A Community-Supported Meditation Initiative

The past

I started Wildmind in 2000 as a website where anyone could come to learn to meditate. It’s been a stunning success; we’ve had roughly 15 million unique visitors during that time! At first the sale of CDs supported my meditation teaching. Later, donations from participants on our meditation courses played a larger role.

That’s the past, and it’s no longer what’s needed. It’s proved to be financially unstable so that too much of my time and energy goes into trying to stay afloat. And it has too narrow an impact on the world. We need to go big.

The future

So we’re moving toward having Wildmind 100% supported by a large number of people giving relatively small donations: as small as $6 a month.

This will:

• Ensure the stability of Wildmind as we move into the future.
• Free up my time so that I can focus on teaching rather than publicity and marketing.
• Allow me to make the courses I’ve already created open to all.
• Let me create new courses for Wildmind’s sponsors.

How it works

You may have heard of “cummunity-supported agriculture” where small farms are supported by contributions from individual sponsors, who then get a share of the farms’ produce. It’s going to be a bit like that. 

“Community shares” are available at $6 each. You can sponsor as many or as few shares as you like. You’ll get a share of my “produce” for as long as you continue as a sponsor. You’ll get access to exclusive article and meditation downloads, to a sponsor-only online community, and to new courses that I develop. You’ll also know that you are supporting a website that benefits a lot of people. And I’ll be making my existing courses available, free of charge, to anyone who wants to participate.

Every sponsor gets the same benefits, however many shares they sponsor. If you sponsor more it’s because you have more to give or because you care more.

Progress so far

I launched the initiative just over two weeks ago. Here’s a live graph, which we update as new contributions come in.

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It’s time to get on board!

So far:

• More than a third of shares have been sponsored.
• We now have more than 200 sponsors.
• The average number of shares per sponsor is 2.7.
• The highest number of shares sponsored by one person is 15.

If you want to give more support and can afford to do so, then that obviously helps us more.

You can become a sponsor by using the PayPal form below:

If you’d prefer not to use PayPal, you can download a credit card billing authorization form. You can complete this on-screen, then print, sign, and return it to us by mail or email.

Your support is enormously appreciated. The love that’s been pouring in has been wonderful to experience. Already I’m experiencing more freedom from stress than I have in years.

I’m looking forward to being fully freed up from focusing on staying afloat so that I can focus more on sharing my practice with you—my community of sponsors—and so that we can benefit the world by bringing the benefits of meditation to more people.