About this app
One evening at my children’s bedside set all of this off. How it turned into an app — and what it is for.
Why Friendly Ping exists
In 2017 I had everything I could have wished for. I was in my early thirties, had a young family, my second child had just been born, we lived in a house of our own, and I had a job I loved. Engineer, later head of development and CTO. Seen from the outside: most of the big boxes were ticked.
But something was off.
I remember one very ordinary moment in particular. I was sitting at my children’s bedside, reading them a bedtime story.
It was one of those perfect small moments a happy life is made of. The room was warm. One child on my lap, the other tucked under the blanket. Their small bodies close to me, the familiar smell of their hair, the quiet sounds when they shifted. Outside, the world was slowly going quiet.
I held the book and read. My children listened, looked at the pictures with wide eyes and waited to find out what happens next.
Everything was there.
And me?
I wasn’t really there.
I had developed the unfortunate ability to read page after page without taking in a single sentence. I was going over how I had come across in a conversation with a colleague — why does the right argument never occur to me at the right moment? I was writing the next email in my head; the issue had been pressing me for so long, it was time someone banged on the table.
I was physically at my children’s bedside — and inwardly trapped in my own head.
The maddening part was this: I noticed it. And couldn’t change it. Not lastingly, anyway.
I knew I was missing one of the loveliest moments of my life. I felt time accelerating and my life moving past me. And I felt that I wasn’t properly present in my own life.
Something became very clear to me then.
Maybe a fulfilled life isn’t made of the big things we work towards. Maybe it’s made of exactly these small moments. Of your own children laughing. Of an embrace. Of a meal together. Of wind on your skin. Of music that moves you. Of a conversation with someone you love. And of the view through a rainy window on the way to work.
Intuitively I knew: out there, I needn’t even begin looking for the answer to that question.
That was the beginning of a journey inwards.
The journey inwards
I began to read about philosophy, wisdom traditions and meditation. I read a great many books, listened to podcasts and worked my way through different teachers and traditions.
What shaped me most were Stoicism, Buddhism and ideas that had been entirely unknown to me — non-duality above all. Whole universes opened up. I listened to countless hours by and about teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, Mooji and Rupert Spira, and about Stoics like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.
I found my way into Buddhism very quickly.
What fascinated me first was the precision with which it describes the very problem I had been living: a constantly commentating mind that pulls us out of immediate experience and holds us in thoughts about past and future.
As an engineer, that spoke to me in a particular way. If a tradition describes the problem this accurately, I thought, it is worth finding out whether it also knows something about the solution.
I began to practise more seriously, became part of a Zen monastery around Zen Master Hinnerk Polenski and, over the years, built a steady meditation practice.
I learned that the voice in my head is not simply “me”. Thoughts arise. They comment, judge, plan and tell stories. And you can learn to notice them without following them every time.
On the meditation cushion I could experience again and again what it means to be truly present.
The gap between meditation and everyday life
The meditation worked. Everyday life was harder.
A good sit in the morning — and a few hours later you lose your temper in a meeting. A deep meditation at dawn — and the whole day still slips past before it has properly begun.
You know what it feels like to be present. And you forget it again and again.
Everyday life is so full of tasks, conversations, messages, decisions and thoughts that at some point you are back on full autopilot.
That was the decisive question for me: how do you get the quality you find in meditation into an ordinary day?
I tried different techniques and looked for small anchor points — for ways of reminding myself, over and over, to be aware. I looked for a simple timer app that would let me schedule reminders like that. Small pings in the swell of daily life.
I couldn’t find one that did it the right way.
My journals became Friendly Pings
Through those years I had written a great deal down. Thoughts from books. Quotes. Insights from meditations. Questions. Small practices. Lines from podcasts. Stories from teachers. Things that had brought me back at the right moment.
Over many years a personal collection grew in my journals. When I read them today, I keep finding small essences:
Be here. Feel your body. Watch the thought without following it. Breathe. You don’t have to change this moment. Come back.
Out of these notes came the idea of turning the essences into short reminders. The Friendly Pings.
They are not a collection of arbitrary motivational lines. They grew out of many years of reading, listening, reflecting and practising — and for Friendly Ping they are carefully chosen, condensed and curated.
A ping is not another task
A Friendly Ping is not meant to get you to tick off one more thing on your to-do list. You don’t have to put it in your calendar.
It lies beneath your day. Like a small seed in the soil.
Maybe not much happens with the first ping. You hear the sound, take one conscious breath, feel your body and carry on.
Then the next one comes. And another.
Over time these small reminders begin to take root. And one day something particular happens: a moment opens up.
You are at the table with your children. You are walking through the woods. You are waiting at a red light. You feel the wind on your skin. You hear music. You are holding someone you love.
And suddenly you notice it: this moment, which was there the whole time.
Maybe at some point you won’t need the text any more. Maybe the sound will be enough. And maybe at some point you won’t need the sound either — because the reminder has become a part of you.
From meditation into everyday life
That is why, for me, Friendly Ping is not a classic meditation app. It isn’t about spending even more time on the cushion. It is about taking what we learn there with us into our lives.
Every ping is a small anchor. A brief moment in which we step out of autopilot and notice again what is actually happening.
A ping isn’t meant to pull you out of your everyday life. It’s meant to bring you back into it.
And the more such moments arise, the less the reminder may be needed at some point.
The seeds are sown. The bridge is built. And the moment begins to open by itself.
My mission
Well, in a few years it will be a matter of common sense to very many people that they are one with the universe. It will be so simple.
And then, maybe, if that happens, we shall be in a position to handle technology with more sense – with love instead of hate for our environment.
This quote has been in the app since the first version. It is the reason it is built the way it is.
Over centuries humanity has made enormous technological progress — modern medicine, space flight, artificial intelligence. More and more people sense that this progress is one-sided, and that it is time to develop our psychological and spiritual capacities as well.
That is what I want to contribute to — using the very means that otherwise pull us out of the moment. The device in your pocket can bring you back, too.
This is my North Star. For a conscious world.
Who is behind it
Friendly Ping grew up alongside Zen.Here.Now – an Instagram community about mindfulness and meditation that I, Dr. Stefan Borja Bammesberger, founded.
By day, I head development at a robotics company for lab automation — so my background is thoroughly rational and scientifically sober. Perhaps that is why what convinced me about Buddhism first was its accuracy, not its spirituality.
Along this path I am accompanied and inspired by people like Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mooji, Rupert Spira and Hinnerk Polenski — and, not least, the Buddha himself.
It's my heart project: this is where all my passion for mindfulness and meditation flows. On Instagram I share impulses, thoughts, and inspiration around this theme – feel free to stop by:
Follow along
A bridge from the meditation cushion into your everyday life.
Bring mindfulness into the middle of your life. Just try it.