People ask me what I do and I never know how to answer. Usually I say I just remind people to try to be. The rest of this is helping other people learn to share that.
Sean Fargo, Founder
Our mission
My mission is to make mindfulness and meditation teaching simple and effective and accessible to anyone who wants to help others.
Mindfulness isn’t complicated. It’s paying attention to what’s going on, whether we like it or not, with a little kindness toward it. It isn’t religious, either. I was a monk for two years, and I don’t think I’ve ever really considered myself Buddhist. We aren’t teaching anyone how to get enlightened. We’re teaching people how to be with their moment-to-moment experience, and I don’t think you need ten years of hardcore training to do that.
We all need a little help with this. No one is mindful all of the time, and I’m no exception. I can offer a few things that may be helpful, and I’m practicing alongside you. When I guide a meditation I say “the body” rather than “your body,” because I’m in it with you.
None of this is really about me, or even about mindfulness. It’s about the struggles people bring to it, and whether something here helps.
How this started
Before any of this I was working a job on the other side of the world, seven days a week, burned out, doing something that didn’t fully align with my values. Meditation helped me find some okayness with just being, so I kept going. I ordained as a monk, in Thailand and then in Northern California. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I left after two years.
I spent the next five years at Spirit Rock Meditation Center working with Jack Kornfield, who is still my favorite teacher. Every few months he’d hand me the money from one of his classes and ask me to deliver it to the local food bank. He rarely announced it. I said yes to almost everything then: prisons, including San Quentin, nonprofits, kids, companies. I became an instructor for the mindfulness program born at Google.
I bought the domain mindfulnessexercises.com thinking it would just be a website with free talks and meditations, a more secular version of Dharma Seed. Dharma Seed said sure, use our content. So I did that, for free. The scripts came later because I needed them myself, teaching for a healthcare company, and it seemed useful to make a bunch and share them. The teacher training came because the ones I knew of cost thousands and required weeks of retreats, and I thought, I guess I could create something like that.
What’s here, and what it costs
There are more than 3,000 free guided meditations, scripts, worksheets, talks, and courses here, including, as far as I know, the only place you can take the Search Inside Yourself course for free. I make sure some of this is always free; I don’t think money should be a barrier to it. Think of it as a library, not a to-do list, and take whatever happens to be useful.
