On Christmas Eve of 1992, Puddicombe was eighteen*, and studying sports science at De Montfort University, when he left a party with a group of friends. A drunk driver plowed into the crowd, killing several people and putting twelve others in intensive care. Puddicombe wasn’t hurt, but he witnessed everything. Soon afterward, his stepsister died in a bicycling accident. He couldn’t shake the tragedies. “They lurked in the mind,” he told me. Back at school, sports no longer interested him; neither did partying. One day, in his dorm room, Puddicombe had a strange experience. “It’s a very difficult thing to put into words,” he told me. “I felt—the only way I can say it is ‘deeply moved.’ ” The feeling lasted for several hours, Puddicombe said. When it ended, he knew what to do with his life: become a Buddhist monk. “It didn’t feel like a choice,” he said.

Puddicombe left college and, for the next ten years, lived in Buddhist monasteries. He started out in Nepal and India, and made his way to a monastery in Burma, where he became a novice monk in the Theravadan tradition, which is “quite strict,” he said. His first retreat involved nine hours of walking meditation and nine hours of sitting meditation every day. His teacher was a Burmese monk who spoke no English, and Puddicombe didn’t speak Burmese, but they met for daily check-ins. “Some days he’d smile, and I’d smile back. Sometimes my face would be drawn, like, Meditation. And he’d nod.”

On a trip back to England, Puddicombe visited Samyeling, a Tibetan monastery in Scotland, where he met Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche, a bearded, stout Tibetan with a bright personality. “He was almost mischievous,” Puddicombe said. Yeshe had spent twelve years in retreat and was known for his zealous commitment to meditation. “He was inspired by the great yogis in Tibet,” Puddicombe said. Chief among them was Milarepa—a tenth-century aristocrat who began meditating so that he could learn sorcery, to get back at his neighbors. He ended up going down a contemplative rabbit hole, dedicating his life to meditation, writing poetry, and living in a cave.

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In 2001, Puddicombe did a year-long cloistered retreat at Samyeling, which included four-hour meditation sessions, four times a day. He discovered a new feeling. “The only way I can describe it is as a subtlety of mind,” he said. He experienced “a dissolution of self and other, where I no longer felt so separate from the world.” It took about two years for the experience to “settle,” but when it did, Puddicombe said, he was a different person. “I found I was no longer searching for anything,” he told me. He was thirty years old.

Headspace recently set up its headquarters in Venice Beach, Los Angeles—around the corner from Google’s offices and the wellness mecca Moon Juice. When I visited, on a seventy-degree day this winter, I wondered briefly if I’d arrived in Nirvana. Puddicombe walks to work, at an indoor-outdoor space that’s filled with relaxed Millennials, typing on laptops. He is married to a British woman named Lucinda, who is an exercise physiologist, and they recently had a baby. His days are spent writing a book about mindful pregnancy—users requested it—and teaching meditation, alone in a recording booth.

Among a certain set, Puddicombe is a celebrity—although what people tend to recognize is his voice. When I met him for lunch, at a Venice café, I noticed that the couple at the next table kept staring at us. Finally, the man said, “Excuse me—are you Andy?” He turned out to be a Headspace devotee; he had once worked as a derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs, and had recently retired. “I wish I’d found this stuff when I was younger. Maybe I’d still be working.” He said that meditation had eased his anxiety. “You know how you can spiral on things and keep repeating things? It’s very helpful with that.”

Puddicombe smiled. “I love hearing how people are using it,” he said.

The man muttered, dreamily, “It’s so surreal to hear your voice.”

The next morning, at eight-thirty, Puddicombe picked me up, along with Rich Pierson, his business partner, a thirty-four-year-old British man, who wore sneakers and shorts. They’d wanted to take me surfing; according to Puddicombe, the sport is one reason that Headspace is based in California. After years of sitting, he was eager to move around again. The partners now discuss company issues during surf sessions every morning, off Santa Monica Beach. (After meditating, of course. Puddicombe meditates for about an hour, using a combination of “visualization and awareness techniques” that he learned at the monastery, and vowed to practice every day for the rest of his life.) It had rained, however, and the water was too polluted for surfing, so, to my secret relief, we went on a hike instead. On the Los Leones trail, Puddicombe set off bouncily through the brush. He took a mindful breath and said, “The air is so lovely and clear after the rain!”

Headspace was created in London. Puddicombe, who in 2004 had handed in his monk’s robes, was working at a medical clinic, teaching meditation to patients who were being treated for such problems as high blood pressure and insomnia. The clinic was situated in the City, and the financial crisis was in full swing, so many of his patients were stressed-out bankers. He shrank his monastic teachings to fit a ten-week meditation course. The bankers could be a tough audience, and Puddicombe soon realized that, if he wanted to engage them, he’d have to make some changes. He translated Sanskrit and Tibetan terms into English, and eliminated some of the trippier exercises, like “visualizing bright white lights,” he said. “It gets into a space, for some people, where it feels a bit frightening.” In the monastery, an hour of meditation was considered a brief session, but that didn’t fly with Puddicombe’s clients. “I realized early on that it had to feel manageable,” he said. He set about condensing the exercises into short chunks: twenty or even ten minutes. It worked—perhaps too well. By the end of the course, several traders had quit their jobs, one to start a landscaping business, another to open a yoga studio.

Pierson was one of his students. When he came to see Puddicombe, he was a young director at BBH, a corporate ad firm, with an anxiety problem. He took to meditation right away. “It sounds glib, but it did change my life pretty quickly,” Pierson said. Before long, he, too, had quit his job, and he and Puddicombe went into business together, borrowing fifty thousand dollars from Pierson’s father. Pierson recalled, “He said he thought it was the worst business idea he had heard, but he believed if anyone could do it Andy and I could.” (Apart from Headspace employees, the two men, and their friends and family, are the only owners of the business.)

Pierson brings out the non-monk side of Puddicombe. They call each other old nicknames, Richie and Pudsy, or just “mate.” “We have similar types of friends,” Pierson said. “They’re, like, blokes.” He argued that this background—blokedom—had prepared them for one of Headspace’s challenges: marketing meditation to men. Pierson said that many males are closet meditators. “The beauty of having an app is that I can do it anywhere, and I don’t have to tell anyone about it.” He talked about the social isolation he’d experienced after “coming out” as a meditation enthusiast. Puddicombe snorted. “Try talking to your mates in a pub when you’re wearing a skirt,” he said.

By now, we were high on the mountain trail. We stopped to look out at the ocean, which was rough after the storm. Puddicombe salivated over the waves. “That’s some corduroy,” he said to Pierson. “Look at it peeling!”

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I asked if it was possible to be a mindful surfing addict. “I think surfing lends itself particularly well to being present,” Puddicombe said. He thought some more. “And there’s an analogy for life. Sometimes there will be waves, you know? Sometimes just little ones, sometimes big and exciting ones, sometimes really big, terrifying ones.” But, he added, we can’t live for waves alone. “A lot of life, actually, is spent just being in the water.” Puddicombe is full of these kinds of insights and analogies, which, though earnestly delivered, have a way of sounding as if they were lifted from a decorative pillow. I mentioned this, as delicately as possible. Puddicombe sighed. “I know,” he said. “It can sound incredibly trite. Be present, let go, don’t judge. Without the experience”—of meditation—“they’re kind of meaningless.”