Detailed List of Retreats

Mindful Compassion -Transforming Your Life Through The Power Of Compassion

Teacher: Choden

Cost: 2 day's accommodation + R350 surcharge

Dates: Friday 31 January 2025 - Sunday 02 February 2025

choden Choden, a South African born Buddhist monk, will offer a weekend workshop exploring compassion within the context of mindfulness practice. He currently resides in Edinburgh in Scotland and teaches on the University of Aberdeen Postgraduate Studies in Mindfulness MSc. During the workshop he will offer skills and practices for tapping into the compassionate potential within us. In so doing, we will discover source of inner vitality and well-being that can support us when we are down and help us respond to the inevitable difficulties of life. Choden will draw on the wealth of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as well as insights from evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. In 2013, he co-authored a book with renowned British psychologist Paul Gilbert called Mindful Compassion (2013) which was a synthesis of psychology, science and Buddhism.

He will focus on the cultivation of self-compassion as an antidote to self-criticism and the cultivation of compassion for others by drawing on the Buddhist model of the 4 Limitless Contemplations (loving-kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity). This will include the practice of tonglen or taking and sending. The workshop will be experiential and will include a combination of imagination and mindfulness-based practices.

View teacher details

Choden: A monk within the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Choden (aka Sean Mc Govern) completed a three-year, three-month retreat in 1997 and has been a practicing Buddhist since 1985. He is originally from South Africa where he trained as a lawyer and learned meditation under the guidance of Rob Nairn, an internationally renowned Buddhist teacher. He is now involved in developing secular mindfulness and compassion programmes drawing upon the wisdom and methods of the Buddhist tradition, as well as contemporary insights from psychology and neuroscience. He is an honorary fellow of the University of Aberdeen and teaches on their Postgraduate Study Programme in Mindfulness (MSc) that is the first of its kind to include compassion in its curriculum. He co-wrote a book with Paul Gilbert in 2013, entitled Mindful Compassion that explores the interface between Buddhist and Evolutionary approaches to compassion training. He is also the co-author of two other books: Mindfulness Based Living Course (2018) and From Mindfulness to Insight (2019). In 2016 he completed a one-year retreat focused on the foundation practices of Tibetan Buddhism.