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!

MBLC book

It took time to find a publisher.  After being turned down several times, when we were almost ready to publish, the arrangement with our first publisher fell through.  It has taken patience and bloody minded commitment to keep going! Then we found our current publisher, O Publications (an imprint of John Hunt publications), who published MA tutor Heather Grace MacKenzie’s (now Bond) book ‘Awakening Child: A journey of inner transformation through teaching your child Mindfulness and Compassion’. She gave me their details and they welcomed us with open arms. However, it has taken a while to get to this stage and the publication date is not until the end of November – so I will have to continue to be patient! But what an awesome Christmas present for all our friends and family!

But seriously, it is an accompaniment to the MBLC 8 week course and a self help version of the course to help those who can’t attend an MBLC class. We hope it will raise the profile of the MBLC course and bring more people to the 8 week course.

Now, I haven’t had a book published before and so am pretty excited, especially after such a long wait, and keeping going despite all the set backs. So I am going to be carrying a copy with me and showing it to all the friends and family I meet – I am resisting showing it to those sitting next to me on the train! So if I show the book to you, please indulge me – I am working on finding a balance between celebrating this accomplishment and working on not letting it go to my head! Not easy!

At the moment Choden and I are working on the final copy of the second book we have written together and this time with Rob Nairn. It is called Mindfulness to Insight: The Seeing Is the Doing. Shambala are publishing this book, which we are due to hand in by the end of the month. So that takes care of the presents for Christmas 2019!

Then after the current review of our Compassion curriculum, I am hoping that we can write a book about that – completing the trilogy of Mindfulness, Insight and Compassion – albeit out of order! Christmas 2020?!

At this time there are two other books arising from the Mindfulness Association’s work in partnership with the University of Aberdeen on the MSc in Studies in Mindfulness (Click here for more information on The MSc: Studies in Mindfulness). The first is a book by the MSc Programme Director Graeme Nixon about the rise of Mindfulness in relation to different aspects of our current cultural context. The second is about the experience of the Mindful Heroes – graduates from our MSc who are at the forefront of implementing Mindfulness in their field of work. If any of you have heard the conference presentations from our MSc graduates, they are pioneers and their work is truly inspirational!

Our motivation is to get the material out there to as many people as possible who may benefit from it and to demonstrate the value of long term Mindfulness training, over years and not weeks; and of Mindfulness training imbued with the qualities of Compassion and Insight from the start, ie. Our MA approach.

I am curious to see how it continues to unfold! It been a pretty magical journey up until now, but the potential for the future seems wonderful!

I’ll let you know when the MBLC book can be pre- ordered!

Kind Wishes
Heather

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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.