calmness

Join me in “As the World Falls Apart”

January 6, 2026

I am launching a major new course for 2026, on the topic of how we deal with political turmoil.

Here’s why:

It sometimes seems that the world we’re living in is falling apart in terrifying ways.

I feel oppressed by the knowledge that the world is on a very wrong track at the moment. My fears of where things might go are a heavy burden to carry. The events unfolding around me were once unthinkable and are now shocking and I view them with a sense of disbelief. It’s like one day I woke up and found myself in the wrong timeline. How can all this be happening?

Much that we value is being lost or is under threat: a livable climate, free speech, the rule of law and due process, the reliability of the US as an international partner, our expectation that the world had learned “never again” with regard to genocide, the assumption that larger countries should not invade smaller ones just because they can, the belief that all human lives matter and that racism and xenophobia are wrong, economies in which ordinary people can better themselves, trust in science and medicine — even democracy itself.

n so many ways a familiar world (imperfect though it is) seems to be crumbling around us, being replaced by something crueler, less human. The forces of authoritarianism and fascism, although largely defeated, never went away, even in liberal democracies, but they’re undergoing a dark resurgence.

Change is coming at us so fast that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. We might feel paralyzed with terror. We might feel tempted to give up in despair. We might find ourselves consumed with rage.

I have to say, some of you might be sick of politics. You might want to just hide.

But that’s what authoritarians want. They do and say outrageous and cruel things at a breakneck pace so that we’ll feel overwhelmed and hopeless, and so that we’ll stop paying attention. We can’t let that happen, because things will just get worse. Many, many people will suffer.

We can’t directly change the upsetting things that are happening in the world around us. But we can change how we respond to them. And if we want the world to change direction, that’s what we’re going to have to do.

A new course

For the last few months I’ve been working on a new course on how we can learn to stay calm, open-hearted, and optimistic as the world is falling apart.

The course is structured around three broad headings for spiritual practice:

Feet On the Ground: This means learn to calm ourselves even in the midst of chaos and outrage. This involves not just mindfulness, but the sense of calm empowerment that comes from knowing we’re doing the best we can with the resources available to us. We practice self-care to keep ourselves in balance. We get smarter about reading the news and using social media.
Heart Wide Open: This includes actions such as supporting ourselves with self-compassion, staying open to the sufferings of others, and cultivating joy as a form of resistance. It includes becoming more fearless. It includes reconnecting with the good that exists in the world and remembering that there are more people who want peace and unity than want violence and division. It includes connecting with and working with those people.
Keep Looking Up: This includes developing and maintaining our faith in a better world. It involves becoming clearer about what a better world would look like. It’s about learning to work with other people of good will to make that a reality.

Taking action — which is one of the emphases of this course — doesn’t necessarily mean becoming an activist. It might mean encouraging those who are. It might mean holding a sign at a rally. It might mean contributing to groups that are working for good. It might mean staying in touch with others who know that what’s going on is wrong, and offering each other moral support. It might include smiling at strangers, and showing that you’re not cowed. It might mean reading an inspiring book with friends. However little we can do, it’s important we do it.

We can push for the creation of a better world, starting here, starting now. In the future, you’ll want to be able to say, “We couldn’t stop them. But we slowed them down. And when the insanity collapsed in on itself, we’d already worked out how we wanted to rebuild things.”

How it works

This course is based on others I’ve run in the past — especially “Love Your Enemies” and “Politics As a Spiritual Practice” — which many people found helpful. I’ve been substantially reworking the materials from those courses and creating new content to make sure I address the renewed threat of fascism and authoritarianism, how we resist it, how we live with it, and how we make it less likely to happen next time.

The course starts Wednesday, 28th of January.
This course has a weekly email, which will go out on Wednesdays at 5 AM US Eastern Time. Each email contains a substantial essay, or a part of one.
There will be meditations, but the emphasis is more on the readings, reflections, and practice suggestions.
The number of emails isn’t finalized, but the course will probably run for the whole year.
There will be live Zoom discussion groups every two weeks where we can talk about the articles, our thoughts and feelings, and our lives. I’m aiming to do these at two different times, to accommodate people in the US, the UK and Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Bear in mind it’s not possible to suit everyone’s schedule. Details to follow.
We can also have written discussions in the community website. Participation and sharing are important.

