Lyndsay Lunan

Lyndsay Lunan is a meditation and mindfulness teacher whose work centres on what she calls being human: living life as presence, and embracing one's messy, complicated wholeness rather than aiming for perfection. She takes her lead from Jung's idea that the goal of a human life is wholeness, not perfection.

Her path into teaching began in 2011 on a 21-day retreat in Plum Village, where Thich Nhat Hanh encouraged his students to share what they had learned in their communities and workplaces. After decades of living with anxiety, she found in his way of being an embodied example of peace, and learned to trust that she could meet the ambiguity of life. That inspired her to teach mindfulness in secular and outreach organisations across Scotland and England, including Youth Mindfulness and The Heart Movement.

Teaching has run through her whole life. She taught literature first (the stories we tell each other), then psychology (the stories we tell ourselves), and for around the last decade mindfulness and meditation, the ways of dropping story and inhabiting stillness. She has practised meditation for over 20 years, drawing on Tibetan monks and nuns, Zen teachers, Christian mystics, Hindus, artists and ecologists, and she does not place herself neatly between "secular" and any one tradition.

Her offerings do not separate spiritual life from ordinary life. She is interested in how inner safety can support a courageous pushing at our own edges, and in what awareness reveals when it meets the body, the feelings, perception and relationship. She describes the path through five principles: wholeness, authenticity, not knowing, embodiment and immanence.

Her guided meditations are gentle and embodied, inviting a non-effortful resting within the body of awareness. She continues to be moved to inhabit spaces of awareness with others, so that people can meet one another from that place and grow in insight together.