There are many benefits to mindfulness meditation, including the ability to deal skilfully with long term conditions and challenging life circumstances. I know many people who through their mindfulness practice are able to come to terms with their physical or psychological pain and flourish in their lives despite it.

Mindfulness practice enables us to think for ourselves, find creative ways of living with challenges and empowers us to find freedom within the messiness of the human condition. These claims may seem enormous and unlikely, but I cannot begin to count the times that people I know or teach have said that they do not know how they would have coped in facing some of the worst moments of their life’s without compassion based mindfulness.

This is also my own experience and in the darkest moments my mindfulness and compassion practice have enabled me to move through those moments, with more skill and grace than I would have dreamed possible.

However, I have pretty good life circumstances and thankfully those dark moments have been few and far between. But what about those who’s life circumstances prevent them from accessing a mindfulness course?

We have found a way to provide compassion based mindfulness trainings to those who otherwise couldn’t access a course by setting up our Charity ‘The Everyone Project’, which matches well trained mindfulness teachers with charitable or voluntary organisations. The organisation provides the clients and premises and we pay the tutor to deliver the course. So far we have funded  over 50 courses from a series of large donations.

For example, we have run courses for carers, refugees, the homeless, those on a low income, the elderly, those in recovery from addiction and in hospices. For more information you might like to watch this video:

We now have 26 applications for new courses to take place this autumn and in order to fund them we need to raise £25,000 through our crowd funding campaign.

Can you help us to help everyone receive the benefits of mindfulness training, by making a donation and by sharing the link to our crowd funding page with your friends and colleagues, along with a plea for them to also donate and share? Then together we can help where help is needed so that everyone can experience the benefits of meditation and compassion based mindfulness.

Many thanks and kind wishes
Heather

Donate here!

Author: Heather Regan-Addis

Heather began training in Mindfulness Meditation with Rob Nairn in 2004. She is British Wheel of Yoga trained yoga teacher, has a Post Graduate Diploma in Mindfulness Based Approaches from the University of Bangor, Wales and has a Masters degree in Studies in Mindfulness from the University of Aberdeen. She is a co-founder and director of the Mindfulness Association, a Mindfulness, Compassion and Insight teacher and leads the team that developed and delivers the Mindfulness teacher training program to teach the Mindfulness Based Living Course. She is an honorary Fellow of the University of Aberdeen and was involved in the development of the Masters program in Studies in Mindfulness at the University of Aberdeen, which is a collaboration with the Mindfulness Association and also teaches on the program.