Our world falling apart is an opportunity

The title of this course is not meant to be alarmist or depressing. In a sense the world is always falling apart. Our own bodies are falling apart, right now. The leaf in the photograph above is falling apart. What keeps things together is the ongoing work of building and sustaining. As well as falling apart, your body is constantly healing and growing. The leaf’s very falling apart is the condition that supports the growth of new leaves. Old institutions die, and new ones are created.

The falling apart of the old world is like the death of a leaf. It looks like a loss. But it’s also an opportunity for new growth. We know that the world we lost, no matter how much we mourn its passing, can never be put back together again the way it was. And it shouldn’t. It fell apart because it was a bad world for too many people. What we grow in the leaf litter has to be something better, fairer, more just, more human. It has to be a world in which all people can flourish. That’s what we need to aim for. What is that world like? How do we get there? We’ll talk about that together.

This course is only open to those who sponsor Wildmind, thereby giving me the opportunity to reflect and write. But it’s easy to become a sponsor, and it’s only $8 a month. That’s a sound investment in an exploration that will help you feel happy and balanced amidst the turbulence, and that will help you be of more use to our suffering world.

With love,
Bodhipakṣa

👉 Click here to become a sponsor and to join me in “As the World Falls Apart” 👈

Keep your feet on the ground with mindful news consumption

March 3, 2025

Bodhipaksa

on practice

A friend of mine recently went on a trip to visit a friend and to do some sightseeing. The effects of this on her mental health were amazing — and she ascribes much of the benefit of that to having spent less time imbibing the news.

Actually, imbibing isn’t the right word. Right now, taking in the news can be like, as they say, trying to drink from a firehose. It’s overwhelming.

Outrage by design

Partly this is by design. The intent, in the words of a government advisor, is to “flood the zone with shit.” This means to keep doing outrageous things, and to lie continuously. There are probably a number of motivations behind this.

We can be reeling so much from one outrageous news story that others slip under the radar. We can only protest so much.

As Brandolini’s Law reminds us, it takes an order of magnitude more effort to debunk lies than it does to tell them. Lying continually exhausts your opponents and the media.

Provocative tactics such as renaming an international body of water can have people up in arms about things that barely affect them, while other things are going on that will have serious effects on their lives.

And people who feel overwhelmed and traumatized by what’s going on might just tune out and not even pay attention to what’s happening at all. A passive population is helpful if you’re pushing policies that a lot of people disagree with.

Off-balance and not thinking clearly

The news is often emotive, and that’s especially the case right now for many of us. We can end up emotionally constantly on edge, off balance. And when we’re on edge our minds tell us that it’s important we don’t miss out on anything important, so we spend even more time reading, listening to, or watching the news. Which makes us even more anxious.

When we’re panicked or despairing, we don’t think or perceive clearly. We think of “solutions” that will make things worse. We lose perspective and assume that nothing can be done. We fail to notice what people are already doing, and so we don’t offer them our support.

We become convinced that our outrage will help change things. But that’s not true. Action changes things. Outrage exhausts us and prevents us from taking action.

At times of crisis it’s important that we keep our feet on the ground, emotionally. And so we need to be aware of the tendency we have to be made anxious and outraged by the news, and how this can lead to further news consumption — a vicious emotional cycle.

News fasting

A temporary total news fast can be useful as a way of resetting ourselves emotionally. Some people do this long-term and still stay informed. When I’ve gone on news fasts I’ve found that I’m still aware of what’s going on. People discuss the news on social media. They share links to news stories, which we see, even if we don’t read the stories. People tell us about the news face to face. So we don’t become totally disconnected from what’s going on. And that’s a good thing, because there are often things we should be aware of.

I tend to think of news fasts as being good when we need to “detox,” but in the longer term it’s a question of managing our news consumption — mindfully.

Real mindfulness

Mindfulness is an over-used and often misused term. Someone recently wrote me a scathing email accusing me of being “unmindful” for having made a typo in an article. I decided not to respond, but if I had I might have pointed out that mindfulness is principally a tool for monitoring ourselves. It’s for noticing whether our thoughts, emotions, and actions are beneficial or harmful for ourselves are others. If we’re mindful, we might write a kind message pointing out a typo, even if our first instinct is to get on our high horse about it.

