Rob Nairn

Rob Nairn

Rob Nairn's training in psychology and Buddhist practice brings him a unique ability to explain ancient Eastern concepts in modern, accessible terms. The author of What Is Meditation? and Diamond Mind, he is sought after internationally as a lecturer on Buddhist philosophy and meditation.

Rob Nairn

Rob Nairn's training in psychology and Buddhist practice brings him a unique ability to explain ancient Eastern concepts in modern, accessible terms. The author of What Is Meditation? and Diamond Mind, he is sought after internationally as a lecturer on Buddhist philosophy and meditation.

4 Items

Set Ascending Direction
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4 Items

Set Ascending Direction
per page

GUIDES

Mindfulness and Acceptance

Mindfulness Sitting Practice with Acceptance

From Mindfulness to Insight

An Excerpt from From Mindfulness to Insight

Posture

Sit on a cushion in a kneeling or cross-legged position, or on a chair with the back self-supporting; lengthen the spine, with a natural curve in the lower back, and relax the shoulders so that the chest opens; open the eyes slightly with a soft downward gaze, or close them; relax the jaw and ensure that the back of the neck is in line with the spine; let the hands rest on the lap or on the knees. Embody an attitude of being alert and at ease.

Intention and Motivation

Form the intention to practice mindfulness—knowing what is happening while it is happening with an attitude of acceptance of whatever arises—and then connect with your motivation: why you—as an individual—want to do this.

Settling

For a few minutes, breathe slightly deeper than normal and count as you breathe; regulate your breathing so that if you breathe in to a count of three or four, you breathe out to a similar count. If thoughts arise, that is OK; just notice them and return to the breathing and counting, without becoming involved with them. Toward the end of the settling phase, focus a little more on the out-breath, noticing how the body relaxes a little as you breathe out and seeing if the mind can learn from the body: the body releases breath and relaxes, the mind releases involvement with thinking and begins to settle.

Grounding

Now let your breathing fall back to its normal rhythm and bring your attention more fully into the body. Become aware of the contact and pressure where the body rests, and notice how the ground supports the body. Now gently open up and tune into the sensations in the body, allowing the sensations to reveal themselves. You may become aware of feeling warm or cold; perhaps you are experiencing a slight pain in the right shoulder or a feeling of tension in one or both knees; maybe there is a contraction in the stomach related to an emotion you are feeling. Let the awareness of sensation hold you in the present moment.

Resting

Now become aware of the body as a whole: mind resting in the body, body resting on the ground. Then become aware of the space around you, noticing how the body exists in space and is surrounded by it. Keeping your eyes open and in a relaxed, almost casual way, allow yourself to experience whatever comes to you through your senses; but don’t actively look at or listen for anything. You are simply with your experience as it presents itself—sensations, thoughts, emotions, visual impressions, and sounds. When you notice that the mind drifts away and becomes involved with thoughts, which is likely to happen quite soon, move on to the next stage.

Breath Support

Place your attention lightly on the natural rhythm of your breathing and tune into it, wherever you find it most easily in the body: this could be the breath coming and going through the nostrils, the abdomen rising and falling, the sensation of the breath leaving the body, or the feeling of the whole body breathing. It does not matter where you rest your attention, what is important is to have a light touch—not shutting out thoughts and emotions but allowing them to come and go. Breathing in, be aware that you are breathing in; breathing out, know that you are breathing out. The breath is like an anchor holding your attention in the present. When you find that your attention has drifted off into thinking, simply notice this and return it to the breath—no sense of succeeding or failing, just noticing and returning. When you feel confident in using the breath support, you can experiment with letting go of the support and just resting. In this way, you can try alternating between using the breath support and resting, and notice how this feels.

