I've been praying the rosary for about a month now to great effect. In this post I want to contrast the religious devotion of the rosary it with the secular exercise of mindfulness meditation. I will do so from a secular perspective, withholding from you the many religious benefits of the rosary as propagated over the last ~500 years by many popes and saints.
When I talk about mindfulness meditation, I'm talking about the common kind where you focus your attention on the breath. This type of meditation has many proven benefits to mental and cognitive health, with thousands of studies and dozens of gurus ready to preach about it. Beginners will benefit from guided meditation, so for those of you who want to give it a shot, I recommend the ad free medito app.
In the past while I was still agnostic and later an undecided theist, I had a few phases where I picked up the habit of mindfulness meditation for a few weeks. I would say I'm actually pretty good at mindfulness meditation. In those phases where I meditated I usually did so for about 10 minutes a day, often with light guidance of intermediate to advanced courses in the medito app, but also frequently with nothing but a timer.
10 minutes daily seems to be the most common practice.
Now the rosary is a complex prayer and the most popular catholic private devotion. It goes back to saint dominic who, according to pious catholic belief, received it from an apparition of the virgin mary. It consists of 53 hail marys, 6 our fathers, 6 glory bes, 6 optional fatima prayers as well as the apostolic creed as an opener. Additionally, there are 4 sets of 5 mysteries with a different one being assigned to each day of the week, focusing on different events in the life of jesus christ. The rosary is split up into five decades, each starting with an our father and ending with a glory be and a fatima prayer. The meat of each decade is the mystery assigned to it and you're supposed to contemplate it while reciting the hail marys.
The rosary is what we would secularly lump in with mantra meditation, not unlike what is practiced by many hindus and buddhists. Its contemplative component of the mysteries also adds the element of visualisation / imagination.
A rosary takes me about 20-25 minutes.
The difficulty of mindfulness meditation as a habit is that its notoriously difficult to make it stick and has a steep learning curve for beginners. Just check what self-help guru improvement pill has to say in this 1 minute clip from his habit tier list video.
The only difficulty of the rosary is the memorisation of the prayers used within it, but that actually has the positive effect of capturing your focus more fully while you are still learning them and are praying the rosary with a guide. Even given this difficulty, it is much easier to get into than mindfulness meditation and importantly much easier to maintain as a habit as well, especially once you have memorised the prayers and can go on a walk while praying the rosary.
Under ideal conditions, that is under such conditions where it is sustainable as a daily habit to do so, 30 minutes of mindfulness meditation may even be superior to the rosary. But I challenge you to try and stick to even 5 minutes of daily mindfulness meditation for a month, its much easier said than done. For mere mortals, the rosary handily beats mindfulness meditation on account of accessibility and ease of acquiring the habit.
So if you're a christian that is open to this catholic practice I urge you to give the rosary a try. If you're from a different religion, research the repetitive prayer of it, as every major world religion has a devotion like this. And to the atheists I say, try out mindfulness meditation or mantra meditation, its still better than nothing.
For further reading I'm gonna recommend an intro to the rosary, as well as another blog post contrasting the rosary with mindfulness meditation by someone else.