About Stephan Bodian
Stephan offers webinars, retreats, videos, books, and spiritual counseling that make profound spiritual teachings and practices accessible to a global audience. He studied and practiced for many years with great masters in the nondual wisdom traditions of Zen, Dzogchen-Mahamudra, and Advaita Vedanta, and in 2001 he received Dharma transmission (authorization to teach) from Adyashanti.
His ground-breaking guidebook Meditation for Dummies, which has sold nearly a half million copies in a half dozen languages since its initial publication in 1998, helped bring mindfulness to the mainstream. More recently, his book Wake Up Now was one of the first to offer a detailed road map to the journey of spiritual awakening. Since 2007 he has led an annual, months-long intensive program in spiritual transformation known as the School for Awakening.
Stephan is trained as a psychotherapist as well as being a spiritual teacher, and he has been a pioneer in the integration of nondual wisdom and Western psychology and in the embodiment of awakened awareness in everyday life. His approach to teaching and counseling blends compassionate self-inquiry, nondual insight, and transformational techniques from the field of psychotherapy. Drawing on his decades of experience as a therapist and teacher, he specializes in offering guidance that’s custom tailored to the needs of the individual seeker.
Stephan began his spiritual journey with Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and received ordination as a monk in 1974 from Kobun Chino. After leaving the monastic life in the early ‘80s, he spent a decade as a student of Advaita master Jean Klein, and after Jean’s death in 1998 he spent several years in intimate study with Adyashanti.
He has taught at major retreat centers in North American, including Omega, Hollyhock, Kripalu, The Crossings Austin, and Garrison Institute, and he has presented regularly at the Science and Nonduality Conference, in both the US and Italy.
Before becoming a therapist and teacher, Stephan spent 10 years as editor-in-chief of the magazine Yoga Journal, and his articles on meditation, spirituality, and health have appeared in various national magazines. He has a degree in English literature from Columbia University in New York and did graduate work at Stanford.
Stephan's most recent book, Beyond Mindfulness, acknowledges the many benefits of mindfulness but cautions that this increasingly popular practice may actually take us away from our natural state of inherent wakefulness and peace. For those seeking to go “beyond mindfulness,” the book offers a more “direct approach” to self-realization that bypasses deliberate practices and points directly to our very own awakened awareness, which is always already present.
He’s also a core contributor to the Waking Up app and podcast with Sam Harris, which features 20 of his guided meditations in the “direct approach.” His other books include Timeless Visions, Healing Voices; Everyday Mindfulness; and Buddhism for Dummies (with Jon Landaw).
Dear Friends,
Thank you for your interest in my work. The informational bio you’ve just read summarizes what I’ve studied, realized, and offered over the years, and what I offer now.
At a more personal level, I have found the process of realizing and embodying the truth of our nondual spiritual nature to be an ongoing journey of opening, deepening, clarifying, and living from moment to moment. There simply is no endpoint—awakening is very much a verb, not a noun. The fundamental love and truth we awaken to does not change, but our relationship to it, our appreciation of it, and our capacity to express it, does indeed unfold and reveal itself over time.
I feel deeply grateful for the teachers I’ve had over the years, especially Jean Klein and Adyashanti, and for the opportunity I’ve been given in this lifetime to explore the endless subtleties and paradoxes of the sacred mystery as it manifests itself in this precious human life. I invite you to join me in this endless revelation.
WIth love and blessings,
Stephan