So being mindful of news consumption isn’t just code for “reading fewer news stories” — which is what we do in the world. What it means is being sensitive to ourselves — which is do do with what’s happening inside us. What effect is our news consumption having on us? Not just in general, but as we’re actually reading or watching the news? How does it make us feel? Is it exhausting us? Making us anxious? Is it a neutral experience? Are we actually enjoying it?

This may change from day to day and minute to minute, because there are so many factors that affect our well-being, such as whether we’ve slept well, how demanding our work is, how our personal relationships are going, and so on.

We need to keep checking in with ourselves, and this gives us the freedom to change what we’re doing. If you’re having a growing sense of dread as you read story after story, maybe stop?

Notice the effect the news, and the feelings it creates, is having on your thoughts and actions. Is anxiety compelling you to stay immersed in the news? Maybe you really should stop!

Downshift emotionally

I suggest downshifting to less emotionally demanding news media. Television news is emotionally “hot.” It bombards you with moving and still images. You hear the voices of people you loathe. You see people arguing. It’s a lot to take in. The only time I ever

The radio news is a lot cooler, because you don’t get the emotional impact of all the visuals.

Reading the news is cooler still. You can pick and choose what you read, while with radio and television news programs someone else is choosing everything for you.

Choose wise sources

But even within the realm of reading about the news, there’s a spectrum. There are partisan news outlets that rely on outrage to get and keep readers “engaged.” Often do do this they will exaggerate or otherwise be deceptive. There are other news sources that are more balanced, thoughtful, and accurate.

We can be drawn to outraged commentators. We might assume that these people have the passion and anger to really change things. But often what they’re doing is a performance. It’s called “moral grandstanding.” People worked up and excited, but they end up exhausted and stressed as well. If these outrage merchants every give practical advice, it’s usual impractical.

I find it helpful to read analysis that puts things in a historical context. I’ve mentioned before people like historians Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson, legal experts Joyce Vance and Teri Kanefield, and expert on authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat. These are people who illuminate without inflaming.

We can learn that what’s going on right now politically is part of a pattern that’s been going on for centuries. This can help us, because we have a tendency to think that when our side wins an election, everything’s going to be okay now. It’s not. These centuries-long struggles will continue. We can also learn from history that we are not alone. Others have faced challenges, too. In fact we can see that others have had things much worse than we have. Compared to the US Civil War, or either of the World Wars, we’re in a good situation. To say that is not to downplay the real suffering that’s happening now. It just helps us put things in perspective so that we don’t panic as much.

Be selective

I’m hearing people say that they’re exhausted trying to keep up with everything. That’s what your opponents want, so don’t give it to them. If you do read in-depth, limit that to the things you most care about. Adam Savage, the former presenter of Mythbusters, recently said that his news “titration” strategy is “kind of scanning the headlines from a distance and sort of getting a rough idea of what’s going on.” That’s wise. I’ve no doubt that sometimes Savage also reads in-depth about those issues he most cares about.

I used to subscribe to the email newsletters of the commentators I mentioned above, mostly through their Substack blogs. But having emails piling up in your in-box is emotionally demanding. So instead I’ve switched to using an RSS app. RSS is Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a technology that’s been around since the early days of blogging. As well as just sitting there, waiting to be read, blogs also “broadcast.” You can subscribe to them so that every post ends up on, for example, an RSS app. Using an RSS app is like having a blog you can visit that’s composed of posts from all the websites you’re most interested in.

I use an RSS app called Reeder on my computer and phone. If you go to your app store and search for “RSS reader” you’ll find a bunch of them. Some are free. Some aren’t.

So now, instead of reading emails because they’re in my in-box, nagging me, I have to go to my RSS app and see what’s there. I don’t feel that I need to read everything. Sometimes I don’t have the time.

Connect with others

We are social animals. Getting support from others online is great. Spending time with friends is fantastic. It’s grounding.

You can start or join a book group. The other week I bumped into a woman in a bookshop who was looking for Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” — a book I love and have recommended to innumerable people. She needed one because she was joining a book group. That’s a great text to discuss because it’s short, informative, and practical.

You can also get together with others to plan resistance strategies from letter-writing to staging protests.

