Why Unfettered Mind?

Buddhas and bodhisattvas, 
Wherever you may be,
Please help me to find a way.

Responses to this prayer are countless. The purpose of Unfettered Mind is to be one of them. 

To this end, Unfettered Mind offers a library of resources for Buddhist practice drawn from Ken McLeod’s understanding and experience of Tibetan Buddhism. These materials are intended for those who are looking for: 

  • a way to deepen their experience and understanding of Buddhist practice,
  • a way to meet challenges, answer questions, or assimilate understandings that have arisen in the course of their practice,
  • a way to live their practice more fully in their lives, and/or 
  • a way to recover from a difficulty or a mistake in their practice.

The books, writings, translations, and podcasts available through Unfettered Mind cover the whole range of practice — from the cultivation of stable attention to the direct awareness of mahamudra and dzogchen, from how to live in attention as you go about your life to a non-referential compassion that informs everything you do in your life. 

To put it another way, the purpose of Unfettered Mind is to offer materials that help you to make your life a living practice of the fundamental principles of Buddhism: ethics, attention, and wisdom.

Living Practice

Living Practice at Unfettered Mind is about building a life of practice:

  • Developing the necessary skills and abilities, 
  • Instilling, uncovering, or opening to deeper understandings, and 
  • Living that is based in and the expression of the practice of ethics, attention, and wisdom.

Living Practice is about the tools, understandings, and experience you need to meet the challenges you may face in your spiritual journey and in your life. It does not mean merely using Buddhist perspectives and methods to resolve problems in your life. While one of the effects of practice may be the resolution of various problems, another effect may be the compounding of such problems to the point that you have to make radical changes in your life. One aim of living practice is to provide you with ways to develop the skills and capabilities you need to meet such challenges.

Living Practice is grounded in the bodhisattva vow. As it is presented in The Diamond Sutra, the bodhisattva vow is the intention to free beings from the vicissitudes of samsara without ever conceiving them as beings. Compared to how compassion is usually understood, this is a compassion of a completely different order — the union of compassion and emptiness.

Living Practice is based in traditional Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings and their time-tested methods of practice that include: 

  • The development of stable attention, insight, and the uncovering of direct awareness; 
  • Mahayana mind-training including loving kindness, compassion, taking and sending (tonglen), the six perfections including the perfection of wisdom, and the Great Middle Way;
  • Vajrayana practice, including teacher union, deity creation and completion, energy transformation, and protector practice.

Living Practice is resourceful and practical. Its motto might be “We don’t do what we know does not work.” In every generation, teachers have enhanced, combined, and distilled the practices they received to meet the particular situations of the times. The willingness to be creative and innovative applies not only to methods or practice, but also to the translation of texts, the integration of prayer and meditation, how students and teachers meet to talk about practice experience, the formats of retreats, and the forms of the rituals and ceremonies that support practice.

Living Practice understands the value of peer learning and encourages practitioners to form practice groups. Ideally, practice groups meet regularly, practice together, and provide the opportunity to discuss practice questions with like-minded companions. The Unfettered Mind resource library includes some recommendations for how to form and maintain such practice groups.

Founder

Born in England and raised in Ontario, Canada, Ken McLeod began his spiritual journey in 1969 after completing a degree in mathematics. He traveled to India, where he met his principal teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, a senior meditation master in the Karma Kagyu tradition and the lineage holder of  the Shangpa tradition. Under Kalu Rinpoche’s guidance, Ken completed two traditional three-year retreats, immersing himself in Buddhist philosophy and meditation. His rigorous training together with his experience as a translator for his teacher established a strong foundation for his later work.

In 1985, Ken was appointed as the resident teacher at Kalu Rinpoche’s center in Los Angeles, becoming one of the few Westerners fully authorized to teach in this tradition. Recognizing the challenges Western students faced with traditional Tibetan Buddhist practices, Ken founded Unfettered Mind in 1990. Although his approach integrates Western psychological insights with traditional Buddhist methods, it has consistently emphasized direct experience and daily practice over conceptual understanding and psychological theory. MORE

Unfettered Mind: yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Yesterday

Unfettered Mind was created in the summer of 1990, a non-profit religious organization through which Ken McLeod taught and guided students in their spiritual journey. The name comes from the book Unfettered Mind, William Scott Wilson’s translation of letters from Zen Master Takuan Soho to sword masters. 

With Unfettered Mind Ken sought to make possible informal meetings between individual students and their teacher to discuss matters related to practice while avoiding both the hierarchical structure of many Asian traditions and the congregational model of many Western Dharma centers. After he presented his model of one-on-one consultations at a Buddhist teachers conference in 1996, it quickly spread in both North America and Europe. Ken also taught numerous small meditation groups on specific topics, developing the material that would later become the book Wake Up to Your Life.

In 2001, Unfettered Mind entered a new phase with the podcast publication of Ken’s class and retreat interactions with students. This decade also saw the publication of Ken’s encyclopedic meditation manual Wake Up to Your Life and An Arrow to the Heart, his avant-garde commentary on the Heart Sutra. In 2008, after teaching two retreats in New Mexico, Ken started to wind down his teaching, and stopped completely in 2012.

Today

Since 2009, volunteers have been transcribing Ken’s classes and retreats for publication on this website. Unfettered Mind also distributes a regular newsletter, each of which includes a tip for some aspect of formal or living practice. The work of transcription will continue for some time and the practice tips from 2004 to 2023 have been collected and will soon be published in a four-volume set under the title There is No Enemy. Unfettered Mind continues to support Ken’s writings, which include his practice trilogy Reflections on Silver River, The Magic of Vajrayana, and A Trackless Path. Ken is currently working on a translation and commentary for The Diamond Sutra.

Tomorrow

Ken’s work, whether in teaching, translating, or writing, has always been about helping people to find their way in practice — finding their way through the cultural differences, through the demands, challenges, and distractions of contemporary Western culture, and through the reactive and confusing internal material that all of us bring to spiritual practice. Because Ken plans to step down from his roles as executive director and primary teacher, Unfettered Mind is transforming itself into an organization that will continue to do what he has always sought to do, namely, helping people find their way in practice.