Years ago, when Bodhipaksa described what Wildmind was about, he expressed it along these lines: that our mission was to to benefit the world by promoting mindfulness and compassion through the practice of Buddhist meditation. Twelve years later, our intent is still the same.
Bodhipaksa wanted, and still wants, to have an impact on contemporary culture. He wants to show the benefits of meditation, and also make it easy for people to learn to meditate.
And that’s why this site is here. We have hundreds of pages of freely available meditation instruction, where people can walk themselves through structured guides to a variety of practices. And we’re constantly adding new materials on our blog. This year, for example, we’ve posted something like 100,000 words of guidance (the equivalent of a couple of books) along with several hours of recordings.
Here are some other highlights:
- More than 1.5 million people visit our site each year.
- Our most popular web page (not counting the home page) has been read by half a million people.
- Our most popular blog post has been read more than a quarter of a million times.
- Hundreds of thousands of people have learned to meditate here — for free.
- We also publish guided meditation CDs, which help fund our activities, and those have reached hundreds of thousands of people as well.
For one thing, the way people are using the web is changing.
People want smaller, more easily-digestible chunks of information.
They want more multimedia content.
They want presentations that are more “app-like” and that work well on mobile devices.
They want more interactivity — like being able to track how many times they’ve meditated, or how much progress they’ve made in working through a program of instruction.
They want tools that mesh seamlessly with their daily lives — for example mindfulness reminders that pop up on their computer, cellphone, or tablet.
They also want more of a sense of community — a sense that they’re not practicing in isolation, but are practicing along with others.
These are all things we’re working on, or plan to work on. We see people’s embrace of mobile devices as an opportunity to help them integrate the practice of mindfulness and compassion into their daily lives.
But we need your help to take Wildmind to the next level. That’s why we launched the Free Bodhi project. We need to build a team around Bodhipaksa (a.k.a. “Bodhi” or sometimes “Mr. B.”) to be a kind of “amplification system.” We need to free him from his admin responsibilities so that he has more time to teach, and to write, and to develop new ways to bring mindfulness and compassion into our society.
So, please help Free Bodhi so that we can help make the world a more mindful and compassionate place.
