Courses available to subscribers
Wildmind is a community-supported meditation initiative, and our courses are generally only available to our sponsors. (If you'd like to learn more about becoming a sponsor, click here.)
This page offers brief descriptions of the courses on offer to subscribers. In order to find out more about any course, click on the "learn more" button. Access to the courses themselves is found in the monthly Community Newsletter that's sent out to all sponsors.
Please note that for practical reasons not all of these courses are available at the same time. They come out on a rolling schedule, with at least two courses being made available every month.
The courses are listed in two categories: those that are particularly suitable for relative beginners to meditation, and those that are better suited for people who have been practicing for at least several months. Plus there are a number of "Sitting With Bodhi" series; each individual series is noted as being good for relative beginners, established practitioners, or both.
Suitable for All Levels of Experience
10-Day Introduction to Meditation Course
Ten minutes a day is all it takes to begin transforming your life and create a sense of peace and calm. Our Introduction to Meditation offers you access to a daily feed of 10-minute guided meditations, to help you develop a grounding in key skills of mindfulness, acceptance, and self-kindness. Each day, you'll receive an email with links to the day's teaching, which will include a short talk of two to three minutes, followed by a guided meditation. The total length of each session is just ten minutes.
Change Your Mind: Meditation for Beginners
Change Your Mind is an introduction to two foundational meditation practices that help us to develop mindfulness and kindness (or lovingkindness). These are clinically proven to help us find greater balance in our lives and to experience greater wellbeing and peace. Step by step, you'll learn to become calmer, more patient, and more emotionally positive. This event is suitable for people of all levels of experience, including complete beginners.
Sit Breathe Love
Sit Breathe Love is a 28 day meditation challenge helping you to set up the habit of meditating daily. It will also teach you the basics of two fundamental meditation practices: one to help you calm your mind, and the other to help you be kinder to yourself and others. This is a great place to start if you're a beginner to meditation, want to learn Bodhipaksa's distinctive approach meditation, or if you want a refresher on the basics.
Living With Awareness
A 28-day meditation event exploring the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is the gentle effort to be continuously present with our experience. When we’re not mindful, we get carried away with our thoughts and emotions, which leads to stress, anxiety, depression, anger, and distractedness.
When the quality of mindfulness is present, we have a greater ability to choose our thoughts and emotions. It has been clinically proven to reduce stress, promote feelings of wellbeing, and improve mental and physical health.
Get Your Sit Together
A 28-day daily meditation event helping you to set up the habit of meditating daily.
Even if you know about the benefits of meditation it’s not easy to set up a regular practice. But we’re here to help you! Drawing on the latest research on motivation and habit-building, along with timeless insights from Buddhist psychology, we'll help you to commit to sit daily, no matter what, so that you can experience the benefits of regular meditation.
Living With Kindness
A 28-session self-paced online course we’ll be exploring quality of metta. Metta is the simple quality of kindness, directed to ourselves and to all beings that we encounter. It is a quality we can increase through training. We can become kinder and more accepting of ourselves. We can deepen our appreciation of and care for our friends. We can become kinder and more patient with relative strangers. And we can reduce the tensions between us and those who we find challenging.
Heart Wide Open (Living With Compassion)
Compassion is not only inherent to who we are as human beings, but is necessary for our well-being. Research demonstrates that the reward centers in our brains light up when we experience compassion. Compassionate individuals are able to show care, kindness, and support for themselves, so that they are more emotionally robust than people who have lower levels of compassion. Compassion helps insulate us from anxiety and depression, improves our overall health, and makes us more popular with others.
Living With Appreciation and Gratitude
When we learn to appreciate the good in ourselves and others, we experience more joy, contentment, and fulfillment. The traditional term for recognizing and appreciating the positive qualities and actions that bring happiness to beings (ourselves included) is mudita. This is one of the "four divine abidings" of Buddhist teaching, following on from kindness and compassion. Living with gratitude and appreciation has been shown in studies to be one of the most important factors in creating happiness and well-being.
Stop Freaking Out
We live in a high-pressure, fast-paced, and continuously changing world, in which life often seems to consist of one crisis after another. In order to thrive, we need to equip ourselves to face — and bounce back from — these challenges. On this 28-session meditation event we'll explore the skills that allow us to bounce back from adversity, and will learn how meditation can aid us in becoming more resilient and effective individuals.
How to Stop Beating Yourself Up
We all long for someone who will love us unconditionally. But what if that person is us? Self-compassion is the radically healing practice of treating ourselves with the kindness, respect, and gentleness that we would ideally offer to those we love.
Most us us have the habit of being hard on ourselves, but research shows that self-compassion promotes emotional well-being, reduces our risk of anxiety and depression, supports healthy habits, and leads to more satisfying personal relationships.
Forgiveness: The Art and Science of Letting Go
Resentment is like throwing a hot coal at someone: you may hurt them but you'll certainly burn yourself. Resentment is painful: forgiveness is freeing. But how do we forgive others? How do we avoid letting them off the hook or putting ourselves or others at risk of being hurt again? How do we forgive ourselves, and stop beating ourselves up? Are we increasing our risk of making mistakes in the future? These are the kinds of questions we'll be examining, and that we'll attempt to put into practice lessons we learn from our reflections.
