We are now in the second year of the University of West Scotland (UWS) MSc in teaching Mindfulness and Compassion. It is a collaboration between the Mindfulness Association (MA) and UWS Psychology Department. The MA provides the teaching in mindfulness and compassion and UWS provides academic input on psychological theory underpinning mindfulness and compassion as…
The Secrets to becoming a Confident Inquirer What an amazing thing to be part of a moment of insight! There’s no doubt that inquiry facilitates lightbulb moments, even though part of the posture of an inquirer is about not pushing for outcomes of course. It’s these moments that fire the motivation to learn inquiry…
‘How often do you sit in your practice feeling like it’s your fault and your responsibility to fix it – whatever ‘it’ is on a given day?’ Read this blog to find out why compassion in action can be key to lifting this feeling. Within our Engaged Mindfulness course, we will look with fresh and…
I started practising Mindfulness in 2016 to help me deal with corporate stress. I continued my Mindfulness journey by studying with Mindfulness Now, eventually gaining my mindfulness teaching accreditation at the end of 2019. Even though I had been studying for a few years, I still felt like I was at the beginning of my…
Felt really quite excited as I headed to Samye Ling for the Mindfulness Association reunion weekend. Even the jarring potholes didn’t dampen my spirits!But I struggled…Unable to get into the practices. The inner critic was on full volume. By the Saturday morning coffee break I was ready to give up and go home. So I…
Next week, after a journey that began that began at the start of 2016, I shall graduate with a PhD in Education from the University of Aberdeen. I guess the journey really began in the autumn of 2013 when I embarked on the Masters programme in Studies in Mindfulness with the Mindfulness Association and the…
Recently, as part of training in mindful inclusion, I was watching a video by Cornel West a philosopher, activist and professor at Harvard and Princeton who speaks on the role of race, gender and class in American society. He is an impassioned speaker – known for saying that “justice is what love looks like in…
Next baby steps towards addressing unconscious racism Last week I found myself writing about the automatic denial and defensiveness I saw in myself when I was presented with an opportunity to work on discovering how racism might live in me. This response, I later discovered, is typical for a white person. Apparently, many of us…
People in cities in America – and other countries around the globe in solidarity – have taken to the streets to protest against the systemic inequalities that led to the death of George Floyd a few days ago. The unjust death of another black American, has brought the fault lines of deep tension around race…