Stephan Bodian
Stephan Bodian offers webinars, retreats, videos, books, and spiritual counselling that make profound spiritual teachings and practices accessible to a global audience. His ground-breaking guidebook Meditation for Dummies helped bring mindfulness to the mainstream, and his book Wake Up Now provides a detailed road map to the journey of spiritual awakening. Since 2007 he has been leading an annual, months-long intensive program in spiritual transformation known as the School for Awakening.
Stephan is a licensed psychotherapist as well as a spiritual teacher, and he has been a pioneer in the integration of Eastern wisdom and Western psychology and in the embodiment of awakened awareness in everyday life. His approach to teaching and counselling 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 studied intensively with great masters in the nondual wisdom traditions of Zen, Dzogchen-Mahamudra, and Advaita Vedanta. He began his practice with Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and received ordination as a monk in 1974. After leaving the monastic life in the early ‘80s, he spent a decade as a student of Advaita master Jean Klein and in 2001, after several years of intensive study, received Dharma transmission (authorization to teach) from 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 annual Science and Nonduality Conference.
Before becoming a therapist and teacher, Stephan worked for 10 years as editor-in-chief of the magazine Yoga Journal, and his articles on meditation, spirituality, and health have appeared in Fitness, Cooking Light, Tricycle, Natural Solutions, and, of course, Yoga Journal. 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, cautions that the increasing popularity of the practice of mindfulness may actually take us away from our natural state of inherent wakefulness and peace. Instead, 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. His other books include Timeless Visions, Healing Voices; Everyday Mindfulness; and Buddhism for Dummies.
