It is very exciting! Our Joyful Club membership weekend (6-8th July) and retreat (6-11th July) at Samye Ling Tibetan Centre is nearly here (For more details, click here). At the Mindfulness Association our heartfelt motivation is to nurture a community of mindfulness practitioners so that we can come together and support each other in our…
The very first Mindfulness course Rob Nairn taught and which is the foundation of our Mindfulness Association Level 1 training began at Samye Ling 10 years ago on 26 May 2008! Choden was one of the tutors and I was one of the participants. The course was by invitation only, just for experienced practitioners (I…
I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful bank holiday weekend. We have had glorious weather here again in my part of Scotland and I am sitting in my garden being serenaded by birds. As part of the first UK Kagyu Monlam, I am still going to teachings at Samye Ling with Drupon Rinpoche each morning…
The moment your eyes are open, seize the day. Would you hold back when the Beloved beckons? Would you deliver your litany of sins like a child’s collection of sea shells, prized and labeled? “No, I can’t step across the threshold,” you say, eyes downcast. “I’m not worthy, I’m afraid, and my motives aren’t pure.…
To my delight, this week I received my 3 author copies of the Mindfulness Based Living Course (MBLC) book that Choden and I have written together. We finished writing it just before Choden did his one year retreat, in October 2015. So it has taken a while! It took time to find a publisher. …
Happy New Year to one and all! 2018 has stopped me in my tracks- literally! I have been in bed sick with the flu for the last week. However, and thankfully, my wonderful colleague Alan Hughes has stepped up to the plate for me and has written this week’s challenge and blog post. Alan writes…
I had an interesting insight in my practice, quite devastating. It was that I have been living in my threat system my whole life. My mind and body have been wired accordingly so that every change, every uncertainty is a potential threat. Most thoughts that are engaged set me into spirals of planning for future…
I have been working with Choden and Rob Nairn on a book, which is an experiential journey through the Mindfulness Association’s Insight Training, called Level 3: Seeing Deeply (click here for more information). We expect it to be published some time next year. Rob designed this training, and then others of us on the MA…
Following a recent Thursday evening online sit, we started discussing the role of concentration in our practice. Afterwards it was suggested to me that I write a blog about this, as we talk a lot about mindfulness in our training (for obvious reasons), but it’s possibly not always apparent where concentration fits in. The first…