Tim Lomas may have started his online Positive Lexicography Project in 2016 officially, but it was when he was 19 that the seeds for it were sown. Back then, he was spending six months in China teaching English, and was in turn introduced to the concepts of Taoism and Buddhism. "But, I couldn't understand much since I had no cultural or intellectual context to process these 'concepts'. What I did know was that these concepts were important," the British psychologist says over a Skype call from Seattle.

The information was put away until 1998, when he went to Scotland to study psychology, and realised that the concepts of mindfulness that he had encountered in China, had no mention anywhere, not even in his research books. A few years later, as he was studying male mediators in London, he noticed how they used words like metta bhavana, which is a yogic practice of cultivating love and kindness towards all beings. "Instead of saying they were practising 'kindness', they said 'metta bhavana'," he recalls.