Practicing Acceptance

If a difficult issue, emotion, or mind state arises while you are resting on the breath support, then you can use the RAIN method. You recognize what the presenting issue or emotion is and, where possible, name it (step 1). You then actively welcome the issue or emotion and allow it to be present (step 2). Now you return your attention to the breath support but with awareness that the issue or emotion is still present. If you find that it persistently draws your attention, then switch your focus to the issue or emotion and make it the support for your mindfulness practice by paying intimate attention to it in a particular way (step 3). First, bring your attention to where the emotion or difficulty is held within the body; notice what kind of sensations you are experiencing in this part of the body—maybe there is a tightness, contraction, heat, vibration, and so forth. Notice if you are resisting these sensations and what happens if you open up to them with mindfulness and acceptance. Next, bring your attention to the emotions and feelings connected with the experience. Notice what the primary feeling tone is and then observe what layers of feeling make up the experience. You may notice that the presenting emotion is not just one feeling but a constellation of feelings. Try to meet them all with mindfulness and acceptance. Next, notice what kind of thoughts or beliefs emanate from the issue or emotion. Take a step back and look at these thoughts: Are they true or one-sided? Are they permanent or changing moment-by-moment? Then notice how you are relating to your experience. Are you taking the issue or emotion to be solid and real? Are you seeing it as permanent? And, are you identifying with it as who you are? This leads to the last stage of RAIN (step 4) in which you inquire of the issue or emotion—is this really who I am or is this just an experience that is moving through me? This process of questioning encourages nonidentification, helping you see the bigger picture and not take things so personally. Then, bring your awareness back to your experience as a whole: mind resting in the body, body resting on the ground, with a light focus on your breathing.

Sharing

Once you come to the end of your designated practice session, spend a few moments resting without any focus. And then, as a way of concluding the practice session, reaffirm your intention and motivation by framing something in your own words like this: “I intend to carry the practice of mindfulness into my daily life, with the motivation of sharing this benefit with others and the wider world.” Then you can stretch the body and slowly get up and see if you can carry the awareness of this sitting session into the next moments of your day.

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Rob NairnRob Nairn’s training in psychology and Buddhist practice brings him a unique ability to explain ancient Eastern concepts in modern, accessible terms. The author of What Is Meditation? and Diamond Mind, he is sought after internationally as a lecturer on Buddhist philosophy and meditation.

ChodenChoden (Sean McGovern) is a monk within the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He is a director and cofounder of the Mindfulness Association and develops and teaches secular mindfulness, compassion, and insight programs. He cowrote with Paul Gilbert Mindful Compassion (2014), which explores the interface between Buddhist and evolutionary approaches to compassion.

Heather Regan-AddisHeather Regan-Addis is a practicing Buddhist within the Karma Kagyu tradition and a director and cofounder of the Mindfulness Association. She teaches mindfulness, compassion, and insight courses and leads the team that developed and delivers the 8-week Mindfulness-Based Living Course (MBLC) and Compassion-Based Living Course (CBLC).

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The Path of Insight

by Choden
From Mindfulness to Insight

How Our Book Came to Be

I thought I would write a little about how our book From Mindfulness to Insight came to be. The three authors—Rob, Heather, and Choden—are co-founders of the Mindfulness Association which was set up in 2010 to run face-to-face and online mindfulness, compassion, and insight courses. The original inspiration for this association was Rob. I have known him for many years—he was my very first meditation teacher back in South Africa where I grew up. I actually attended the law school at Cape Town University where he was professor of criminology but we never met there. It just so happened that I attended a talk by him in an entirely different context on Carl Jung and Tibetan Buddhism. That was one of those pivotal moments in my life where everything changed. I started to lose interest in my studies in law and became more and more fascinated by the path of meditation.

Rob has a passion for insight. Toward the end of his teaching career he focused more and more on insight training because he thought that this was the main point of meditation practice. Many people these days use mindfulness meditation to help them relieve stress, improve their mood, and enhance their well-being and happiness. In fact, mindfulness is often described as an “intervention.” These are all very worthwhile motivations. We live in a world where most of us suffer from a condition described these days as “overwhelm,” so anything that helps reduce this is laudable.

