From Mindfulness to Insight & Wisdom Retreat

Tuesday 1st – Sunday 6th December 2020

with Heather Regan-Addis and Choden

If you have already completed a Mindfulness Course, whether it is an 8 week MBCT or MBSR, Breathworks or our own Mindfulness Based Living Course or Level 1 Training, spend 5 days online deepening your practice with Choden and Heather.

The path of Mindfulness leads to insight into our habitual patterns and to freedom from self-created suffering. For this to happen we need first to settle and stabilise the mind through Mindfulness practice. This helps us to accept our minds as they are. We then bring compassion to ourselves. Kindness and compassion are crucial for creating the conducive inner environment for insight. This then matures into compassion for other people and for appreciating our interconnection with all of life. These are the pre-conditions for Insight and they are the basis of the Access to Insight Retreat.

During the retreat we will teach the unique Mindfulness Association method of settling, grounding, resting and support as a core Mindfulness sitting practice. We will also teach background and practices which cover key areas:

• The RAIN (recognising, allowing, intimate attention and non-identification) practice as a basis for acceptance.
• The self-compassion practice drawn from the Mindful Self-Compassion approach of Chris Germer and Kristin Neff.
• Introduction to the Four Immeasurable Qualities (loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity) as the basis for compassion for others.

With this as a foundation, we will teach the Undercurrent and Observer model developed by Rob Nairn. This is the gateway to Insight and is a navigating tool for clarifying what arises involuntarily in our minds (Undercurrent) and how we relate to what arises (Observer). This model introduces the key focus of Insight training – turning 180 degrees to face the Egocentric Preference System (EPS) in the Observer.

Through Insight training we learn to become acquainted with the subliminal mechanisms that hold this preference system in place (i.e. the contracted sense of ‘I’ that is ruled by our habitual likes and dislikes). We learn to accept this but not feed it. As a result, we learn to rest in open awareness, in which all of our experience becomes the meditation.

During the retreat we will also offer some teachings and practices for connecting with our innate wisdom – our basic goodness, wholeness and freedom that, for so many of us, lies undiscovered like a glittering jewel beneath the mud of our everyday lives.

Note that this retreat will meet the UK Network (now BAMBA) CPD retreat requirements.

The retreat will involve teachings, guided practices, inquiry and periods of silence.