Articles and blog posts written by team members, tutors and supervisors of the Mindfulness Association about how they bring mindfulness into their lives.
I had the good fortune to see my teacher Lama Yeshe Rinpoche this week and he emphasised the importance of forgiveness. There was a forgiveness exercise in the early Mindfulness courses we delivered, but it never made it to the current courses. I think it was quite a profound exercise, but painful to engage in…
I had a lovely retreat last week by the seaside, with mindfulness, yoga and some lovely walks along the beach. I always forget the calming power of yoga, which I do moving and breathing in time to Tibetan Buddhist chanting. The chatter of my mind falls away and there is just moving, breathing and hearing.…
This week I have the amazing good fortune to be on retreat, with thanks to my husband and mother-in-law for the time. I have rented a cozy cottage by the beach on the Solway Firth. My husband dropped me off with my food for the week and I have the luxury of being here alone…
We human beings love stories. Stories are how we make sense of the world. Our stories about ourselves, all the others and the rest of the world. It is useful to check our own particular set of stories, as well as the main emotional tone and core beliefs that underpin them. We tend to mindlessly…
I have been practicing Tonglen recently. It is a Compassion practice in which we bring to mind someone who is struggling and imagine breathing in their difficulty – taking it in – and breathing out what will help, all that is good – sending it out. This reverses our usual tendency to want all that…
A glimpse into the practices that will be explored on the Mindfulness Association’s Engaged Mindfulness course led by Kristine Mackenzie and Fay Adams in Samye Ling, starting in January 2018 Those who have completed the Mindfulness Practitioner training will be familiar with the concept of grounding. The first stage of grounding is about dropping into…
This last weekend, I have been teaching with Choden on the insight module of the Masters in Mindfulness. The material we presented was a bit different from usual, as the two of us are half way through writing a book with Rob Nairn on this subject. We covered the same themes: the key insight practices…
I am a very fortunate person. Things have gone well in my life. Although I have had the odd set-back, my mum says of me that each time I fall in a pile of crap I come up smelling of roses. And yet still I worry. I find myself in a lovely new home,…
I have had a lovely weekend at Samye Ling with the new cohort, our eighth, of MSc students. I have a lovely tutor group this year and it was wonderful to hear their aspirations for Mindfulness in their life and work. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end to…