Our 2021 conference has been postponed due to the coronavirus restrictions and lockdown, so we’re looking back at some of the best bits of our 2020 conference.
One of the stand-out key speakers was Buddhist monk, Gelong Thubten.
In 1993, in his early twenties, Thubten suffered with stress and decided to go to a monastery to learn meditation. Initially only planning to stay for a year, he ended up ordaining as a Tibetan Buddhist monk at Kagyu Samye Ling in Scotland, Europe’s oldest and largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery, where he is now one of the most senior monks.
He specialises in teaching mindfulness meditation internationally, in businesses, hospitals, schools, universities, prisons and addiction centres. He has been teaching for more than 20 years and is a world pioneer in the mindfulness movement, as he introduced it to these sectors many years before the trend became popular. He is now considered as one of the UK’s most influential teachers in the field.
Thubten spoke to our members about mindfulness as an increasingly popular form of non-religious meditation.
It was interesting to hear him speak about how mindfulness can change your reaction to stress and how you can discover inner calm in the workplace. Something our members were keen to hear about and put into practice once they got back to their garden centres, if only for a brief period before the lockdown hit.
He explained that we are now more stressed than ever as a culture. We are all busy and this can be energising but can also tip us over into exhaustion.
We’re also always reachable thanks to social media and mobile phones. We need down time in order to feel like we are not under attack.
Thubten said that mindfulness helps build the ability to focus and change a person’s relationship with their own thoughts. It also results in greater kindness, makes you feel calm, less stressed and more able to cope.
He went on to run a short mindfulness workshop with our attendees and we have to say, it was the quietest we have ever seen them!
Thubten has been taught by some of the world’s greatest masters of meditation, and he represents a traditional and authentic training in meditation and Buddhist philosophy, and yet is able to translate that knowledge into a non-religious format which can be of benefit to all in our hectic modern world.
His wise words really resonated with our attendees and we still hear feedback from many of them about how they are using mindfulness in their everyday work and personal lives.
We’re hoping to host our next conference this summer dependant on Government guidelines and will keep all members updated with the latest info on venue, dates and of course, inspiring speakers.