Remember there are more decent people who have empathy than evil people who lack it. There are more of us than there are of them.

Look for the helpers

Fred Rogers said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'”

Feeling alone is terrible. But we’re not alone. There are people who are working hard and who have our backs. Unions, the ACLU, and other organizations are launching lawsuits to restrain authorities from acting outside of what they’re legally allowed to do. There are journalists who are working tirelessly to uncover what’s happening. Find out who these people are. Watch what they’re doing. Let the positive be part of the news you’re consuming.

Be a helper

More than that, support organizations that are doing good. Find out how to donate to them. Mostly that information is right on their organizations’ home pages. By doing this you make yourself part of the news. You won’t be in the headlines, but few are. Most soldiers in Ukraine, who are fighting to preserve their democracy, their freedoms, their country, and their fellow citizens, are never going to be featured in newspapers or have Wikipedia pages. But what they’re doing is historic, and will be talked about centuries from now. Similarly, your much easier, much less risky contributions to support good organizations are part of history.

You can participate in non-violent action. My partner and I recently made a sign for a protest outside our state capital building (she attended — unfortunately I couldn’t). We have participated in boycotts of businesses whose politics we believe to be harmful. I look forward to more marches, demonstrations, pickets, and other displays of resistance.

Help make history. Be part of the news.

Find refuges

As you try to mindfully manage your news consumption, you will find yourself getting upset, angry, and fearful about things that are happening. That’s not a failure on your part. It’s just you having normal emotional reactions to very abnormal circumstances. You’re going to need to keep finding ways to bring yourself into balance.

Back to my friend who found that site-seeing and going on forest walks helped her to detox from the news; we can’t all do that, exactly, but we can look for other ways to turn our attention away to the news for long enough that our minds become calmer and bodies start to relax. I find I’m reading much more than I used to. I’m finding the physicality of real books, and the ability to immerse myself in the stories they contain.

Get out into nature. Make crafts. Meditate. Do things that keep you sane, and that you can connect with others over. As everything becomes more politicized, we need more things we can do that are not political.

Anyway, these are my suggestions for ways you can help keep yourself grounded. Give some thought to what might work for you.

Any other suggestions? Or examples of things you’ve been finding helpful? Please share them below.

Find peace with “Sitting With Bodhi”

February 11, 2025

Bodhipaksa

news

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.

Calmness as a revolutionary act

April 5, 2018

Bodhipaksa

on practice

I came across this extract from “Reasons to Stay Alive” by Matt Haig this morning. I thought it was worth sharing:

The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an antiaging moisturizer? You make someone worry about aging. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

Four cast-iron benefits of mindfulness

October 11, 2017

Bodhipaksa

on practice

Many thousands of studies demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness have now been published, to the point where mindfulness can almost seem like a miracle cure. The problem is that not all of these studies were conducted well enough to be taken seriously.

Daniel Goleman (author of “Emotional Intelligence”) and University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson combed through thousands of studies and found that only one percent of them match the current gold standards for medical research. While we could rightly despair at the poor methodology of the 99 percent, we could instead focus on the four strongly confirmed findings that Goleman and Davidson have identified in the studies conducted using the soundest protocols.

In an article in the Harvard Business Review Goleman outlined those four confirmed benefits, which are: stronger focus, staying calmer under stress, better memory, and kindness. No doubt because he was writing for HBR, Goleman wrote about mindfulness mainly in terms of a tool for creating better workers for corporations — for example parsing kindness as “good corporate citizenship.” So I’d like to take those four benefits and write about them in a less corporate way, looking at how they can benefit us spiritually.

Stronger focus

People who practice mindfulness regularly experience less mind-wandering and distractibility.

Why is this important, and how can it benefit you? Mindfulness improves our filters. It helps us to identify when the mind is wandering in ways that are unhelpful for us, and to bring our attention back to our present-moment experience. Much of the time when the mind is wandering it’s engaged in what the Buddhist meditation tradition calls the “five hindrances” — craving, getting angry, worrying, low energy states of avoidance, and doubting. These hindrances diminish our sense of well-being and cause toxic effects in our interpersonal relationships and in our lives generally.

