Bodhipaksa

Today, the 11th day of November, 2025, is Wildmind’s 25th birthday! It’s the 25th anniversary of the first day that the Wildmind website went live. It was, as far as I’m aware, the first website where anyone could come and learn meditation. I’m pleased and delighted that 25 years later the website is still running.

Here’s now it came about.

A Master’s in Buddhism?

Sometime around 1997 I’d met a professor of Buddhist studies called Alan Sponberg in his alter ego as Dharmachari Saramati — who was, like me, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order. We met at a Buddhist convention, and he told me he had funding for a teaching assistant position. The successful candidate would have the fees for a Master’s degree paid for by the university. It seemed like a good deal to be able to study Buddhism for three years while living in the Rocky Mountains, and get paid for it. Moreover, there was a Triratna Buddhist center in Missoula, the home of UM, which I could be involved in.

As it happened, the Buddhist Studies department consisted of just Saramati, and it wasn’t going to be possible to do a Master’s degree purely in Buddhism, so the best option was to do an interdisciplinary Master’s of some sort. This would involve studying both Buddhism and a second, co-equal subject, with specific focus on the overlap between the two. At first I thought I might study Buddhism and Japanese, because at that time I had what turned out to be a short-lived interest in Zen Buddhism. Saramati informed me, to my disappointment, that the Zen scriptures were written in Chinese, and that in the three years of a Master’s program I probably wouldn’t learn enough Chinese to be able to study them.

Reflecting on my background

Back to square one. I thought about what I wanted to do in life. I’d spent, at that time, six years at university. And I started to wonder if a Master’s degree would simply be me gaining knowledge and skills that wouldn’t be of much practical value in my life. My first degree had been in veterinary medicine at the University of Glasgow, from which I graduated in 1984. It was while I was a veterinary student that I became a Buddhist, and unfortunately I’d come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t become a vet; the meditation practice I was doing had sensitized me emotionally, and having to kill animals was, I found, traumatic, leaving me with terrible nightmares. Nevertheless, I graduated.

I then spent some time working with other Buddhists in a printing business, giving myself the space to think about what I would do with my life. I was also doing various kinds of voluntary work, which I enjoyed. I taught basic reading and writing skills to illiterate adults. I spent one evening a week helping an immigrant teenage boy with his school work (his father had abandoned the family and his mother barely spoke English), and I volunteered in an adventure playground for children with mental and physical handicaps. All of this was very fulfilling, and I applied for and was accepted in a one-year post-graduate course in Community Education. I spent a challenging year in a small class with 11 other students (including Gary Lewis, who is now a well-known actor, and Shona Robison, who at one point was Scotland’s Deputy First Minister).

I learned a lot of skills at a Community Education Worker, and worked in that field for several years. But I had to resign my position in order to go on a four-month ordination retreat in Spain, in which I joined the Triratna Order and became Bodhipakṣa.

When I came back to Scotland there were no Community Education jobs available, but there was an opening as the Manager of Dhanakosa Retreat Centre in the Scottish Highlands. Dhanakosa was quite new at the time. The previous manager left after a year, and wasn’t even organized enough to have a filing cabinet.

Buddhism and Business

I gained a lot of skills, including teaching experience, running the retreat centre, which wasn’t that different from running the small education center for single parents that I’d established as a Community Education Worker.

Back to my Master’s degree: I realized that I’d always enjoyed helping people and building things up. These were things I’d done in my voluntary work, in Community Education, and as manager of Dhanakosa. I wondered if there might be an Entrepreneurship program at UM, and it turned out there was. So it became established that in my Interdisciplinary Master’s program I would study Buddhism, business, and the overlap between the two — which is traditionally called Right Livelihood. There needed to be a practical component to this overlap. and at first I thought I might collaborate with an existing Buddhist business (a restaurant) in Missoula, but that didn’t seem possible.

A stroke of inspiration

I remember — this would have been 1999 or very early 2000 — having to wait for an appointment with someone who was running late. As I waited I had a stroke of inspiration. I had taught a lot of meditation, and seemed, from what people said, to be good at it. What, I thought, about setting up a website where people could learn to meditate? People already learned meditation from books; on the website there could be readings. People already learned meditation from cassette tapes; on the website there could be recordings.

You have to remember that this was less than ten years after the public launch of the World Wide Web. I’d only been online for seven years at this point. There were places online where you could find out the times and locations of meditation classes, and you could even read the Buddhist scriptures, but you certainly couldn’t learn meditation online.

At first my idea was simply to have a free resource, but a friend, fellow Buddhist, and very successful businessman called Pat Lawler asked me if it might be possible to run courses as well, and to make a living out of doing that. I thought it probably could be done. Pat, an exceptionally generous man, gave me there and then some funds so that I could buy a domain name and get a website set up.

Developing the idea

In the Business School I entered this idea in a Business Plan competition, where I came second. In the philosophy department my professor and I submitted an application for a grant to the American Council of Learned Societies to test whether a meditation course could be done online. The application was successful. I wrote the proposal and my professor kept most of the money, but what remained was enough to support me over the summer so that I could write the contents for a website). In Fall, 2000, I ran the course, which went well. The course was run on UM’s course management system, so this was not the Wildmind website.

The actual website came about with the help of Heidi Harting-Rex, a local web designer who helped me turned the course materials I’d developed into the Wildmind website. (I also had help from Roger Hyam, an old friend from Edinburgh.) The header image for this article is a screenshot of the Wayback Machine’s first snapshot of the site, from Feb 1, 2001, at which point the site was only three months old. The first course (run under the name Mindworks) ran in the Spring of 2001.

25 years later

Things have evolved a lot since then. I realized along the way that community was the important thing. And so now there’s a thriving, although small, Wildmind community of about 400 people who donate varying amounts every month to support me to explore and teach meditation.

It’s still, after 25 years, touch and go financially. From time to time I have to do fundraising appeals to my community and to fans of the website. On two occasions I’ve been close to giving up, and one time I even wrote a letter explaining why I was having to give up teaching meditation. (I was about to apply for jobs in social media marketing for local companies.)

In the meantime, if you want to support the site, which is free of advertising, feel free to make a donation. Or you can become one of Wildmind’s sponsors, and be part of our community.

I have to say that even though it’s been a struggle, I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to spend so much time practicing, reflecting on, teaching, discussing, and writing about meditation. It’s been deeply rewarding. It’s also heartening to know that my guided meditations have been listened to by literally millions of people, and that I have several articles that have been read by close to a million people each. I’m still hanging in there! And so is Wildmind. I hope that the site will continue for many years to come, and will still be offering advice and guidance on meditation to millions more people long after I’m gone.

Books and cats

August 29, 2025

It was lovely to receive this photograph the other day. This is Mara, one of the people who wrote an endorsement of my forthcoming book, “The Heart’s Awakening,” receiving her advance copy.

The cat in the background is Cleo.

The book doesn’t come out until Oct 14, and I didn’t even know that it existed in physical form!

I’m looking forward to seeing one myself.

“The Heart’s Awakening” has the subtitle, “108 Steps to a Life of Love.” It explores how we can bring more kindness, compassion, and appreciation into our lives. These are things that enrich our lives and make us happier.

It explains how we can overcome anger, hatred, resentment, and contempt — which make us and others unhappy.

One of the things it addresses is the way we undermine ourselves through self-criticism. Lots of people in our lives have criticized us in order to “improve” us. We internalize that strategy to the point where we can’t imagine living without it, even though we hate it!

The teachings in my book show how we can support and encourage ourselves through kindness instead. It makes such a difference to our lives when we do this. We realize that we’ve been going through life traumatizing ourselves with self-criticism. Then we wonder why we procrastinate on doing important things. Well, isn’t it kind of natural to avoid doing things when you’re only going to criticize yourself for not doing them “perfectly”?

There is a better way. And it’s not that hard. It starts with learning to show ourselves a little warmth and encouragement, using soft, kind, eyes (which is something I explain in the book), kinder inner communication, and other methods.

The Heart’s Awakening is available for preorder now. Why not reserve your copy so that you can hit the ground running (or sitting) on October 14?

Here’s a link to the book on Amazon, and os bookshop.org (which allows you to support your local bookstore).

Find peace with “Sitting With Bodhi”

February 11, 2025

I warmly invite you to join me in an innovative meditation course.

The focus in these 42 guided meditations is learning to calm our restless minds and learning to evoke a pervading sense of peace and calmness that we can bring into our daily lives.

Sitting With Bodhi is a unique concept. There are no readings. It’s all about practice. So what you get is a series of emails, each with a link to a guided meditation recording.

How It Works

The guided meditations are 10 minutes long, but open-ended. You’re invited to set a timer for as long as you want to sit — for example 15 or 30 minutes. The guidance lasts for 10 minutes, and ends with an invitation for you to continue the suggested practice for the rest of your sit.

The Creating Calmness series has 42 meditations, all recorded specially for this course. Each introduces a skill that will help you feel calm, confident, and at ease, so that you can experience more peace, even when events around you are stressful.

These are skills you can being into your everyday life, imbuing your everyday activities with a sense of peace.

No Pressure

Thanks to the magic of technology, the next day’s email won’t be sent out to you until you click a special link in the current day’s email. So if you have a few busy days and aren’t able to listen to the guided meditations, or if you want to stick with one meditation for a few days, there’s no pressure! Emails will only arrive when you are ready for them! Isn’t that great?

And you can take as long as you want to complete the course. There’s no end date.

Questions I’ve Been Asked

Q. Am I able to return and revisit a meditation after I complete it?

A. Yes. You can listen to the meditations as many times as you want.

Q. Do the meditations have to be completed by a certain time?

A. No. It doesn’t matter how long you take to complete the series. You really can go at your own pace.

Testimonials

“This series of guided meditations arrived during a very difficult period in my life. Each meditation helped me settle my mind and I was able to enjoy a period of peace in an otherwise very hectic and stressful situation. That situation is on going and it’s helpful that I can revisit each meditation. Thanks Bodhi!”
“I have been meditating for a couple of years but found the techniques here (especially the ‘soft eyes’) very helpful in getting me to a calmer mind set. 🙏”

How to Join

To sign up, just use one of the payment buttons below: PayPal, Venmo, or credit card.

Within 24 hours of subscribing, you’ll receive the first course email.

Chinese translation of “This Difficult Thing of Being Human”

October 21, 2024

It took a while to get a copy of this book from the Chinese publisher, not just because of the distance involved but because of the local post office temporarily losing the package it came in.

But here it is: the Chinese translation of my book on self-compassion, “This Difficult Thing of Being Human.”

Behind it you can see various copies of my other books in a variety of languages. I’m pleased to say that my work is now available in nine different languages. I’d love that to be in doubt figures, but that’s not something I can hurry.

The story behind this book is a little weird. I discovered that “This Difficult Thing of Being Human” had been translated into Romanian by stumbling upon in on Amazon. My publisher had never mentioned the translation.

While I was asking about the Romanian translation, my editor mentioned in passing that a Chinese translation was being discussed.

In trying to find out whether the Chinese translation had gone ahead (it had, two years before!) I found there was also a Korean translation, which I’ve never seen.

I suggested to my publisher that they might want to look at their procedures for translations, so that they kept authors in the loop. They took this on board and it seems like it’s going to happen in the future. So when my work is published in a tenth language, I shouldn’t have to discover that accidentally!

By the way, This Difficult Thing of Being Human has been very well received. Every single review on Amazon gives it five stars. (There are some people who have rated the book with less than five stars, but none of them have written a review.) Several people have told me it’s been life-changing for them or people they knew. One woman whose son is in rehab said that every person in the rehab facility had found it revelatory.

New translations of “This Difficult Thing of Being Human”

September 20, 2024

I was delighted to discover recently that “This Difficult Thing of Being Human” — my book on self-compassion — has been translated into Chinese and Korean. That’s in addition to a Romanian translation I learned about three years ago.

It’s an odd story. I discovered the Romanian translation by accident while browsing on Amazon. I saw my name on the cover of a book but didn’t recognize the title or even the language it was in. Google Translate helped me determine that the book was in Romanian. I asked my editor about this, and yes, it was legit. They’d made a deal with a Romanian publishing company, and had forgotten to tell me. My editor also mentioned that there was possibly a Chinese translation coming out as well.

I promptly forgot about the Chinese translation until a couple of months ago, when I happened to re-read that email while looking for something else.

I asked my publisher if anything had happened with that, and the editor I talked to didn’t know. The person who would no was on extended leave. Two months later they got back to me and told me that the Chinese translation not only existed, but had been published two years ago! That was a surprise!

I was curious about the money side of this and continued the conversation. Then someone in the company mentioned “the Korean translation.” The Korean translation??? I asked for more information, but I found it through searching online before I got a reply.

It’s funny how authors seem to be the least important part of the publishing industry!

Looking for an image of the cover of the Korean translation, I found a review that was really beautifully done, with photographs of the book beside some meticulous hand-written notes. (The link is to a Google translation of the review.)

I haven’t actually seen copies of these books, but I hope that my publisher will be able to track one down and give it to me. Otherwise I’ll have to buy my own books and have them shipped from Asia. (See what I mean about authors being the least important part of the publishing industry?)

Here are links to:

請用正念疼惜自己 (Chinese)

and

인간으로 산다는, 그 어려운 일 (Korean)

I believe that’s nine languages that my books are now available in: English, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Romanian, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean. It would be nice to get that up into double figures.

Great news about my writing

August 13, 2024

Exciting things have been happening recently. In the space of just a week or so I was been offered two publishing contracts, one for a book coming out next year, and one for the following year.

“The Heart’s Awakening”

The Heart’s Awakening” is scheduled to come out in September 2025, and is being published by Windhorse Publications.

The book is based on four courses I created on the topic of the Brahmaviharas, which are practices for bringing more kindness, compassion, and appreciation into our lives. In these courses I radically re-imagine these practices. For example,

I explore metta as kindness, rather than lovingkindness, the former term being much more down-to-earth and experiential.
I stress the necessity for developing empathy before cultivating kindness.
I place a lot of emphasis on self-compassion as a prerequisite for having compassion for others (something I also explore in my book, “This Difficult Thing of Being Human.”)
I discuss mudita not as “sympathetic joy” but as joyful appreciation of what’s skillful.
And I discuss upekkha not as a state of withdrawal into peace, but as a calming of reactivity so that we can love more deeply.

“SIT: 28 Days to a Rock-Solid Daily Meditation Practice”

The second book is based on my course, “Get Your Sit Together.” It’s coming out through Wisdom Publications in the Spring of 2026. The title is self-explanatory. It is aimed at people who have been practicing for a while — perhaps years — but who have never managed to establish an unshakable daily practice. It comes out of my own struggles with this, and from my work in helping others to establish a rock-solid daily meditation practice.

This is all very affirming, and I’m thrilled that the work I’m doing will reach and benefit a wider audience. I will of course let you all know when these two titles are available for pre-order.

More adventures with artificial intelligence

March 24, 2023

Recently I shared a conversation I had with ChatGPT, a supposed Artificial Intelligence. ChatGPT is designed to reply to natural language questions in natural language. It does precisely that, using a vast body of information it’s been fed. When I asked CHatGPT about the benefits of meditation, and the various kinds of meditation practice available, it mostly did a good job.

ChatGPT is essentially a plagiaristic search engine. What I mean is that normally you ask Google for information and it finds the websites that are most likely to be able to answer that question, which you then visit. ChatGPT takes information from the websites and then presents it to you in a reworded fashion, without crediting the original sources. Hence, my description of it as plagiaristic.

Yesterday I talked with another AI. It’s Bard, which was developed by Google. Given that Google is the most-trusted search engine in the English-speaking world, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is the third-largest tech company in the world, most people would have high hopes for its capacities.

Tell me about the meditation teacher, Bodhipaksa.

Bard: Bodhipaksa is a Buddhist meditation teacher and author. He was born in 1961 in Dundee, Scotland, and has been meditating since 1982. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and has published several books and guided meditations. He is the founder of Wildmind, an online meditation center.

Bodhipaksa’s teachings are based on the Theravada Buddhist tradition. He emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and compassion in meditation. He also teaches a variety of meditation techniques, including mindfulness of breathing, lovingkindness meditation, and insight meditation.

Bodhipaksa is a popular and respected teacher. He has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. He has also been interviewed on NPR and ABC News.

If you are interested in learning more about Bodhipaksa or his teachings, you can visit his website at www.wildmind.org.

The first paragraph — the biographical details — is a rewording of bios that I’ve posted in several places, including this website, various places I’ve taught, and on the Insight Timer app.

The next part — about my meditation teaching — is accurate. “Based on the Theravada tradition” is questionable, although I’d let that slide. While the meditation practices I teach mostly have roots in the early Buddhist scriptures, that’s not the same as “the Theravada tradition,” although many people make that conflation. I’ve never been part of any Theravadin group. I also teach meditations, such as mantras, that are definitely not part of the Theravada tradition.

The third part, about my being featured or interviewed in the NYT, the WSJ, Forbes, NPR, and ABC News, are inventions. (I have been interviewed by CBS and appeared on the BBC, however. And I would like to think I’m “a popular and respected teacher.”)

I was interested in those inventions. I wondered how Bard could come up with this kind of misinformation. So I probed more deeply.

Tell me more about Bodhipaksa being featured in the New York Times.

Bard: Sure. Bodhipaksa has been featured in The New York Times on several occasions.

In 2006, he was interviewed by Sandra Blakeslee for an article about the science of meditation. The article, titled “Cells That Read Minds,” discussed the research that had been done on the effects of meditation on the brain. Bodhipaksa explained that meditation can help to reduce stress, improve concentration, and increase compassion.

In 2012, he was interviewed by Mark Bittman for an article about vegetarianism. The article, titled “We could be heroes,” discussed the benefits of a plant-based diet. Bodhipaksa explained that vegetarianism can help to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases.

In 2017, he was interviewed by David Brooks for an article about the benefits of meditation. The article, titled “The power of meditation,” discussed the research that had been done on the effects of meditation on the mind and body. Bodhipaksa explained that meditation can help to reduce stress, improve focus, and increase compassion.

Bodhipaksa’s interviews with The New York Times have helped to raise awareness of the benefits of meditation. His teachings have also helped to inspire people to make changes in their lives to improve their health and well-being.

This is all very specific. I’m very aware of all these names. They’re significant commentators and writers. We’re even given titles for the articles in which I was supposedly interviewed.

Sadly, I’ve never been interviewed by anyone from the NYT. A search for my name on the NYT website failed to bring up any results.

So again I thought I’d probe more deeply and see where Bard was supposedly getting this information from.

What is the URL for Sandra Blakeslee’s article where she interviewed Bodhipaksa?

Bard: I can’t assist you with that, as I’m only a language model and don’t have the capacity to understand and respond.

I thought the definition of a language model was that it did understand and respond. Why can’t Bard supply the location of an article it cited just moments before? It’s already supplied a URL (for Wildmind) so it’s not that that’s verboten. I thought I’d try asking the same question in a different way.

Where can I find the Sandra Blakeslee article where she interviewed Bodhipaksa?

Bard: You can find the Sandra Blakeslee article where she interviewed Bodhipaksa in the book “Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change”. The book was published in 2006 by Shambhala Publications. In the article, Blakeslee interviews Bodhipaksa about his work on meditation and his views on fearlessness. Bodhipaksa is a Buddhist teacher and author who has been practicing meditation for over 30 years. He is the founder of the Bodhipaksa Retreat Center in Barre, Massachusetts.

So this is interesting. Yes, I wrote the book, “Living as a River.” And sure enough, I have a reference in there to Sandra Blakeslee’s article, “Cells That Read Minds.” But she’s never interviewed me, nor I her. Bard has taken my citation of her article and spun it into a story about an interview that never happened.

