Buddhist Centre Features

#EthicalChristmas: Wildmind - An Online Meditation Center, And More!

On Thu, 4 December, 2014 - 15:01
Centre Team's picture
Centre Team
Wildmind is an online meditation center, a blog, an online meditation supplies store, and a publisher of guided meditation CDs.

These varied activities are run by a small team of three people working from an office in a former cotton mill on the Lamprey River in Newmarket, New Hampshire, just down the road from Aryaloka Buddhist Center.

As an online meditation center, Wildmind has a global, reach. In the past twelve months Wildmind’s website, which offers structured guides to meditation as well as a constant stream of news, reviews, and articles on various aspects of practice, has had visitors from every single country in the world, with the exception of Western Sahara.

The website is visited by one and a half million people per year, making Wildmind Triratna’s busiest center! The two most popular blog articles, both written by Bodhipaksa, have each been read by over a quarter of a million people, which probably makes Bodhipaksa Triratna’s most widely read author.

Wildmind sprang to life in 2001, as a project that Bodhipaksa started while completing Master’s degree in Buddhism and Business at the University of Montana. At first the site offered structured guides to the mindfulness of breathing, development of lovingkindness, and walking meditation practices, using a combination of text and audio. Within a year, Wildmind had started offering online meditation courses, and shortly after had branched into publishing guided meditation CDs. Because these CDs were being sold through the site, it made sense to sell other meditation items as well, leading to Wildmind having a fully fledged meditation supplies store, which retails locally made meditation cushions and fair-trade craft items from across the globe.

Wildmind has been through cycles of growth and contraction in its 13 years of existence. Weathering the recession that began in 2008 (and which doesn’t appear to have entirely ended yet) was a major challenge, but Bodhipaksa decided that growth was the best strategy. At the end of 2013 Mark Tillotson joined Bodhipaksa and Shantikirika (who has since been replaced by Amy Kosh) so that Bodhipaksa could devote more time to teaching and writing. Mark’s addition was instrumental in allowing Wildmind to set up a program of eight free meditation events in 2014, from 28 to 100 days in length, called “A Year of Going Deeper.” Each of the events attracted over 1,200 participants.

Wildmind is running an expanded series of thirteen meditation events in 2015, all of which are by donation. The material that Bodhipaksa wrote for these events last year will be appearing in book form next year in Wildmind’s newest venture — becoming a book publisher.

Join the Wildmind Year Of Going Deeper 2015

#ethicalchristmas articles from Wildmind
Wildmind: The Evolution of Dana-Based Online Teaching
Wildmind - The Accidental Publisher

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Responses

Sapree's picture
loved the new meditation journey of 2015 .I signed up for it.see you there.luv ya.