Reduced mind-wandering goes hand-in-hand with improved executive function, or self-control. Neurologically, what is happening is that the brain’s prefrontal cortex is learning to regulate and damp down activity in the amygdala, which triggers disruptive emotions like anger or anxiety. When we are mindful it’s easier for us to avoid things like addictive activities and needless conflict because we’re able to monitor the mind, spot the early stages of these activities beginning to kick in, and choose other ways of being.

Mindfulness, in other words, gives us greater mental freedom, which in turn brings us greater happiness and more harmony in our lives.

Staying calmer under stress

Since the prefrontal cortex regulates the amygdala more effectively when we’re mindful, mindfulness reduces stress.

This tends to make for better decision-making. When the amygdala is firing strongly it suppresses activity in the prefrontal cortex, which means that we don’t think clearly and make bad decisions. We might, for example, feel panicky about opening bills, stash them out of sight, and thereby increase the number of problems we have. Mindfulness helps us to think more clearly.

Mindfulness also improves our inter-personal relationships. When the amygdala is over-active, it’s constantly looking for potential threats, for example by worrying that someone doesn’t like us or is intending to insult us. Rather than waste energy reacting to “threats” that may not even exist we can just get on with building productive, sustaining, and nourishing connections with others.

This in turn leads to us having a better support network, so that we’re better able to deal with other stresses in our lives.

Better memory

Those who practice mindfulness show a stronger short-term memory (or working memory). For example, the graduate school entrance exams of college students who were taught to be more mindful scores showed increases of 16 percent.

The purpose of working memory is to keep relevant information in conscious awareness while it’s needed. The better our working memory, the more information can be stored there without data loss. On a very practical level, with a poor working memory it’s hard to remember a seven digit phone number long enough to dial it — intrusive thoughts or the inability to screen out other information disrupt our ability to keep the number in mind. Things like performing mental arithmetic depend highly on working memory as well, which partly explains the 16 percent boost that mindful students saw on their Graduate Record Exam scores.

But the benefits of better working memory are more profound than that. An improved working memory allows us to keep ethical principles and guidelines in mind as we go about life. Often the problem with being mindful or kind is that we just forget. So we might have an intention to be less reactive with our spouse, children, or colleagues, but find that this intention fades from the mind in the midst of our interactions. This is a failure of memory, and comes about because we’re not able to consciously keep our long-term goals in mind (such as “be more kind”) while attending to short-term ones, such as responding to what someone just said.

When we’re working on becoming better people — kinder, more compassionate, more honest, more courageous — we need to be able to keep those long-term aims in mind. This is what Buddhist psychology calls “sampajañña” — or continuity of purpose. Long-term change is difficult without this quality.

Kindness

Goleman presents this in terms of mindful people making “good corporate citizens,” which is an angle that I find rather jarring — as if the point of mindfulness practice is to fit in so that we can make more money for corporations.

He does also point out that mindfulness practice leads to “more activity in brain circuits for caring, increased generosity, and a greater likelihood of helping someone in need.”

In other words, mindfulness makes us kinder and more compassionate. This has benefits that go well beyond making more money for businesses. It creates more harmonious families and communities, and helps people who are struggling. In short, mindfulness can help us create a better world — something that’s desperately needed in these challenging times.

The body-wide wave of breathing

October 4, 2017

Bodhipaksa

on practice

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When I’m teaching a refresher course on meditation, I’ll often ask people first of all just to meditate for a few minutes to arrive, paying attention to the breathing as they normally do. After letting them settle in to their meditation practice for a few minutes I’ll ask that they take one hand and — as they continue to pay attention to the breathing — “draw” in the air over the body the outline of whatever it is they identify as “the breathing.” You might want to try that right now, before reading further.

I wonder what kind of shape you drew on the body, and where? Most people end up inscribing a very small area. Sometimes they show that they are paying attention to a column of air moving up and down their airways. Most often they draw a small oval, perhaps the size of an open hand, in the center of their chest.

It seems that many people, when they hear the suggestion to observe “the breathing,” take this as a suggestion to observe “the breath.” But the breathing and the breath are two very different things. The breath is air (or the sensation of air) flowing in and out of the body. The breathing is all and any sensation connected, however indirectly, with the process of air flowing in and out of the body. This potentially includes sensations from the whole body, since indirect sensations connected with the process of breathing can be experienced even in the hands and feet. But it at least involves the whole of the trunk of the body: the front, sides, and back of the chest and abdomen, sensations on the skin that covers those parts of the body, the shoulders, the spine — and of course air flowing through our airways.