But in Rob’s view—which both Heather and I share—the main point of meditation is to gain insight into the mind so we can change. Insight does not refer to a rarefied, dry intellectual understanding—it means seeing from the very core of your being what is happening in your very own mind and how you are perpetuating your own unique brand of suffering.

When you see things in this way, then change happens by itself. To use a phrase we often use in our book: the seeing is the doing.

What we are trying to see are the subtle forces that shape how we think, act, and behave. These are like scripts of conditioning that lie just outside the reach of conscious thought processes. They lie in the subliminal reaches of the mind. Rob coined a term that he began to use more and more in his teachings: the subliminal reflex. This refers to reflex mechanisms that determine what is allowed into conscious awareness and what is not—like a gatekeeper. It is also the driver of many of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The conscious mind thinks it is running the show, but in fact these subliminal reflexes are. The problem is that they lack intelligence and are like automatic reflex mechanisms that are governed by the scripts of conditioning that emerge as we grow up.

Rob felt passionately that if we learned to become aware of these conditioned reflexes, then our lives could change in remarkable ways. I once remarked to Rob that when he died we would put a plaque on his grave stone saying, “Here lies the one who coined the term subliminal reflex.” He had witnessed people meditating for years who did not change because they were not seeing how these reflexes were operating in their minds. They were sitting on a lid and cultivating a kind of fabricated calm, but beneath the lid these subliminal reflexes were running the show.

When we see them clearly, however, we have a choice not to be the slaves to our conditioning. But if we do not see them they control us from the shadows of the subliminal and so they shape our lives.

Acting Out of Habit

We can just think of any normal day and how so much of the time we function according to habit, and how most of what we do is on automatic pilot. We find ourselves thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that seem very normal, but are pre-programmed. We are slaves to habit.

My sense is that we live in a false duality of “me and you” and “me and my feelings and thoughts.” There is always this sense of “me” that is set apart from something other—whether it is other people, other things, or my very own feelings and thoughts. We often use terms like “I am struggling with my feelings,” like somehow these are two separate things.

The Path of Insight

The path of insight is about exposing this false duality. Not in an intellectual, philosophical sense, but in a very direct, immediate experiential way. We do this by working with the false duality we are trapped in. First we practice mindfulness so we calm down, then we learn to accept the thoughts and feelings that constantly arise in the mind. This is at the level of “what is observed.” Next, we make a crucial shift and turn to observe the observer or become aware of the thinker in us.

This is the heart of the matter.

We now start to use specific methods for exposing the sense of me in the observer. These methods are explained in From Mindfulness to Insight. The key thing is that we are bringing awareness to a part of us that we seldom choose to look at because we are so identified with the observer or thinker in us. This is the “angry me” or the “anxious me” or the “self-critical” me or the “romantic me.” So, we learn to pay attention to the shape-shifting sense of “me.”

Maybe the biggest insight of all is that none of these things define who we are. The more we look at them the more we see they are insubstantial and illusory. They are ephemeral like phantoms and dreams.

We then bring compassion to the whole drama of mind that we are caught up in and then just rest—we go off duty and sit in the midst of it all like a fool who has no preconceived ideas about anything. This opens the door to a vast, spacious, open, and joyful experience of who we can be.

For me, practicing in this way has made a big difference—it has allowed me to touch something in myself that is flawless and free and unlimited despite my normal experience of being caught up in a crazy, conflicted, over-busy mind like most of the human race! My hope is that those of you who read From Mindfulness to Insight find that it makes a big difference to your lives too.

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ChodenChoden (Sean McGovern) is a monk within the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He is a director and cofounder of the Mindfulness Association and develops and teaches secular mindfulness, compassion, and insight programs. He cowrote with Paul Gilbert Mindful Compassion (2014), which explores the interface between Buddhist and evolutionary approaches to compassion.

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Continue Reading >>