Android they arrive like any app notification, even when the app is closed. They also work in Chrome/Brave on Android and on desktop. On iPhone it needs the site added to your home screen first. Turn on in Profile → Notifications → Push notifications → Enable. You can enable it on each device you use.

Telegram: connect your Telegram account in Profile → Notifications → Telegram → Connect — a deep link opens the bot (@SHFClubBot), you press Start, done. You'll get the same reminders there. If your circle owner links a Telegram group (by adding the bot and using /linkgroup CODE), everyone in that group also gets sit announcements.

In Profile → Notifications you choose exactly what to receive: sit starting soon, lobby open, someone in your circle sitting right now, the streak-saver at 7 pm (only when a streak of 3+ days is still open, at most twice a week, and not if your pact has a nudge), the weekly recap on Monday morning (only after a week with practice), and come-back notes. You can also set quiet hours so no nudges arrive late at night, or Pause all messages in one tap.

Your pact nudge is separate: it comes at the time you chose in your pact, on days you haven't sat yet. After a week without any sit it goes quiet, and it comes back with your next sit. Change the time or clear it in Profile → your pact → Change it.

A little, and then we stop. If you made an account but haven't sat yet, you get a short hello the next day and one last one a few days later. After a single sit, one note two days later about sit number two. If you were practicing and stopped, we wait: nothing for the first days (rest days are part of the rhythm), and if you have friends here, one of them may send you a spark. After a week your hero speaks once, after three weeks one last note says the door stays open. Then silence, until you sit again.

Never more than one message a day or three a week, through one channel only (push, otherwise Telegram, otherwise email), never in your quiet hours. Every note says why practice matters, because that part isn't obvious: what a sit trains is attention, and it grows a little with every sit, even short ones. Every email has a one-click Stop these notes link; in the app it's Profile → Notifications → Come-back notes, or Pause all messages.

“Who's been sitting?” in your profile opens the boards: solo (this week's minutes, streak, all-time XP) and circles (total and per person, so a circle of three can beat a circle of thirty). Pseudonyms only, top 50 plus your own row, a day counts at most 90 minutes. You can hide yourself with “Show me on the leaderboards” in your profile. Guests can look but aren't ranked.

In your profile you can tick “Monthly SHF CLUB letter”: one email a month with practice ideas and club news, from hello@shf.club. Untick it, or use the unsubscribe link in the letter, to stop.

For members: your email (for sign-in only), pseudonym, optional bio, time zone, hero, and your session log — start and end time, length, the three label counts, and solo/together. If you make a pact: what you want more of, days a week, length, your cue and the nudge time (private, only you can read it). Friends: who is friends with whom, requests with their one-line message, your choice of who may send requests, and your invite code (none of it visible to anyone but the two people involved). If you connect Telegram: your Telegram chat ID and username (so we can send reminders; never shown to others). Never audio, never what you noticed. Data lives in the EU (Frankfurt).

For everyone: we count visits and sits without cookies and without storing IP addresses — each visitor becomes a scrambled code that changes every day, so nobody can be followed over time. We keep only the page, where you came from, country, phone or computer, the length and type of the sit, and which features were used (for example "poster saved" or "radio opened") as plain counts. Delete your account yourself any time: Profile → Delete my account (or email hello@shf.club). The full details are in our privacy policy.

We also use PostHog in cookieless mode (US hosting) for page views, practice starts/completions and circle actions. We also count page departures, time on the page and scroll depth, and measure page speed, visual stability and interaction responsiveness (FCP, LCP, CLS and INP). Requests go through shf.club to PostHog; Web Vitals contain metric values, not page text or DOM/resource-attribution details. No analytics cookies or stored browser identifiers; no account IDs, emails, pseudonyms, circle codes, chat content or audio. URL queries and fragments are removed. Session recordings, automatic click capture and error/log collection are off. Practice events include duration, solo/together, voice/silent, microhit and total label count; circle events include scheduling and RSVP choices. PostHog estimates visitors with a daily-changing server-side hash, separate from your account.

Radio chat: your chat name, the text and the time, kept for up to 7 days. To stop spam and enforce mutes we also keep, with each line, the random code of your browser (or your account for members) and your network address; neither is ever shown to others.