About Seven Doors

The idea

There are many ways into stillness, and they don’t suit everyone equally. Some people settle through the breath, others through sound, movement, seeing or simply noticing awareness itself. Seven Doors lets you try seven quite different ways, three times each, and keeps an honest record of what has worked for you so far. Then it helps you practise with less and less guidance.

The source

The methods come from the Vijñāna Bhairava, a short Sanskrit text of the Kashmir Śaiva tradition that describes 112 ways into awareness. The seven Doors and the editorial families used on this site are our own way of organising the methods for a modern app. They are not the text’s own arrangement. The method numbers follow a popular modern ordering; each method’s page gives the verse it comes from in the 1918 Kashmir Series edition, in our own transcription of the Sanskrit, with our own translation.

All writing, scripts and recordings are original work for Seven Doors. They are not paraphrases of existing translations or commentaries. Every method has been reviewed, with AI assistance, for its source, its place in the tradition, its safety and its practice in the app.

Safety and how methods are handled

Every method has one of four handling levels:

• Gentle: Suitable for ordinary self-guided practice. These pages include a short way to begin.
• Adapted: Needs guardrails or a safer reading. Described here, not instructed.
• Advanced: Best approached after the foundations, or with a teacher. Described here, not instructed.
• Adult: Adult and context-dependent. Mentioned for completeness only; not taught here.

The app guides gentle adaptations only: 21 discovery sessions, then a guided practice for every other method, each safe to do alone. Where a method in the text involves risk, the app guides a safer adaptation and says what it changed; the pages here describe those methods without instructions. The methods about intimacy are only mentioned here so the library is complete; the app offers them as solo, non-explicit practices, and only to people who say they are 18 or older.

Voices

The voices in the app are AI-generated. Read how and why.