When we’re paying attention to the breathing in this more expensive way, the practice becomes much more interesting. Focusing on just a small area of the breathing just doesn’t give the mind enough to do, and because the mind doesn’t like being under-occupied it invents distractions for itself. When we pay attention to many different sensations the mind has plenty to do, is less likely to go wandering, and is more engaged and absorbed.

This absorption can go even deeper than simply noticing lots of different sensations. Once we open ourselves to noticing sensations of breathing over the entire body (or at least a large part of the body) we can notice how those sensations are connected with each other and move together.

After all, the breathing is one process. No matter which sensations we observe, they’re all part of a single wave of movement driven by the movements of the diaphragm. Air flowing in and out of the nostrils, the rise and fall of the shoulders, the ever-changing pattern of sensation where our clothing moves over our skin, the movements in the spine, and of course the movements of the rib cage and of muscles in the abdomen — all of these are part of a wave of sensation, surging back and forth through our entire being.

Paying attention to the breathing as a body-wide, dynamic, rhythmic flow is far more engaging than observing just one small area of the breathing, and even more fascinating than observing several sensations at the same time. It brings about a deep level of absorption in which we can be content, calm, and fully engaged with our sensory experience.

Relearning the art of stillness

December 19, 2016

Bodhipaksa

on practice

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Our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign is doing well. At the time of writing, with 23 days left to go we’re already 51% funded. The graphic below will give you a live update.

What’s it about? Glad you asked! To keep things simple, I’ve included below some information we sent out to our 17,652 subscribers in a special newsletter today. Please do read this important message!

***

Last week we launched a crowdfunding effort to help us bring you four highly effective meditations Bodhipaksa has developed over the years. What we’re suggesting is essentially that you buy our forthcoming CD (or the MP3 version of it), in advance, to help us cover the production costs. (Although there are other donation options as well.)

In Case You’re Not Sure, This Is What We Do

We do a lot. More than 1.5 million people visit our site each year. Our most popular web page (not counting the home page) has been read more than half a million times. Our most popular blog post has been read by more than three hundred thousand people. Hundreds of thousands of people have learned to meditate with us — for free. We also publish guided meditation CDs, which help fund our activities, and those have also reached hundreds of thousands of people.

And here’s how your support helps. The more CDs we publish, the more financially stable we are, the less time we have to spend worrying about money, and the more we’re able to provide resources to help you become happier in your life!

About the Meditations On This Album

These meditations have been road-tested with many, many people, who have found them to be powerfully transformative. Both those who have used them for their first ever meditation and those who have been meditating for years have expressed surprise and gratitude. Here are some comments we’ve received.

Kate, in Maine
That was astonishing. As a high-anxiety person, I stumbled on this while seeking help in focusing on tasks. Wow. I feel so peaceful and yet ready to tackle the tasks awaiting my attention. Thank you!

Jennifer, Colorado
This is a favorite. Bodhipaksa’s voice is very calming. I can definitely feel a positive difference in my body when I open up my awareness as suggested in this meditation.

Care, Seattle
Wow. This way of becoming present was new to me. It helped lift the weight from my heart. Thanks!

Ryan, Florida
Excellent. I’ve had trouble calming my thoughts while attempting meditation. When it was mentioned during this session I was surprised that my mind was already calm.

Gina, Florida
Very calming and effective in such a short amount of time.

Over his decades of teaching, Bodhipaksa has developed many different techniques that very rapidly and easily calm the mind, reducing the amount of intrusive thinking and creating a sense of peace and spaciousness. When we started to list all of these methods, we found there were almost 20! So we’re actually going to be bringing out a series of CDs (and MP3s, of course). Our next album, Guided Meditations for Inner Peace, is just the first. That’s what we’re raising funds for.

About Our Crowdfunding Campaign

Crowdfunding helps dreams become real. It helps creators share their vision with the public, who in turn can offer support, usually receiving “perks” in return. In our case the perks we offer include early access to these guided meditations (and optionally to alternate versions of them). Whatever level of contribution you choose, and whichever perk you select, if any, you’ll experience the good karma and warm glow that comes from supporting an organization that does a lot of good in the world.

