The Buddhist

Malcolm first discovered Buddhism in 1990 when be began attending activities within the Triratna Buddhist Community (then the FWBO). For ten years, he attended retreats, worked within Buddhist teams and helped at local Buddhist centres. At the end of this period, he was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order and given the name, Upayavira, which translates to something like, he who heroically finds ways to help others on the path to Enlightenment.

Soon after joining the Order, he became a parent. This was a major change in life direction. Little of the learning from the previous ten years was useful. He spent the next ten years exploring what practice meant in the context of a family, culminating in the the site and audio course at parentsmeditation.org, detailing an approach to meditation suitable for parents of young children.

During the next ten years, Malcolm started to connect with other Buddhists that were exploring “insight” practices. Practices that helped unravel the assumptions that bind us. During this time he had significant exposure to Direct Pointing as used within Liberation Unleashed and a community exploring the Buddhist teaching of the Ten Fetters as a live practice.

Discovering the work of Dr Jeffery A Martin confirmed a lot of germinating thoughts and clarified ways in which many of the communities he had experienced were limiting themselves unnecessarily. Discovering the Sedona Method gave further language to his approach to meditation and inquiry.

Malcolm is now putting his efforts into the development of the Odoki Method, a flexible approach to wellbeing that brings all these threads together.

The Geek

Malcolm wrote his first computer program at the age of 9, on a computer the size of a large room, with somewhere between 1 and 9Mb of RAM. Since then, he witnessed the birth of the personal computer, including assisting with his father’s computer book publishing company. Having first been introduced to the internet at university, then again at his first job at INMOS Ltd in Bristol, he rediscovered the internet in 1994, playing with the basic web browsers and starting to explore this new-fangled world-wide-web.

Malcolm is a versatile software engineer with experience across a variety of fields, including software development in a range of languages (Golang, Javascript, Typescript, Python, and more). His versatility tends to make him well suited to early stage startups or projects.

He has taught extensively offering courses in IT subjects for IT professionals. He has extensive experience of open source development - in 2005 he was invited as a member of the Apache Software Foundation - the ASF is a vendor neutral foundation supporting the creation of open source software for the public good. His professional experience of remote working goes back to before remote working was a thing (as in, the late 1990s).

Malcolm’s current role is at Grafana Labs, where he has seen the company grow from 30 to 1300 people since he joined in 2018.