About Us
How Being Mindful Stories began
In 2014 I shut down my startup and started working for Sportskeeda and Langoor. The same year I did a Vipassana retreat. Afterward I wanted something worth hearing during my cab rides, and I found Ajahn Brahm. He talks about mindfulness and Buddhist philosophy through short stories, and those stories stayed with me. I read his story collections and kept listening to his talks for three to four years. Stories became my favorite way to learn.
In 2020 the pandemic left many people anxious and negative. I started sending one wisdom story a day in a WhatsApp group. More than 200 people joined, and they looked forward to each new story. I chose each one with care, including Ajahn Brahm's gentle ones about monks and mosquitoes, and I noted why it mattered at the moment. After the pandemic, the searching, listening, and tagging took more focus and patience than I had. I stopped.
On November 8, 2026, I started again, this time with a team of AI agents doing the searching, listening, and tagging.
Why stories
Stories change more minds than facts. James Clear put it this way: you change a mind with overwhelming emotion, not overwhelming evidence. I wrote about this in 2019 in a post titled “Stories are the programming language of the mind”.
Stories do three jobs a list of facts does not.
They make a message easy to absorb. A story wraps the core message in a context, so you see how it applies to a life like yours. Spiritual teachers across traditions have taught this way for generations.
They travel. People retell a good story and carry its message past the first audience. Take the legend of MTR, the Bangalore restaurant. As the story goes, the government capped food prices during the Emergency, and MTR's founder refused to serve lower quality food. He closed the restaurant for a few months and kept his staff busy by developing a ready-to-use rava idli mix. People still tell it more than 40 years later. The fact is “MTR would not compromise on quality.” The story turned the fact into a legend.
They build connection and culture. A story makes you feel something for a person in a way a summary does not. Companies use this to pass on values. Tally wanted every employee to follow one rule: charge customers only when you add value to their business. Stating the rule did less than one story did. A friend told me about a Hyderabad businessman who renewed his Tally license and then lost his goods in a godown fire. The Tally representative refunded the fee, because a man with no business had no use for the software. Employees repeat that story, and it teaches the rule.
Why this website exists
A story helps most when it reaches you at the right moment. A story about patience matters when you are waiting on bad news. A story about letting go matters after a loss. Most story collections ask you to browse and hope. Being Mindful Stories works the other way. You describe the situation you are in, and the site shows you a story from a teacher who spoke to it.
Every story carries credit to the teacher and a link to the original talk. You hear the full talk in the teacher's own voice, and the teacher keeps the audience.
What's here so far
Most of the stories so far come from Ajahn Brahm. We are working our way through all the talks the Buddhist Society of Western Australia (BSWA) has posted over the years, and stories from Ajahn Chah and Thich Nhat Hanh will follow.
How the library is built
AI agents went through every talk on Ajahn Brahm's official Buddhist Society of Western Australia YouTube channels, 1,894 in all, and pulled full transcripts for the 1,857 that have them. They now work through those transcripts talk by talk, starting with the most viewed. For each talk they extract every complete story in Ajahn Brahm's own telling, record the context in which he told it, and note why it works. When he tells the same story in several talks, the agents merge the tellings into one story and keep every source. So far they have mined 313 talks and found 1,166 unique stories, and the site adds newly mined stories every evening. Collections of stories from Ajahn Chah and Thich Nhat Hanh are under way. My hands-on time so far is two to three hours. A person doing this work properly would need weeks.
The stories were always available. Human bandwidth limited how many I could find, filter, and deliver at the right moment. This limit is gone.
If you like this project, email me at avinashmkb78 (at) gmail.com, or support Being Mindful Stories on Patreon. Feel free to use the stories as you see fit.