We do hope you’ll support us, both by becoming a donor and by sharing our project with your friends and social media contacts. You can check out and support the Creating Inner Peace project at our Indiegogo page.

Thank you!
Mark, Mary, and Bodhipaksa at Wildmind

Create inner peace!

December 12, 2016

Bodhipaksa

on practice

“Just as the ocean may be turbulent above, but is always still in its depths, so beneath the surface noise of our thoughts there is always available a deep reserve of calm and tranquillity.” Bodhipaksa

Over my years of teaching and almost 35 years of practice, I’ve evolved a number of very effective meditation techniques for calming the mind. This album of four guided meditations (in CD and MP3 formats) contains the best tools I know of for creating inner peace.

To help us bring these teachings to the world, we’re asking that you help sponsor their production by purchasing the CD (or MP3s) in advance. Or you can simply make a donation. Head over to our Indiegogo page to support this effort!

These four meditations, born from over 30 years of practice and exploration, offer highly effective techniques for slowing down the mind, creating calmness, and bringing into being a more authentic, calm, and positive approach to living. We plan to publish them as “Guided Meditations for Inner Peace.”

Research shows that on average we’re caught up in distracted thinking 48 percent of the time, and often much more than that. Research also shows that our distracted thinking causes unhappiness. These distractions are often driven by anxiety, irritability, and self-doubt, which undermine our well-being and lead to stress and depression.

Mindful attention, on the other hand, brings freedom from the tyranny of compulsive thinking and allows us to have a deeper, richer, and more joyful experience of life.

You can purchase the album (plus or minus some enhancements!) in advance, or make a donation, if you wish. Plus we have some other great perks! Click here to check our our Indiegogo crowdfunding page!

Also do watch our video, “Create Inner Peace.”

The most important thing right now, is right now

October 18, 2016

Bodhipaksa

on practice

The problem with distractions is that they’re compelling. They make us think that they’re important. They draw us into their stories. It’s as if they’re saying, “This is what you need to be thinking about right now.”

And so, over and over, we end up immersed in stories driven by anxiety, anger, desire, and self-doubt.

These distractions come from relatively primitive parts of our programming, which evolved as protective mechanisms. As mammals who suffered from predation, we needed to be anxious and alert for potential physical threats to our wellbeing. When such threats became actual—a stranger approaching our camp, for example—we might respond with displays of anger in order to invoke respect or fear in the other party. Living in an environment where resources were scarce, our sensory desires motivated us to seek and hold on to food and other essentials. Self-doubt promoted caution, so that we didn’t recklessly put ourselves in danger, and also helped us fit into a hierarchical social group where not everyone could be the leader.

Also see:

Although we still do face threats, uncertainties, scarcity, and so on, for the most part the kinds of mental states I’ve been describing don’t really help us in modern life. In fact they hinder us in many ways, and rather than protect us they mostly cause us to suffer. The circuitry in our brains connected with these states is still there and keeps looking for things to get anxious, angry, greedy, or doubtful about. Sometimes that circuitry gets out of control and has a destructive effect on our lives, as with stress, social anxiety, and depression.

Even outside of pathological conditions, though, these mental states diminish our wellbeing. We’re always happier when we’re mindfully attentive to whatever we’re doing, even if it’s just our breathing, than when the mind is off wandering.

The thing, then, is how do we convince ourselves that our distractions are not actually important for our happiness, and that mindfulness is what’s truly important?

The Buddhist tradition offers lots of ways to do this, including reflecting on the drawbacks of our distractions (“Anxiety doesn’t solve my problems, it just makes it harder to tackle them”). But one of my favorite approaches is to drop in a gentle reminder that it’s valuable to disengage from distracted thinking—that it’s important to be mindful.

In the past I’ve used the phrase “But right now … right now.” I’ve also used “It can wait.” I’ve found them both to be very useful.

My current phrase is, “The most important thing right now, is right now.” This is a simple reminder of priorities. In a sense there’s nothing “wrong” with anxiety, doubt, and so on. Having those things show up isn’t a sign of failure. It’s not a weakness. It’s not a sign that you’re a bad person. They’re simply part of your old programming, and tend not to make you happy or bring you a sense of contentment. Instead, they stir us up emotionally and create worlds of pain. What is a higher priority, what is important for us to do, is to be mindful of our present-moment experience.

The second “right now” in “The most important thing right now, is right now” is pointing to everything that’s arising in our direct sensory experience. Sounds, light, the body, our feelings are all arising right now. Paying attention to those in a mindful way allows the mind to calm, our body to let go of tensions, and our emotions to come to rest in a sense of contentment, or even joy.

This “mantra” suggests exploration. What is “right now?” That’s for us to find out, through mindful exploration.

So as you find yourself coming out of a period of distracted thinking in your meditation, and re-emerging in a more mindful state, try dropping in the phrase “The most important thing right now, is right now,” and let it direct your attention to what’s truly important, which is your immediate sensory reality.

One student, Zia, wrote to me to let me know how the words had changed as she practiced with them:

Over several days, the reminder “The most important thing right now, is right now” has morphed in my mind into “All that matters right now is right now”. At some times, it further morphs into “ALL that matters right now is right now”. The capital “ALL” brings more of a sense of the vastness, the divinity, that is contained in the present moment and that becomes more accessible through attention.

This is a beautiful reminder that we can treat phrases like these as living things that you’re inviting to share your life, rather than objects that you keep around. Let them adapt, grow, and evolve.

The best way to calm your thoughts is to give them plenty of space

August 29, 2016

Bodhipaksa

on practice

The ancient Romans had a special punishment for those guilty of parricide, which involved sewing the guilty party into a leather sack and tossing him into a river or the ocean. This, according to Cicero, symbolized how the heinousness of the offender’s crime sundered him from the realm of natural law.

This punishment evolved over time, with the addition to the sack of animals such as a viper and a dog. Eventually four animals were used, and this became the classical form of this punishment, which was known as the poena cullei.

It’s hard to imagine how horrible this would have been. Suffocating would be awful enough, but throughout the ordeal you’d have two terrified animals working themselves into a panicked rage as they clawed and bit each other, as well as you.

This image came to mind last week when I was at a meditation class and people were talking about trying to manage the restless thoughts that intruded into the meditation practice. People mentioned various ways that they try to calm their thoughts, such setting an intention to stay focused on the breathing. But it struck me that this is a bit like trying to calm down a dog and snake that are tied in a sack with you.

It’s difficult to calm your thoughts when you feel trapped with them in what feels like a confined space.

What I find works best for calming thoughts is to develop a sense of spaciousness. This is akin to opening the sack and setting the dog, the snake, and yourself free in a large meadow. You’re all still together. But there’s less pressure, less fear, and therefore more calmness and ease.

What does this mean, to develop a sense of spaciousness?

Although beginners to meditation often think about noises as being distractions, these sounds are simply sensations that we can be mindful of. In other words, rather than being distractions from meditation, sounds are opportunities to practice meditation.

So, right now, try being aware of the sounds around you. (You might want to close your eyes.)

As you pay attention mindfully to these sounds, notice how they are inherently spacious. The sounds you hear may come from several yards away, or even from miles away. This is a much larger space than the tiny “leather sack” of your head, where you may often feel you are suffocating with your thoughts.

As you’re mindfully paying attention to the sound and space surrounding you, notice what’s been happening with your thoughts. They will probably still be there, but it’s likely that they’re no longer bothering you. The snake and dog of your thoughts are off doing their respective things, and aren’t causing a disturbance.

Now, let your attention narrow again until it’s inside your skull, and you’re focusing on your thoughts. How does this feel? Does it feel constricted, tight, and unpleasant?

Broaden your awareness to the sound and space around you once again, and notice how that feels. Perhaps it’s more relaxed, calm, and easeful?

Try alternating in this way a few more times, to reinforce the fact that whether you let your awareness be expansive or contacted is a choice. Also, you can reinforce that an expansive and calm awareness, even if it’s unfamiliar to you, is someplace you can feel at home.

Trying to negotiate with our thoughts can sometimes work, but often it’s as futile as trying to calm trapped and panicky animals. It’s better broaden your attention—to open up the leather sack—and to let your thoughts exist in a spacious field of awareness, where they will naturally and spontaneously find peace and calm.