How we collect and check stories

Students write their own stories on this site after taking a program. Some send theirs by email, and our team posts it for them; those stories say “Sent by email, posted by Mindvalley”. Stories our team adds for someone in any other way say “Posted by Mindvalley”. A small number come from well-known people our teachers have worked with.

Stories written before this site was built come from our original stories site and keep the date they were written there. They say “From our original stories site”.

• Every story waits for a person on our team to approve it. Nothing is published automatically.
• Before that, an AI model reads the story’s title and text to flag possible problems, work out its language and rate how clear and specific it is. It never publishes or rejects a story, and it is never sent the storyteller’s IP address, email or account details.
• We reject spam, abuse, duplicates, stories that share someone else’s private information, and stories that aren’t about a program. Rejected stories are never shown.

• The date and time it was written.
• How it reached us: on this site, by email, or posted by our team.
• The IP address it was sent from, the country that address points to, the type of connection, and whether it came through a VPN, proxy or data centre.

We never show the address. We delete it, and its country, 30 days after the story is submitted, and keep only the results of the checks below. When our team posts a story, we don’t record their address. We keep these records to show that stories are genuine and to stop fake ones.

• Country: whether the country the address points to matches the country the storyteller gave. If it does, the story says “Submission country matched”. If it doesn’t, for example because they were travelling or using a VPN, only our moderators see that.
• Repeats: five or more stories from one address within 24 hours are flagged for a moderator to look at.

We may write a story’s title, a short summary and an English translation, and the page shows which: its line says “Title by Mindvalley” or “Translated from Spanish by Mindvalley”, and the summary sits apart from the story under “Quick summary”. Some stories from our original site had characters garbled when they were moved; we show those repaired, and keep the text as it arrived.

We don’t edit what the storyteller wrote. If we ever have to, for example to remove private information they shared by mistake, the story says “Story text edited by Mindvalley” with the date. Changes to spacing or line breaks alone don’t count as an edit.

The words as they were submitted are kept and can’t be changed by our systems. The only exception is a legal request to erase or redact them, which we carry out deliberately and record.

Most lists show stories our team has chosen to feature first, then the rest by the AI’s rating of how clear and specific each story is. We don’t show ratings, and stories aren’t star-rated.

Each story has a fingerprint: the SHA-256 hash of its ID, the date it was written, its original text, how it reached us and whether the submission country matched. Nothing derived from the address is in it. If any of these changes, the fingerprint no longer matches.

We sign each story’s record with an Ed25519 key. Our public keys are at /.well-known/mindvalley-stories-keys.json. Every story ends with a Verify link to its record page, which recomputes the fingerprint, checks the signature and shows how to check both yourself.

Stories from our original site got their records when we moved them. Their records show the text hasn’t changed since then; they can’t show what happened before.

• Each story is one person’s experience. Results vary, and a story doesn’t show what is typical.
• Counts such as “mentioned in 41 stories” count stories, not results.
• Nothing here is medical advice.
• We don’t yet confirm that each storyteller bought the program, so we don’t call stories “verified”.

Some classes invite students to share a story, and two people chosen at random from everyone who shares receive a free course. Anyone who shares is entered, whatever they write. We never ask for positive stories, and no story is chosen for what it says.

How many stories are written, published and rejected each month, where they come from, how they reach us and how long they wait for a person to review them are in our Transparency report, updated every night.