Shaun Glossop

on Overcoming Alienation
Through Better Mindfulness Communities

In this episode, we talk to Shaun Glossop about his work building a mindfulness group outside of the usual religious or medical contexts in which it is often taught. We discuss what he has done to reduce barriers to engaging with mindfulness by  finding ways to make practice more accessible and relatable to people in his community. He also discusses the problem of social alienation and isolation in postindustrial society and the importance of creating a space where people can build meaningful connections with each other.

Shaun Glossop is a meditation and mindfulness teacher based in the UK. He’s the co-founder and Director of the Nottingham Mindfulness Group, a popular and highly successful meditation community that is active in the central region of England. His other professional roles include teaching mindfulness and meditation to people whose lives have been impacted by cancer (which he does at the renowned Maggie’s Centre in Nottingham) and also to people who are in active recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.

Shaun is a certified MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy) coach and teacher. He originally trained in this capacity at the Nottingham Centre for Mindfulness, which is an important mindfulness teaching centre in Britain that is run and supervised by the UK public body that oversees the provision of mental health services.

Shaun has practiced meditation personally for over 25 years. He has a wide-ranging and in-depth familiarity with a number of different meditation traditions and styles – including Buddhist, Vedic, Tantric, and Jewish/Christian meditation – as well as being thoroughly versed in today’s contemporary, more secular (and science-based) approaches. He has taught meditation and mindfulness professionally since 2014, during which time he’s taught in excess of 10,000 people, both publicly and privately. He has been a guest lecturer on meditation and mindfulness at Nottingham Trent University and he’s appeared several times in the press and on both tv and radio in the UK in his capacity as a respected mindfulness teacher and as a spokesperson for mindfulness and meditation.

Shaun views meditation as a powerful tool for cultivating well-being and positive personal transformation, and he’s passionate about making meditation and mindfulness easily accessible and readily available to all. In his work he seeks to integrate the wisdom of traditional meditation teachings with the modern insights of neuroscience and psychology/psychotherapy. His aim is to help everyone to flourish and fully-blossom as a unique person, whatever their background or life situation – which then, in turn, enables them to make their own positive, enriching and valuable contribution to the wider world.

Shaun is noted for his warm, welcoming and friendly personality, his wide-ranging knowledge about meditation and mindfulness, and his very grounded, down-to-earth, and easy to understand teaching style.

Resources:

• Nottingham Mindfulness Group
• Lost Connections by Johann Hari
• The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate