business

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.