Deepak Chopra's Leela is a groundbreaking interactive experience that combines ancient relaxation and meditation techniques with technology to bring focus, energy and balance to your life.
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Full Body Relaxation. Deepak Chopra's Leela allows players to utilize full body gestures to relax the entire body. Stillness in motion. In the Stillness Meditation tradition
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Create, Customize, connect. To help guide their meditation, players can create and customize personal mandalas - artwork that expresses a person's unique essence - and share it with friends online.
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Wellness made personal. Deepak Chopra's Leela utilizes the player's own abilities to cultivate a healthier, harmonious and more balanced life.
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45 of 46 found the following review helpful:
A unique, fun, relaxing meditation gameNov 10, 2011
By B. Molen Leela is a new way to learn and play with kinect. I bought a book on Chakras (7 energy centers that rise up your torso to the crown of your head) many years ago and have always been moderately interested in meditaion.
This game from Deepak Chopra and Curious Pictures is pretty amazing. I played the demo 3 times last week and seemed to feel a little better. So I purchased the full game and am pleased with the variety of activities to unlock. The control method works well, the menus are easy to navigate. I found I play more calmly and in control with each time I play. The Presentation Sound and Visuals are very well done and will help your breathing, relaxation, and put you into a flow state if you let it.
I will break down what the game offers.
There are 2 main branches to the game, Play and Reflect. Play's Movement section is broken down into 7 chakras each with seven levels. Each level adds a new element to play with. The movements you perform to control the visual game onscreen are exersises to help open your Chakras. (you will be rotating and bending hips, chest and sholders, and expanding your arms and pushing gently outward, depending on the level/chakra).
The 2nd section of Play is Sequence. Where you perform a series of Movements to open multiple chakras. The 3rd is Mandala in which you create a personal mandala image to help guide you back to meditation.
Reflect contains: Stilness, Oracle and Ambient
Stilness has 7 guided meditations with Deepak's voice and some visuals and music. Breath Practice has 7 different meditations that help you control your breathing with onscreen visuals that actually match your breath in your lower middle and upper torso. Finally 7 silent meditation lengths are available from 2 minutes to infinite. They also each offer 7 sound choices and no speech.
Oracle contains quotes from Deepak that arises after you've reflected on something.
Ambient lets you listen to the music in the game with backdrops from various parts of the game .
So there is plenty to do, and I look forward to making this a daily routine. If you are curious about meditation, and/or playing a game in a relaxed new innovative way, I highly recommend Leela. It is extremely well done with wonderful music, psychedelic trance inducing visuals and is a nice introduction to chakras and meditation. It's just what I've been looking for in the back of my mind all these years.
**It's been almost a week now of daily leela and I must say I feel more calm overall, especially right after a meditation of course. It really seems to work if I breath with my movements in the Play section as well.
22 of 24 found the following review helpful:
More frustrating than fun.Dec 11, 2011
By B. Noyes Leela is a tough "game" to review. I didn't purchase the game expecting a deep and rewarding gameplay experience, but I was hoping for a relaxing one. On the one hand, I did get what I expected from the guided meditation (or Reflect) exercises, which are indeed very relaxing and are a great way to unwind and get grounded after a long day. The mini-game (or Play) sections are a very different story. The first few levels are engaging enough, and the controls don't work against you to make the experience too painful. However, as you move on to the later exercises, and particularly the higher levels of those exercises, it becomes apparent that the Kinect controls leave a lot to be desired. It is ironic that I have not felt so frustrated playing a game, if not literally angry, as I have felt while playing some of the later Leela levels. They bring neither a feeling of relaxation or accomplishment upon their completion, but rather a sense of relief that it is over, and possibly a sense of shame for even forcing yourself to get through it in the first place. The game tell you to relax and make subtle movements, but before long you will find yourself rigid and jerking left and right just to try to accomplish your goals.
Sadly, due to the sloppy and unintuitive controls, the entire 'Play' portion of Leela is a missed opportunity. It will often leave you feeling more agitated and tense than before you put the game in. Again, the guided meditation portions are much better, but the fact is that you can find videos on the internet for free that work just as well. The main reason to buy this game is for the Kinect functionality, which barely functions at all. I still recommend this game for those of you looking to get into meditation, as the "Reflect" potion of the game does a good job of easing newcomers into the concepts and practices. However, I highly recommend holding off until you can purchase it at a lower price ($20 or less). For those looking to purchase the game simply for the mini-games, I recommend passing on Leela entirely. It is not worth the time or the money.
