Over a twenty-year period, beginning in 1978, he spent extensive time in a spiritual community at Meherabad, in western India, where he worked in a rural clinic free to the poor, and lived with the intimate disciples and family of Meher Baba.
Some time later, as Ladinsky recounted in an interview, intending to drive towards the Andes mountain, he took a detour of a thousand miles, and stopped at the Meher Baba Center at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Since the release of his first publication I Heard God Laughing,[7] Ladinsky's books have been translated into German, Hebrew, Turkish, Indonesian, and Slovene languages and maintain international best-selling status in the religious and inspirational poetry genre.
[8] His work is widely quoted on social media, including by Rupi Kaur,[9] Oprah,[10] Paulo Coehlo, and many; it is reprinted in the books of internationally known authors, including Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, Greg Mortenson, Matthew Fox, Elif Shafak, Stephen R. Covey, Jack Kornfield, Tom Shadyac and Elizabeth Gilbert.
Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sufi leaders and organizations, as well as non-affiliated spiritual and service groups, license Ladinsky's work for use and reprint.
[20][21][22][23] Christopher Shackle describes The Gift as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry" and Aria Fani describes his contribution thusly "Ladinsky does not know Persian while his poems bear little or no resemblance to what Hafez has composed" [24][23] Reviewer Murat Nemet-Nejat contacted Ladinsky and asked him for one or two translated ghazals of Hafiz.
[25][26] In April 2009, the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, recited from Ladinsky's book at a Nowruz celebration in Toronto, but was later informed there was no corresponding Persian original for the poems.
"[28] Ladinsky continues to live on a rural wilderness farm in the Ozarks of Missouri,[29] on a ranch outside of Taos, New Mexico, and, at other times, next to the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.