Finding Calm in a Crisis
Bodhipaksa created this course inspired by the need to offer psychological and spiritual help to the world during the Coronavirus pandemic. The content, however, it timeless and universal. The course contains 28 meditations, which can be downloaded or streamed, to help us develop the emotional resilience we need in order to find peace in a stressful situation. The meditations vary in length from just three minutes (so you can meditate in tiny gaps in your schedule) to around 20 minutes.
Stress Reduction Through Mindfulness: Peace in Every Moment
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by feelings of overwhelm or stress? Is your mind always on the go? Research shows that we spend, on average, 48% of our time in distracted states of mind that are detrimental to our happiness. In extreme cases, our compulsive thoughts create out-of-control states of depression or stress. The antidote to this is mindfulness. When anxious or depressive thoughts arise, for example, we can simply notice them, and choose not to get drawn into the stories they try to create for us. We can also learn how to calm and soothe ourselves so that our minds are calmer and quieter.
The Path of Mindful Relationships
On this 28-day online event, we’ll look at the art of connecting spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and physically with our romantic partner. Intimate relationships can present us with opportunities for deep connection, joy, and self-transcendence, but they can also be challenging. As Robert Holden said, "Love brings up everything unlike itself for the purpose of healing." Our intimate relationships are like an uncompromising teacher, unrelentingly directing our attention toward that within us which needs to be transformed.
Sitting With Bodhi
It's very easy for our practice to go stale. We get stuck. Instead of our meditation being a vivid experience of awakening, it can devolve into a half-alive, humdrum habit. Or maybe we even stop practicing. Sitting with Bodhi gives you guidance when you need it. It's a daily meditation support to offer you guidance, to show you new ways of being, and to bring added depth and richness to your practice.
Links to guided meditations, especially recorded for this event, will be sent to you in a series of emails that are delivered at your pace.
Each meditation provides a 10-minute lead-in to a particular approach to meditating. Before you hit "play," set a timer for as long as you want to sit — for example 15, 20, or 30 minutes. Next, start playing the meditation on your computer or mobile device. At the end of the recording you are invited to continue with the practice until the end of your chosen time period.
Sitting With Bodhi I: Creating Calmness
The focus in these 42 guided meditation downloads is learning to calm our restless minds and to bring a pervading sense of peace and calmness that we can bring into our daily lives. These meditations, which can be downloaded or streamed) draw on almost forty years of exploration by Bodhipaksa. (Suitable for beginners and more experienced meditators.)
Sitting With Bodhi II: Lovingkindness
This series of 28 guided meditations explores lovingkindness meditation. We'll be learning the micro-skills and micro-habits that help us to be more patient and kinder toward ourselves and others. The meditations can be downloaded or streamed, and are delivered at a pace chosen by you, that fits your own life. (Suitable for beginners and more experienced meditators.)
Sitting With Bodhi III: Radical Peace
This series of 28 meditation downloads helps you explore the skills and habits that bring about radical peace through insight meditation. These teachings are drawn from a dialogue in an ancient Buddhist text, The Honeyball, where the Buddha and one of his disciples lay out an understanding of how the mind comes into conflict with itself and with others, and how radical peace can be attained. (Suitable for more experienced meditators.)
Sitting With Bodhi IV: Overcome Self-Hatred & Learn to Be Kind to Yourself
This series of 28 meditation downloads helps you explore the skills and habits that help you to offer yourself patience, forgiveness, and kindness so that you can be less judgmental of yourself. You'll learn how to be more understanding of yourself, and to offer yourself the support and encouragement that you would naturally give to a dear friend. You'll also learn how to be kinder, more patient, and more forgiving of others. (Suitable for beginners and more experienced meditators.)
Sitting With Bodhi V: Mindfulness of the Body
This series of 28 meditation downloads helps you to experience yourself in a more grounded and centered way. But as well as developing calmness through the body we'll also explore how to experience our full aliveness, so that we tap into the body's capacity for pleasure and vitality. Eventually this can transform our entire sense of who we are, so that the body becomes a vital source of energy and joy. (Suitable for beginners and more experienced meditators.)
Sitting With Bodhi VI: Exploring Change and Impermanence
This is a series of 28 guided meditations that lead you into observing change and impermanence in your direct experience—as opposed to conceptually reflecting on those topics. Observing change is an important aspect of insight meditation practice, which aims to bring a deep transformation in how we see ourselves, others, and the world we live in. (Suitable for more experienced meditators.)
Sitting With Bodhi VII: Sitting With Intention
This series of 28 meditation downloads helps you to bring more clarity and mindfulness of purpose into your practice. We'll be exploring many different intentions that we can bring into meditation, including the intention to enjoy your practice to the intention to be curious about discomfort. We'll even explore what it means to sit without intention. (Suitable for beginners and more experienced meditators.)
