Feel free to use this site in any way you want. It is a playground for the mind and spirit. The following are only suggestions.
The Blog
There are broadly two different parts of this website. There’s the blog, which mostly contains one-off articles, and sometimes series of articles, about meditation and about spiritual practice more generally. Almost by definition, the blog is for dipping into. It’s perfect if you’d like a little inspiration or guidance on some specific area of your practice.
If you want to explore a specific topic in the blog, you can use the search feature (look for the magnifying glass icon at the top of the page). Or you can click on the tags beneath each post in order to find other articles on that topic. For example there are tags for empathy and for pain.
The Meditation Guides
In the main menu for the site you’ll find a link called “Meditation Guides.” This will take you to structured guides to various meditation practices. This is ideal if you’re new to meditation or to those specific practices.
The meditation practices on this site are all in several stages. The Mindfulness of Breathing has four stages, and the Metta Bhavana (Development of Lovingkindness) has five. We suggest learning these practices one at a time and one stage at a time. Each stage is a meditation practice in itself.
We also teach Walking Meditation and have a guide to Mantra Meditation.
Focus on Practice First
Learning meditation is a skill, and like all skills, is learned only through practice. You have to do the exercises to get the benefits.
I suggest reading only as much as you need in order to do a few minutes of meditation. If you read information about meditation as if it were a novel, you won’t experience much benefit. Because meditation is about doing, and you only need to learn enough to take the next step.
So I recommend that you do the practice, and then read. Listen to the guided meditations that you’ll find in the various sections of the website, and which will guide you through each stage of the meditation. Then read some of the background information that will help you with doubts of questions you may have, and that will give you pointers about problems you’ve experienced.
There are some people who prefer to know a bit about what they’re going to do before they do it. That’s understandable. If you’re in that category then read just a little. Then do some meditation. Take five minutes out and actually do some meditation, following one of the exercises in the site. The site will still be here when you come back!
Take your time learning the exercises, and come back frequently to explore. You’ll probably have some questions and the site is set up to answer the most common questions that beginning meditators come up with. If you still have questions, then you can e-mail us.
Practice at home. Even ten minutes of meditation every day will make a big difference to your life.
Our Online Community
There is one whole section of this site that’s only available for Wildmind’s sponsors. For a small monthly fee, which helps support me to teach, sponsors get access to dozens of online courses I’ve created over the years, as well as exclusive articles and meditation downloads. It’s an amazing bargain. Check it out!
