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A brief biog:

I was born Jonathan Wolfers in Melbourne Australia in June 1957
I came to London, England with my parents when I was six & soon after that my Father David left us.
My mother Ruth, sister Miriam & brother Peter moved to Cambridge England.

In 1969 we lived for a year in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, Mass, USA.

My Mother remarried and Mike became my stepfather.

Leaving school a bit of a rebel with few qualifications  in 1975 I worked in a film processing plant and then a Physics lab in between playing in a band, running a mobile disco & back-stage and stage building work at the Cambridge Folk Festival.

My then girlfriend's brother taught me to meditate and I developed an interest in Buddhism.

One lunchtime, walking down the road I had a vision?!  I saw myself walking towards myself as an old man who had spent his entire life in a dead end job without challenge.  I started going to night school & getting 'A' levels.

Going to Keele University I decided to study Maths and Computer Science as I thought that a) I wouldn't have to write essays & b) I couldn't write essays.  Both of those presumptions proved to be wrong.

I started attending the Manchester Buddhist Centre, part of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order a 50 mile drive from Keele.  I loved it.  I also got interested in Massage & organised Massage workshops for the students.

In my final year I dropped Maths - although I had aptitude, I found it very hard work keeping all that stuff in my brain.

During my third year I became friends with and then finally started going out with Rose.

Leaving Keele, I spent a miserable year as advertising manager for the Manchester Buddhist Centre.  I was no good at the work, we had NO budget and it rained all the time!  See, it still is!

I realised I needed some work that provoked the grey matter into action and quickly got a job with British Airways as a computer programmer.  I was given the choice of PL1 or Assembly Language and looking for a challenge went for the latter.  It proved to be a shrewd (well lucky in my case) move as there quickly developed a world-wide shortage in the skills I acquired and BA paid well to stop you from being poached.  I worked on the monolithic BABS system, which handled enquiries from travel agents all over the world for many airlines.  It had initially been written in the early 1960s (I think) and had just kept growing and growing since then.

After a couple of years I joined the IM Training Department at British Airways and taught people to be Assembly Language programmers, including a very enjoyable month in Tokyo.  Around this time a new language called REXX was appearing on IBM VM systems & I embraced it.

After five years in the training department I was beginning to find it hard to care about the students and enjoy my work.  I had also had a disagreement with my boss about the way some of the junior staff were treated, so I went back to a project team and was team leader for BA on a joint collaboration with IBM to distribute our TPF development to a network of Minicomputers around West London.  It was ground breaking work and as I recall the project came in at somewhere around £31million (in 1991).  I heard from an ex-colleague that the whole thing has been scrapped now!

In 1992, I was invited on an ordination course with the Western Buddhist Order.  I needed four months off work.  British Airways found it hard to meet this need and the upshot of it was that after doing about a year of a career break that suited neither parties, I left the company feeling rather badly treated.

I joined the Order as Sahananda - which means delightful companion.  It was a very enjoyable and meaningful experience.

Some Buddhist friends and I started the Evolution gift shop in Hammersmith in co-operation with a Buddhist business called Windhorse Trading.  This allowed us to raise funds for our local Buddhist Centre.  Strange it was telling people that I was a shop assistant - usually I told them I was the manager and they both felt as true as each other.

The work was incredibly hard, and it took us nearly three years before we actually made a surplus.  At that time, Windhorse Trading was growing at an incredible rate.  We appeared in the Independent's 100 UK fastest growing businesses several years in succession.  It was clear that systems were not keeping pace with the companies growth, so I started going up to Cambridge 2-3 days a week to help with the systems work.

In 2000, I took four months off to travel and take stock.  The Charity running the West London Buddhist Centre was in a bit of trouble as the Chairman had had a bit of a crisis and left.  No one really wanted to take on his work (which had been a full time job).  I decided that I would try to do it in a couple of days a week, leaving me two days at Windhorse and a day at the shop.

Chairing the Centre proved very hard.  Often two steps backwards and three forwards.  I found someone to help me with the admin, but he died.  Before Padhana was buried I had found a replacement for him and she had died too!  The building got flooded and the movement came under intense scrutiny after a press and internet slur campaign was mounted.

Living through all that was hard.  It is often difficult knowing what is true and what is not and when allegations are made anonymously and they seem to have some basis in fact, but a great deal of basis in imagination or just hatred, it can be very undermining.  Luckily, for every example of people making mistakes or hurting others, there are many many examples of good solid people getting on with their practise and doing a lot of good.