Im meeting Andy Puddicombe for the first time at his airy offices just off the beach in Venice, California. And its weird. Not because the cofounder of the meditation platform Headspace is forbidding. Just the opposite: Puddicombe, from Bristol in the U.K., gives off a cheery, affable vibe, like a guy youd amiably argue football with over a couple of pints. No, the weirdness is because hes been inside my head for three years, murmuring through my headphones and desktop speakers, calmly leading me through the daily exercises that are the heart of Headspace, Puddicombe's startup devoted to creating a larger platform for mindfulness principles. Ours has been a relationship mediated by technology, sure. But its also been an oddly intimate one. And here he is in the flesh. Its a little jarring. "You must get this a lot," I tell him. "Quite a lot," he says sheepishly.

He may want to brace for more of the same. As mindfulness continues to grab more public mindshare, as celebrities (Oprah WInfrey), athletes (LeBron James), and CEOs (LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner) sing its praises and scientists present more evidence of its value, Headspace is positioning itself as as a modern, tech-savvy way into the practice. After a mid-year rejiggering of its web and smartphone meditation program, the service has seen a sharp uptick in its use. Since July its signed up twice as many users as it did in the previous two and a half years, and served them 125 million minutes of meditation practice. (Thats about 23 years.) It has about 2 million active users, defined as ones who access the $96-a-year paid program or its free introductory version at least once a month; among paying subscribers, 60% use it every one to three days. Now Puddicombe, 42, and co-founder Rich Pierson, 34, are contemplating what might be called Headspace v3a fully rounded wellness platform whose goal is no less than to "improve the health and happiness of the world." I ask Pierson how he quantifies a goal so grand. He has a target number in his head, he saystotal meditation minutes consumed by a given date, several years from now. He doesnt want to put the number on the record. "We want to create the most engaging health platform we can," he says. "We certainly dont have all the answers. But we do think we have a role to play in starting to get the public to reframe how they think about health."

That's a pretty remarkable bit of entrepreneurial ambition for an ex-advertising man and a former Buddhist monk. The two met in London in 2008. Pierson had recently left a job at international ad agency BBH, and Puddicombewell, how to put this: His path had been a bit more circuitous. Starting Christmas Eve, 1992, he had the kind of Annus Horribilus that breaks some peoplea drunk driver plowed into a crowd of Puddicombe and his friends and killed two; his stepsister was killed while cycling; and his ex-girlfriend died during heart surgery. Young Puddicombe found himself contemplating some of the big questions. "You know: Whats it all about, that sort of thing," he tells me. "I traveled, started a sports science degree, went out boozing. All the normal stuff. But nothing really quenched my thirst. My mind was busy, I felt overwhelmed with emotion. And one afternoon, I just got a gut feeling. I couldnt ignore it. I knew I was going to be a monk."

Puddicombe entered the monastery in 1994, the beginning of a 10-year journey that took him to India, Nepal, Myanmar, Australia, Scotland, and Russia. Five years in, he took full ordination as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Toward the end of the decade, the idea of a return to secular life already tickling at his brain, he was asked to speak about meditation to a group of Western expat oil executives. He talked it over with an oil-company VP who was a lay visitor to the monastery. "He said, Look, a Buddhist monk? In an oil company? In Moscow? Its not going to work. I think it was at that point that I started thinking: Imagine if meditation was stripped of all this stuff. Without losing the authenticity, what if it was presented in a way that people could get a handle on? I think thats when I saw the potential."

Back in London in 2004 and mulling his options, he took up a degree program in Circus Arts. It wasnt as much of a juke as it may seem. He spent nights and weekends thinking about ways to bring meditation to the wider world and days "swinging around like a monkey," he says. "It was a dream. Acrobatics, trapeze, all that stuff." It all sat nicely, he found, alongside meditation. "Tightrope is a great example of mindfulness," he says. "You watch someone trying too hard, and they wobble and fall off. Someone not focusing enough? They wobble and fall off." In 2006 he started a private clinical practice, where he further refined his thinking about a modern, secularized approach to the 3,000-year-old practice of meditation.

Thats where Rich Pierson turned up one day in late 2008. When he walked away from BBH, he was burned out and looking for something to ease his busy mind. He wasnt a believer; his only experience with meditation had been the year or so his mom had spent doing it when he was about 13. But when he started working with Puddicombe, "It had a very profound effect on my life very quickly," Pierson tells me. "It made me think, This thingwhy arent more people doing this? And this guyhes so good at explaining it, and its not weird."

In that moment, without realizing it, Pierson identified the first and probably the biggest of the barriers he and Puddicombe would try to blitz with Headspace, which the duo founded in London in 2010. "Its too weird, its too wacky, its too woo-woo," Puddicombe says now, ticking them off on his fingers. Large group meditation sessions around London helped to dispel some of those preconceptions and to build a buzz around the young Headspace. For its first two years, it was strictly an events company. "Id like to say it was always our intention to use technology to deliver the content," Puddicombe says, "because that would make it sound very planned. It wasnt." But inquiries from attendees looking for takeaways soon led the company to package meditation lessons on CD, and in early 2012 to introduce the first version of its web/mobile platform.

Brand-building successes came early. In 2011 Virgin Atlantic added an inflight Headspace channel; in early 2012 the Oxford Street retailer Selfridges partnered with Headspace for a "No Noise" initiative that offered a variety of mindfulness exercises in-store. Puddicombe quickly became the face of the platform. It helped that he was "a proper expert," as Pierson puts it. "This is a guy who went and sat on his backside 18 hours a day for 10 years. If youre using the 10,000-hour thing, hes done that and more." But it was equally helpful that Puddicombe has an easygoing approach to pedagogy that works as well via digital delivery as it does live. On the hot medium of the Internet, Puddicombes cool demeanor is a balmand perfectly suited to the be-here-now message of mindfulness. The Headspace ethos tends to come as a surprise to novice meditators like me, who picture the practice as something ancient and musty, reeking of saffron and patchouli, and dogmatically strict and unforgiving. Headspace is quite the opposite, in a way that reflects Puddicombes personalityfriendly, warm, conversational. Over the three years Ive been a Headspace user, the phrases Ive probably heard him deliver more than any others are "In your own time" and "Its perfectly normal."

Theres an irony, to be sure, in using technology to deliver mindfulness coaching to a population thats more and more tech-frazzled. It isnt lost on Puddicombe and Pierson. "I can see it, theoretically," Puddicombe says, hoisting his iPhone. "But this can be used for good or bad. What excited me was the opportunity to use it for good, to interrupt some of the negative habits that seem to be developing quite quickly around technology." Meet people where they are, one of Puddicombes teachers used to tell him, and increasingly, where they are is moored to a mobile phone.

The dictum isnt just literal, though. Headspace userstheyre spread evenly from 18 to 75, with a slight uptick between 25 and 45are busy, and research told the company that the v1 program, which built quickly to 20 minutes per day, represented a time commitment a lot of potential users felt they couldnt make. v2 allows them to choose among 10-, 15-, and 20-minute sessions. It also blows up v1s linear timeline, which more or less followed the progression Puddicombe taught in his clinical practice. Users can roam freely among a variety of themed "packs" on such topics as anxiety, sleep, and relationships. "We had version 1 users telling us, Look, Im struggling in my relationship now,"Pierson says. "I dont want to wait until the Heart Series, eight months in, to get help with that. We live in a distracted society. When you take choice away from people, they get frustrated."

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The Monk And The Mad Man Making Mindfulness For The Masses