One prompt a day. Write what you've been avoiding. Keep it, or watch it burn.
Shadow work is a psychological practice rooted in the ideas of Carl Jung, who described the "shadow" as the parts of ourselves we've pushed out of conscious awareness — the anger, shame, envy, fear, and self-criticism we've learned to hide from ourselves and others.
The practice is simple in concept and difficult in execution: look honestly at those hidden parts, write about them, feel them, and integrate them. Ember is a tool to help you do that, one prompt at a time.
Ember is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for working with a qualified mental health professional. If you are struggling, please reach out to one.
Open the app. You'll see a single prompt. Tap it, write whatever comes up — however long or short — and when you're done, choose to keep the entry or burn it.
If you want a new prompt on the same day, tap "Show me another." If you enabled the daily reminder, you'll get a gentle notification at the time you set.
There is no streak, no word count, no right way to use the app. Missing a day costs you nothing.
Burning an entry permanently and irreversibly deletes the text from your device. The animation isn't decorative — the text is actually gone. There is no trash folder, no undo, no cloud backup to recover from (because Ember never uploads anything), and no way for us or Apple or anyone to retrieve it.
Ember keeps a small record that a burn happened on a given date — but not what was written — so your history screen can show how many entries you've released over time.
This is a deliberate design choice. The act of releasing something is part of the work. If everything is archived, nothing is released.
Everything you write stays on your iPhone. Ember has no user accounts, no server, no cloud sync, and makes no network requests of any kind. If your iPhone is in airplane mode, the app works identically.
Your entries are included in standard iOS backups (iCloud Backup or encrypted Mac backups) only if you have those backups enabled at the device level — that's a system feature, not something Ember does.
See the Privacy Policy for the complete picture.
No. Ember is a one-time purchase. You pay once, and every feature — all 370 prompts, burn mode, Live Activity support, notifications — is unlocked from the first launch.
There is no premium tier, no upgrade path, and no future "Ember Pro." If you bought the app, you have the full app.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Ember is built for a specific kind of writing — not the morning-pages productivity journal, not the gratitude log, not the bullet-journal habit tracker. It's built for the writing you do when you need to look at something you've been avoiding.
Some prompts will feel easy. Others will surface material that catches you off guard. That's the practice working. If something comes up that feels larger than the app — grief, trauma, persistent distress — please close the app and speak with a therapist or a crisis line. Ember is a tool for reflection; it is not equipped to hold a crisis for you. If you are in the United States and need immediate support, call or text 988.