About Wildmind


Wildmind’s mission is to benefit the world by promoting mindfulness and compassion through the practice of Buddhist meditation.

Wildmind is run by Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist teacher and author who has been practicing within the Triratna Buddhist Community since 1982 and has been a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order since 1993. Bodhipaksa previously taught meditation in the Religious Studies department at the University of Montana.

Wildmind’s activities include:

  • Providing free meditation instruction on the internet in a variety of languages
  • Publishing news stories, articles on meditation, and reviews in our blog
  • Responding to questions about meditation through the comments on our articles
  • Publishing guided meditation CDs and MP3s
  • Conducting online classes in meditation and other forms of Buddhist practice
  • Building a spiritual community in Wildmind’s Google+ Community

Wildmind began life in 2000 as a project that Bodhipaksa undertook while studying for a Masters’ degree at the University of Montana, having realized that at that time there was a dearth of reliable information about meditation on the web.

The website was launched on 11 November, 2000, and in the spring of the following year Bodhipaksa began offering his first online meditation course. Since then Wildmind has continued to expand, and now offers a number of online courses and free instruction in a variety of languages.

There are various ways to keep up with our activities:

  • You can have our posts delivered to your email in-box once a day by subscribing through Feedblitz.
  • You can follow us on Google+.
  • You can follow us on Facebook, although Facebook will probably hide most of our posts from you. Be sure to click on the “Liked” button on our Facebook Page and then select “Receive notifications.” You can also add the page to an interest list. Lastly, Facebook hides our posts if you don’t show an interest in them by occasionally clicking “like” or leaving a comment.
  • All our posts are published on Twitter.
  • You can subscribe to our email newsletter, which goes out roughly twice a month, and which contains links to the most significant articles of the previous two weeks or so.
  • We’re on Pinterest as well, although not all our articles get published there.
  • You can follow our RSS feed if you use a feed reader.
  • You can even subscribe to our blog on your Kindle.

Wildmind is ad-free, and support, in the form of one-time donations or (even better) recurring contributions is vital to our success, and helps us to bring the benefits of meditation to more people. Please feel free to contribute to our work.

  • Why “Wildmind”?
  • How to use this site
  • About Bodhipaksa
  • About the Triratna Buddhist Community
  • Help support our work
  • Support our translation project

    • View Comments

      • It's interesting that you ask. Wildmind is a small publisher of guided meditation CDs, and we also sell some other items related to meditation and Buddhism, such as incense and ritual items. The income from all this is not enough to provide me or my children with health insurance. It's not enough that paying bills isn't a struggle. My family is, like many American families, one crisis away from financial ruin. However:

        • Despite this, I spend as much of my time as possible helping people (free of charge) with their meditation practice. I receive many questions on the blog and via email, and I attempt to answer every one of them -- including yours. Our site now has over a million visitors a year, and it's satisfying to know that the work we do here helps so many people.
        • Despite this, I spend as much time as possible writing articles, and persuading others to write articles, that may help people live happier and more fulfilling live.
        • Despite this, for six years I travelled up to the men's prison in Concord, NH, in order to teach meditation and Buddhism to inmates. Unfortunately I had to stop doing this when my wife's work hours changed.

        I hope this reply has helped you with whatever it was you wanted to know. Do feel free to help financially support the work we do here by making a donation or purchasing a guided meditation CD or MP3.

    • Is it preferable/required to have a teacher guide you through meditation? I was using an online guided meditation session, but the narrations were very frustrating. I felt rushed and couldn't keep up with all of the instructions that were given. Considering the point of meditation is to come to peace with and learn about yourself, I would like to do it in my time rather than the time an instructor would choose for me.

      • Not at all. We need a guide when we're learning something new, and at those times we just have to be patient because the teacher can't possibly know whether or not you're moving at a pace that's ideal for you, but in the long term most of our meditations will be self-guided. Even experienced meditators can benefit from a guided meditation once in a while, but it's not desirable to rely on guidance the whole time. And as you've found, it can be frustrating. Mind you, so can meditating on your own!

