As the Buddha said,

“Looking after oneself, one looks after others.
Looking after others, one looks after oneself.”

(Attānaṃ rakkhanto paraṃ rakkhati.
Paraṃ rakkhanto attānaṃ rakkhati.)

Over the last 33 days of our 100 Days of Lovingkindness, I’ve written a blog post every day. Here’s a list of all the posts I’ve written, offering teachings on developing lovingkindness and compassion.

I hope you’re finding all this useful. If you haven’t had a chance to read these posts yet, then of course they’ll be there for you in the future.

Many people have said that they’ve benefited from this writing I’m doing, and it’s even been suggested that I turn all these posts into a book. I feel …

At Wildmind, ee sit, we develop lovingkindness, and we express that love by sharing our experience though our blog and through our structured guides to meditation.

And we hope that this will in turn lead you to sit, to develop love, and to give back so that you support our activities.

Wildmind is increasingly supported by dana (the Buddhist word for donations) these days. We’ve received lots of one-time donations, but we feel particularly grateful to those who make a regular monthly contribution to our running costs.

In fact, people who have set up a recurring donation will receive free copies of any creative work that I produce during the …

Wildmind has been on the receiving end of a lot of love these days. Needless to say, this has been an enjoyable and even inspiring experience.

Not only have a lot of people been writing to express appreciation, but we’ve received many donations, which are all very much appreciated. (If you don’t have time and want to skip to the tl;dr — too long, didn’t read — version, then click here.)

We’ve always tried to self-fund our work (encouraging the practice of meditation), by charging for classes, selling guided meditation CDs and, more recently, selling other meditation supplies. That went well until the recession hit, and we’d been increasingly struggling until the …

Here’s what I’m planning. I want to create more, and specifically I want to record two meditation audio programs this year. To do this I need to take a couple of months off from teaching my online courses, which creates a bit of a financial problem for Wildmind because we’ll be earning less and because we live on the edge (and not always on the right side of the edge!)

So, I’m asking for donations. And anyone who makes a one time-donation of $15 or more, or who sets up a recurring donation of any amount will receive a free download of the first of these programs, which will be …

“We make a living by what we make, but we make a life by what we give.” These words are often attributed to Winston Churchill, but they appear to be the work of the prolific “anon.”

I had trouble sleeping last night, which is very unusual for me. I was rather anxious about money, since Wildmind had a very bad year financially and lost a lot of money. I’d actually expected to make a loss since we moved into a larger office and I took on an office assistant to free me up to spend more time on creative tasks. But working on the end of year accounts was rather troubling, because the …

Sit : Love : Give is two things.

First, it’s what we do. We believe in the power of meditation to bring more mindfulness and compassion to the world in order to make it a better place. So we sit.

Through sitting we develop love.

Out of love we offer Wildmind to the world, in order to make meditation more accessible. Google Analytics tells us that there were 2.5 million page views on out site last year. That represents a lot of learning about meditation, and hopefully a lot of practice of meditation too. That’s our giving.

And second, we encourage you to sit, to develop love, and to give to the …

Wildmind recently went ad-free. The income from carrying ads was certainly useful — it costs a lot to run a site this size — but carrying advertising here seemed both esthetically and ethically ugly. So they’ve gone! And we feel great about it!

However, it takes about 80–100 hours a month to curate, write, edit, and post the articles you read here, and if you enjoy and benefit from what we do, we’d ask you to consider making a regular donation.

Dana, or giving, is an ancient Buddhist tradition, and we’d much rather rely on the generosity of you, our readers, than bombard you with advertising.

We’re calling …

Victoria Gill, BBC: Performing deliberate acts of kindness makes pre-teen children more popular with their peers, say scientists.

A team led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, “assigned” children three acts of kindness each week for four weeks.

After the four weeks, children were happier and more liked by classmates.

The researchers say than encouraging such simple “positive acts” could help children to get along with classmates and even prevent instances of bullying.

The findings are published in the open access journal Plos One.

Cuddling and cleaning
Working with 400 school children aged between nine and 11, the team assigned whole classrooms either …

Read the original article »

Can you remember a time when you offered a gift to someone? Perhaps a holiday present, or a treat to a child, or taking time for a friend – or anything at all. How did this feel? Researchers have found that giving stimulates the same neural networks that light up when we feel physical pleasure, such eating a cookie or running warm water over cold hands. Long ago, the Buddha said that generosity makes one happy before, during, and after the giving.

Then there is receiving. Can you remember a different time, when someone was giving toward you? Maybe it was a tangible, something you could hold in …

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less likely to be motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

In three experiments, social scientists found less religious people’s generosity was consistently driven by compassion. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the July issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and …