From Mindfulness to Compassion to Insight: A Conference

7:00pm 11 July 2019 - 3:00pm 14 July 2019

Cost: £150.00

Venue: Samye Ling

Mindfulness Association Members, please use the priority booking page on the membership site.
To become a MA member please click here
The cost for non-members is £250, to book please click here

Once your course place has been confirmed please book your accommodation at Samye Ling by clicking here.

Victor Frankl famously said: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space there is a power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom’.

What might it be like to choose our response to that which triggers us? What might it be like to be free from following every angry, sad, anxious story that repeatedly plays out in our mind? What might it be like to be free to choose how we react to our life challenges and the stress of the modern world rather than be ruled by our habitual patterns?

What might it be like to tap into our innate Insight and Wisdom?

Mindfulness and Compassion are well-known pathways of training in main stream society and there is a rapidly emerging evidence base for both.  The logical next step is Insight and Wisdom, but as yet there has been little discourse on this topic and only a few secular trainings have emerged.

The focus of this conference is how Mindfulness and Compassion can inform an approach to Insight and Wisdom that is grounded in Neuroscience, Psychology and Eastern Wisdom traditions.

Through Mindfulness practice we learn to settle and stabilise the mind in such a way that we do not compulsively feed negative patterns of thinking, and through Compassion we learn to build emotional resilience and gradually open our hearts and minds to the suffering of life. The next step is to gain deeper Insight into how and why we identify with our negative habits of thinking and emotion in the ways we do, and to access our innate capacity for Wisdom that awakens the richness and intelligence of every aspect of our lives.

Key themes that will be explored:

• Finding freedom in the midst of our strong emotions
• Connecting with the richness and intelligence of our so-called destructive emotions
• Understanding the subliminal roots of our habitual patterns
• Finding freedom of choice in the face of our compulsive habits and drives
• Accessing our capacity for open awareness and loosening our tight mental fixations.

Lama Yeshe Rinpoche, Rob Nairn, Heather Regan-Addis, CHoden, Torey Hayden and Charlie Morley will explore how a robust approach to Insight & Wisdom can be developed that is based on emerging insights from Science and Psychology, and from the ancient practices of Mahayana Buddhism.

***The Mindfulness Association has been running workshops in Insight for the last 10 years and it is included as a module within the Post Graduate Studies in Mindfulness MSc, which is a collaboration between the Mindfulness Association and the University of Aberdeen.

***Rob Nairn, Heather Regan-Addis and Choden have written a book entitled From Mindfulness to Insight that is due to be published by Shambhala Publications in April next year. We are planning to have books available at the conference for signing by the authors who will all be present.

The conference begins at 7pm (evening meal at 6pm) on the Thursday evening, between 8am and 8pm on Friday & Saturday and between 8am and 3.00pm on Sunday.