    • I've been practicing mindfulness of breathing on and off for around a year (often more off than on, unfortunately). Over the past 3-4 weeks, however, I have been practicing more regularly for at least 40 minutes each day. In the past week or so I've been feeling more anxious and stressed than I can honestly ever remember feeling. I know on paper at least that the 'aim' of meditation is not to reach any particular state, but it does seem as though meditating is taking me to a state more unpleasant than that which I experienced before coming to the practice. I have considered that this might just be me becoming more aware of feelings that have always been present, but, I have experienced powerful waves of anxiety so pronounced as of late that they *surely* could not have been overlooked in my life as a non-meditator.

      To that end, I have provisionally enrolled on a 10-day Goenka Vipassana meditation retreat in two weeks' time in the hope that some structured teaching might help to advance my practice. Would you be able to offer any advice on whether it is too soon in your eyes to embark upon such a prolonged and thorough stretch of meditation, or any thoughts as an unbiased spectator on this particular course? The "reviews" and opinions online are all very polemical.

      I would appreciate any insights on either the recent stress and anxiety or on the decision to go on an extended retreat so soon into regular meditation

      Thank you in advance for any help.

      Jake

      • Hi, Jeff.

        Apologies for the delayed reply, but I'm just back from a vacation with my children, and I was trying to avoid being online as much as possible while I was with them.

        I don't think it's likely that you're discovering emotions that have been buried. Largely I think that idea is ill-founded. What's more likely is that a natural tendency to anxiety is becoming compounded. In other words you're turning your attention inwards, noticing signs of anxiety, and becoming anxious in response.

        But there can be other causes too, and you might want to check out this page, and the comments below, including the one by Andrea, which is similar to yours in some ways.

        I have mixed feelings about Goenka retreats. They can be very intense indeed, and some people find them unbearable. On the other hand, people who make it through them often experience great benefits. They also vary in quality, depending on who is conducting them. With luck you'll have a good teacher on board who can help you work through your experience in a way that doesn't add anxiety to anxiety, if indeed that's what's going on.

    • Re your note above:
      "You can follow us on Facebook, although Facebook will probably hide most of our posts from you"

      This is true, but followers will get more updates if they click the little arrow next to 'Liked' then make sure 'Get Notifications' is checked. Also, Facebook senses where your main interests lie, so you get more notifications from pages where you regularly Like posts or join in with comments.

      Perhaps you could add a note about notifications to encourage better reach on Facebook.

    • I was listening to the Buddhist Geeks podcast. I saw your name in the description and thought. "No way, there has to be a bunch of Meditation instructors that have that name." But sure enough. I took Meditation from you in like 1998 at UM when I was 19. Small World. And thanks, you gave me some tips that have helped a lot.

    • Namaste Bodhipaksa, Just came across Wildmind today and am delighted, impressed, and feeling joy and love for this site and the work you are doing -- very meaningful and highly relevant to the work and mission i seem to have been charged with, a long story for another time. I will be visiting Wildmind often and sharing your site with others. Thank you!

      • Thanks for letting me know. We reorganized things a while ago and apparently broke some links. I'll get them fixed as soon as possible.

    • Reading the early comments here reminded me that I was first referred to Wildmind around 1997 by a client who was (and still is) a highly-respected consulting and clinical psychologist. I soon after purchased 'meditations for busy people' and still use them to this day!

    • I think it was last year (2018, though it could have been 2017) that I signed up for the course, "How to Stop Beating Yourself Up," which was very helpful for as long as I kept up with it. However, I fell out of the practice, and now am in great need to step back in. Is the course still available to me, and if so, how can I access it? Thank you, deeply.

      • Hi, Sandra. That course was delivered by email, so you should still have those messages in your email account. If you've lost them I could probably get them to you again, although it might take a bit of work.

    • Bodhipaksa i found a video on YouTube 5 years ago
      About abdominal breathing you had. It changed my life my
      Life. It give me a peaceful mind and peaceful body. Please
      Send me the video link

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