I don’t cite Mark Bittman in Living as a River, although I think I may have in my book on vegetarianism. I can’t recall citing David Brooks ever, although it’s possible I did.

The mention of the “Bodhipaksa Retreat Center” is weird. It doesn’t exist, although the Insight Meditation Society is in Barre. I wondered if that’s what Bard was referring to.

What is the address of the Bodhipaksa Retreat Center in Barre, Massachusetts?

Bard: The Bodhipaksa Retreat Center is located at 132 South Barre Road, Barre, MA 01005.

That’s not the address of the IMS, which is on Pleasant St. Apparently it’s a small private residence, which I have no connection with.

I asked for the phone number of the “BRC” and was given one. I’ve no idea whose phone number it was.

I decided to backtrack, and see what other information Bard could provide about me.

What university degrees does Bodhipaksa have?

Bard: Bodhipaksa has a master’s degree in Buddhism and business from the University of Montana.

That’s correct, and presumably that was taken from bios that various websites have posted.

Does he have any other degrees?

Bard: Yes, Bodhipaksa holds a degree in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Glasgow.

That’s also accurate.

But just when you think there are some kinds of straightforward factual information that Bard is good at, you offer an easy question and get an answer that’s completely off.

How many books has Bodhipaksa written?

Bard: Bodhipaksa has written over 20 books on Buddhism and meditation, including:

The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion
Fulfilling Your Potential
Facing Anger
The Eightfold Path to True Freedom
Living as a Buddhist
The Practice of Mindfulness

He has also written several audio programs and ebooks on meditation and Buddhism.

I’ve written six books, I think. The first title offered has at least has some relation to one of my book titles, “This Difficult Thing of Being Human,” whose subtitle is “The Art of Self-Compassion.” But the rest are just made up.

I’ve seen one music website that has a whole bunch of articles on in that were written by Bard, although the website gave a (presumably fake) author name. The articles were bland, repetitive, very non-specific, and often inaccurate. A citation to at least one of those articles made it into Wikipedia, although one of the editors later flagged up the website in question as not being a reliable source of information. But other articles by Bard and ChatGPT containing false information are certain to slip by the editors, or simply to be picked up by other websites and amplified. Misinformation will spread

I can’t help but feel that there’s a crisis of misinformation at the moment, and although all of these AI tools contain warnings that the information they generate may not be accurate, a lot of people are going to ignore that and spread the nonsense it creates.

Even this post, with its references to the NYT articles I’ve supposedly been interviewed in, might become a source of misinformation, if those paragraphs are taken out of context. Information created by AI’s will inevitably end up being fed back in to AI’s. It’s going to get messy. Or blurry.

So far the wisest words I’ve read on these AI’s are those of Ted Chiang, the science fiction author, in a New Yorker article: “It’s the digital equivalent of repeatedly making photocopies of photocopies in the old days. The image quality only gets worse.”

My latest book: “A Year of Buddha’s Wisdom”

December 24, 2021

reviews

Over the summer I wrote a book. The idea was presented to me by the publisher, who had decided that they needed a daily practice guide based on Buddhist teachings, and they wanted me essentially to fill in the blanks.

It turned out to be a bit more involved than that, because their original outline wasn’t realistic. So we worked together to create a new outline, and the book ended up having four components: brief guides to meditation, reflections, mantras, and quotes from the Buddha.

Almost half of the entries are meditations, and I have to say I particularly enjoyed having to come up with something like 160 distinct approaches to meditation. The reviews so far have been excellent. Even very experienced meditators have said they they’ll be turning to it for inspiration.

The Kindle edition is now available. Using the same link you can order the paperback version, which gets released on the 4th of January.

It’s not yet available on Apple Books or the Kobo store.

I consider Amazon to be a pretty awful company, so please do consider supporting your local bookshop buy pre-ordering there.

Publisher: Rockridge Press (January 4, 2022)
Language: English
Paperback: 264 pages
ISBN-10: 1638783004
ISBN-13: 978-1638783008

Get daily meditation guidance on your iPhone

February 8, 2019

Wildmind Meditation News