Bodhipaksa and Sunada combine forces to bring you Wildmind’s latest audiobook — a complete guide to mantra meditation. In this two CD set (available on our online store) you’ll find everything you need to get started with a mantra chanting practice, including:

• The “magical” background and history of mantras
• How mantras can help us develop centeredness and inspiration
• Preparatory exercises to open the body and free the breath
• Seven mantras chanted for listening and learning
• The meaning and symbolism of each of the seven mantras
• A print-friendly companion guide with images, pronunciation key, and musical notations

Sacred Sound is led by Bodhipaksa, who has been practicing mantra meditation since 1982, and who is the author …

My friend of nearly three decades, a disciple of Swami Rama, and a guru in his own right, told me about going to the American embassy in New Delhi for a visa to travel to the United States. Having heard about the idiosyncrasies of visa officers, and not knowing how another man claiming to be a teacher of yoga and meditation would be handed his “visa karma”, my friend stood in line waiting for fate to play its game.

Called by an officer and asked why he wanted to travel to the US, my friend told me that he must have spoken for about 15 minutes, and that it seemed his guru, Swami Rama, was the one who was doing the talking through him. With tears in his eyes

The transformation of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons from the recreational drug-using, model-chasing manager of seminal 1980s rap artists Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Will Smith into a serene 21st-century prophet of veganism and meditation may be surreal, but it’s also quite real.

Even in his dark days of excess, Simmons had a lot of light around him. As 1990s entrepreneurs like Suge Knight made the rap business virtually synonymous with invective and violence, Simmons stood above them as a relative paragon of virtue, achieving unmatched success with humor and hustle rather than brutality. As he matured and embraced his holistic lifestyle, Simmons became “Uncle Rush,” …

There has always been a pervasive but undocumented feeling that Indian philosophy, as manifest in Vedanta on the intellectual plain and yoga on the physical plain, has very significantly influenced the West in general and America in particular. That feeling now finds a meticulously constructed scholastic endorsement in the form of an important new book.

Author Philip Goldberg’s ‘American Veda – From Emerson to the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West’ (Harmony Books, 398 pages, $26) [available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk] offers a comprehensive account of the inroads made by Indian philosophy since the early 19th century.

‘The combination of Vedanta and Yoga was …

The book based on this site, Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation, is now available in our online store.

Wildmind (the book) leads you through the process of setting up a meditation practice, offering hundred of tips about meditation posture, how to deal with problems that may crop up, and how to bring the clarity and peace of meditation into your daily life.

“Of great help to people interested in meditation and an inspiring reminder for those on the path.” – Joseph Goldstein, author of Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom and founder of the Insight Meditation Society.

In clear, friendly language, Wildmind guides you through the mindfulness of breathing, …

Sacred Sound: Mantra Meditations for Centeredness and Inspiration, the popular audio course on mantra chanting led by Bodhipaksa and Sunada, is coming out as a double CD in January.

a complete guide to mantra meditation. In it you’ll find everything you need to get started with a mantra chanting practice, including:

• The “magical” background and history of mantras
• How mantras can help us develop centeredness and inspiration
• Preparatory exercises to open the body and free the breath
• Seven mantras chanted for listening and learning
• The meaning and symbolism of each of the seven mantras
• A print-friendly companion guide with images, pronunciation key, and musical notations

Buddhist Geeks is an insanely popular podcast, featuring in-depth interviews with some of the most influential Buddhist teachers around today. Recently the Buddhist Geeks’ Vince Horn interviewed Bodhipaksa about his new book, Living as a River, which explores how penetrating the truths of impermanence and insubstantiality can free us from fear and clinging.

The interview has now been transcribed, and is available online:

Vincent: Hello, Buddhist geeks, this is Vincent Horn, and I’m joined today, over Skype, with Bodhipaksa. Bodhipaksa, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I know that you’ve actually tuned in to Buddhist Geeks before, and I’ve been following …

There is nothing noisier than silence, if your head is full of words. Escape the clamour of the city and at once an excited voice enthuses about the quiet. “How wonderful,” you tell yourself getting out of the car, “to have made it up to the Highlands, to have fled the traffic and the TV and the strident voices round the dinner table. Fantastic!” You strike off along a path through pine trees – isn’t the hush extraordinary! – and before you know it yesterday’s argument with your wife is playing out in your head. How could she have said that! “You’re lucky you still have someone to insult.” That would have been the smart answer. Why didn’t I think …

When the film Four Weddings and a Funeral came out in 1994, I was irritated by the film’s ‘token’ inclusion of a deaf character and two gay men. A lesbian friend was less judgemental. She was just thrilled that a mainstream film featured a gay relationship.

Reading Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-seller, and seeing the film adaptation starring Julia Roberts, I think I know how my friend felt. The ideas are flawed, but to see Buddhism portrayed positively in popular culture is a delight.

The story – if you don’t know it – is of a thirty-something woman, unsatisfied with her affluent New York life, who goes …

This summer I led yoga on a month-long Buddhist meditation retreat in The Santa Cruz mountains, and when I returned home to the city this book, “Freeing the Body Freeing the Mind” was in my mailbox. It appeared like a welcome-home gift and a tool for reflecting more deeply on my own joyful exploration of Hatha Yoga and Buddhist mediation as one practice.

I had been pondering the relationship between the two traditions and how the two practices support one another, and this book is a deep reflection of these very themes. In a compilation of 13 essays from a …