News from Wildmind

It’s been a while since we brought you news from Wildmind, Triratna’s US-based on-line meditation teaching website. They’ve been busy, and alongside their regular courses and newsletters, have no less than three books in the pipeline.

The first, already out, is their first audio book, entitled ‘Sacred Sound: Mantra Meditations for Centeredness and Inspiration’.

By Bodhipaksa and Sunada, Wildmind’s principle teachers, it’s a complete guide to mantra meditation, including:

• The "magical" background and history of mantras
• How mantras can help us develop centeredness and inspiration
• Preparatory exercises to open the body and free the breath
• Seven mantras chanted for listening and learning
• The meaning and symbolism of each of the seven mantras
• A print-friendly companion guide with images, pronunciation key, and musical notations

You can listen to a free five-minute sampler of the content (which runs to over two hours) by clicking here - Five minute sample of Sacred Sound - and there’s even a Companion Guide to the audiobook, available as a free PDF download.

Next up is the second edition of Bodhipaksa’s much-loved book, Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation, due out in July (August in the US). He says “Meditation helps us to cut through the agonizing clutter of superficial mental turmoil and allows us to experience more spacious and joyful states of mind. It is this pure and luminous state that I call your Wildmind.”

Last but not least is ‘Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change’, a major new work from Bodhipaksa and probably Triratna’s first to explore the implications of the Buddhist Six Element Practice. He writes -
“I wrote Living as a River because I’m fascinated by the Buddhist Six Element Practice, and I wanted to communicate my explorations. But my book isn’t really about the Six Element Practice, which is really just the framework for the explorations it contains.

“The Six Element Practice is a way of exploring the nature of the self, and how we cling onto notions of what we are. It’s a way of letting go of our clinging so that we can, eventually, lose our clinging and find freedom. But that’s not an very adequate description of the book either.

“But those are the kind of descriptions I keep giving people. I just couldn’t think of a pithy way of expressing what the book was about that wasn’t too narrow or long-winded. I needed to find a “pitch.”

“A couple of days my last flailing attempt to describe my book, it finally came to be how I could describe the book in just two words: “Embracing change.” So that’s what the book’s about. It uses the structure of the Six Element meditation in order to face up to the reality of change, and to help us let go of clinging so that we can embrace change”.

‘Living as a River is due out on October 1st this year. You can follow its progress on Facebook www.facebook.com/livingriver, where it’s already clocked up nearly 1,000 fans!

There’s too much new on the site to do it justice in a single post - tomorrow we’ll feature a few more of its highlights...