Sitting With Bodhi: Letting Go Into Joy
This series is different from other Sitting With Bodhi series, in that it consists of guided meditations supported by articles. it consists of 60 sessions, leading you step-by-step toward the state of effortless meditative absorption known as jhana (or dhyana, in Sanskrit). It teaches three skills: 1. Radically calming the mind, so that our thoughts no longer distract us. 2. Experiencing the body as alive and full of pleasant sensations connected with the breathing. 3. Allowing a state of joy to arise as we observe, with kindness, confident, and appreciation, the unfolding of the above processes.
Courses More Suitable for Experienced Practitioners
These courses are aimed at people who have several years of experience with meditation. Often the themes are more explicitly Buddhist, or they offer a more in-depth guide to applying the principles of mindfulness and compassion to daily life. There are however, no prerequisites, and any Wildmind sponsor is open to participate.
Just Being, Just Sitting
On this 28-day online course you'll learn how to sit without judgement, to practice radical self-acceptance, and to rest in an open and expansive state of awareness. Just Sitting is a practice of non-doing in which, as we sit, we allow thoughts to pass through the mind unobstructedly, and without getting caught up in their storylines. In time the mind stills, a peaceful state of pure, effortless awareness emerges, and your practice begins to unfold spontaneously and effortlessly from within.
Optimize Your Brain: Awaken Your Full Potential With Meditation
We now know that meditation almost literally rewires and sculpts our brains. In Optimize Your Brain we’ll draw on the latest scientific research to explore a variety of approaches to meditation that can help to bring about beneficial changes in our mental and physical health. You’ll learn how to activate states of calm instead of worry; kindness and compassion instead of irritability and anger; mindful presence instead of distractedness; and joy instead of sadness and despair.
Letting Go Into Joy: A Step-By-Step Guide to the Experience of Jhana
Letting Go Into Joy is a 50-session exploration of jhana — a joyful state of focused attention that can arise in meditation. It’s what modern psychology calls a “flow state.” The Buddha highly stressed the importance of being able to contact calmness, pleasure, joy, and stable concentration in meditation. Not only does this help us to reduce the amount of negativity in our lives, but it is key support for the arising of liberating insight—the goal of Buddhist practice.
Love Your Enemies
As spiritual practitioners we can easily find our kindness and compassion running short as we engage in the highly polarized world of politics. It's common for us to get into arguments with political opponents, and even to hate of have contempt for them. This course is a practical exploration of how to escape what author Arthur C. Brookes calls the "culture of contempt" and learn to embody a love so deep that it embraces even our enemies.
A Love as Deep as Life Itself: Living With Upekkha
A Love as Deep as Life Itself is a 28-day exploration of upekkha, which is usually translated as "equanimity." The function of upekkha is to help us go deeper when our love and compassion fail us — not so that we can be neutral, withdraw, or detached, but so that we can overcome barriers to relating with kindness to all. At its most profound, upekkha recognizes the potential all beings have for spiritual awakening — it sees the Buddhahood lying dormant within all.
Waking Up: Stepping From Delusion to Freedom In This Very Life
The aim of all Buddhist practice is to bring about freedom from suffering. We can free ourselves from much, but not all, of our suffering by becoming more ethical, more mindful, and more compassionate. “Becoming a better person,” however, isn’t enough. To find lasting happiness we have to radically change the way we see ourselves and our relation with the world. This change comes about by developing insight, so that we appreciate the impermanent and interconnected nature of our being.
Calm in the Storm: Living In Challenging Times
Society is becoming more polarized. Violent extremism against minorities is on the rise. Democracies are under threat. Living in fear and confusion is painful. Retreating is not an option; where, after all, can we retreat to? And yet being engaged can be exhausting and stressful. But it's in challenging times that we are presented with opportunities to grow. This 28-day online course is designed to help us develop the skills to survive, and even thrive: finding not just calm, but wisdom and compassion, in the midst of storms of political, social, and personal change.
The Six Elements: Seeing Our True Nature
The greatest insights that the Buddha had are that our sense of self is a burden that we drag around with us, and that it’s possible to lay down that burden. The six element practice is a beautiful and poetic reflection on impermanence, interconnectedness — and especially non-self. The practice encourages us to examine everything that we take to be “us” and “ours” and teaches us to see that nothing in the mind or body truly belongs to us.
Find and Live Your Purpose: A Spiritual Reboot Camp
Do you feel excited and energized by your life? If not, you may need to clarify your purpose, or learn how to live your values. You may need to "reboot" the core principles upon which you base your life. A sense of meaning and purpose is critical to a healthy psyche. No one can teach you what your purpose is — this is something that we each have to discover for ourselves — but on this meditation course we'll learn to uncover for ourselves our own deepest values and passions. We'll dare to find — and to live — our purpose.
Politics as a Spiritual Practice
Politics is always a difficult arena in which to maintain our calmness and kindness. Mindfulness is clearly not enough in itself. This course examines how we can strengthen and develop the Five Spiritual Faculties of faith, wisdom, meditation, action, as well as mindful attention. These five skills bridge the inner world of self-transformation and the outer world of active engagement. They give us a way of handling our fear, of turning anger into love, and of overcoming despair.