Edit: In light of the fact that I've been able to find videos online (for free) that work better than this game both in terms of providing movement exercises and guided meditations, I've lowered my review by one star. I highly recommend simply downloading the demo to find out if you're interested in these types of exercises. If so, keep in mind that there are better and cheaper ways of pursuing exercise and relaxation than this game offers.
14 of 15 found the following review helpful:
Fun Play but Meditations Not as interesting...Nov 20, 2011
By bunnyrabbit4 Leela is a mixed bag but not a bad one. It depends on what you are looking for. It could be better in many ways but I applaud it as one of the first dedicated uses of the XBOX kinect to enhance spiritual practice. I hope that others follow and use this platform for interactive guided meditation as well as disciplines like Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Reiki and other healing forms of body work.
The first thing you need to know about this program is that it has three major sections. After you create a personal mandala (you don't have a full creative palette here and it is hard to make the game freeze on the exact shape you want), you are invited to either PLAY or REFLECT. If you want to relax do not enter PLAY. All of the "games" listed under the chakras will quickly tense up the part of the body required to move the game pieces and as you go up in level produce more and more adrenalin. One section, the one on INTUITION reminded me a lot of the tunnels in Mizuguchi's "Eden" and blasting rocks and gems in the POWER section did not connect me with my personal power, only my rail shooter skills. Still, this has to sell as a game and the games in this section are reasonably fun if not spiritually enhancing.
As noted the games are fun, but for those of you who own Chopra's Wild Divine or Journey, this game does not contain anything like those calming visualizations and does not allow you to control the game via relaxation and breathing techniques. Beyond knowing what your chakras are and what they do, you won't win the games by using your body to "gently flow" the game piece as suggested in the instructions. A jerky movement is required to quickly pop the game piece on a particular course, especially at the higher levels of each game. Not one of the six chakra games I've played so far has left me feeling relaxed or meditative. Even at the second level (there are 7 levels of play for each charka) of the second Chakra game, the "gentle sway" of my hips that was supposed to guide the game piece around a circle, quickly turned into exaggerated side lunges to get it to move any distance at all.
The REFLECT contains STILLNESS and an ORACLE that opens once you reach the third level in all REFLECT offerings. This area doesn't have games. It is made up of breathing exercises and guided and unguided meditations. I found that most of the exercises didn't provide me with more than I could do on my own. You get to pick from several types of droning music while watching three bars expand and contract with your breathing. Kinect watches your breath which is cool but there is a bit of hesitation here and there that makes the feature more annoying than useful. Wearing a tight fitting top would probably help this. Be sure to note the time stated on each breathing level as there is no bonus or penalty for right or incorrect breathing. You simply sit for the amount of time indicated when you first enter the level. It is also useful to note that most people don't like to meditate in glaringly bright light. Kinect is light sensitive so you have to pump up the lumens to get a good reading, especially for those of you with darker skin. I also found that most of the dialog and guided meditations I encountered moved too fast or went on too long.
I found the "ORACLE" to be more of a thought for the day or affirmation generator. I didn't find what it generated to be that meaningful in terms of answering my question. I wasn't able to get into the AMBIENT section yet, but from I've seen I assume there will be additional audio files available there. I'll report back when I finish the levels and provide more details.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
Great title marred by just a tad buggy UINov 13, 2011
By Timothy Collins First off, if you are at all interested in the topics that this title addresses (Meditation practices) then go out and buy it. It's well worth it. The graphics are good, the sensitivity of the game to the Kinect is wonderful and the music works well. Plus the tutorials really help a person learn about these things. Far and away the best thing short of having a human being helping you with these things.
There is one little thing though that makes me deduct a star from the overall score though. The interface requires you to select buttons on the screen - and I think that they are just a tad to small and the game makes it just a tad too hard to select them. If that were fixed then this would be a 5/5 stars.
11 of 13 found the following review helpful:
Amazing new way to meditate!!!Nov 15, 2011
By Shannon I purchased this game yesterday. It's like going on a journey into another realm. The "play" aspect is a variety of games for each charka, and they each have 7 levels to open up. You use different parts of you body based upon which chakra your working on. The first one you use only your hips to complete the level.
The other section of this game is on various ways to meditate, and guided meditation. For anyone interested in meditation and awareness, I HIGHLY Recommend this game. In this day in age, we ALL need some help recentering our energies so we can get thru the business of life.
based on 9 reviews
( 9 customer reviews )
