Neil McKinlay: Healing Through Meditation and Community

Struggling with the disempowerment and manipulation of his Tibetan Buddhist community, Neil McKinlay thought he'd found solace in meditation. But little did he know that meditation would lead to an unexpected twist in his story - a journey of healing and self-discovery, offering him the chance to reclaim his inner knowing and find direction in life. What will Neil discover on his journey? Show Notes | Transcript "Through this process of turning toward and settling in and coming into contact with these basic qualities... we do begin to have a sense of path." - Neil McKinlay Neil McKinlay is a meditation teacher and mentor whose inspiring journey led him to explore the healing power of meditation and the importance of community in mental well-being. Neil started practicing meditation as a teenager and went on to study and practice in Tibetan Buddhism communities. After facing a challenging time in his life, Neil discovered the transformative potential of meditation in guiding him through his healing process. With a focus on embodied meditation, Neil teaches and shares his experience with others through his podcast, Bringing Meditation to Life, and his online communities. Join Neil as he dives into the world of meditation and its role in mental health and personal growth. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover the healing potential of meditation during life's challenges. Understand the vital role community plays in maintaining mental stability. Uncover your inner qualities through meditation habits. Achieve the perfect balance between patience and direction in meditation. Gain insight into the rise of mindfulness in the business world. Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: Meditation is the Path to Self-Love In this episode, I talk about the impact meditation has had on my life and why I recommend it as a practice to everyone! Meditation for Guidance with Daniel John Hanneman Daniel shares how you can own your value, why it’s important to trust yourself, and what it means to step into who you truly are. Expressive Meditation with Pragito Dove In this episode, Pragito explains how expressive meditation helps us to release repressed emotions. Resources: Connect with Neil: here Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT Gloria Grace Rand Namaste. I am Gloria Grace Rand, and I am so glad to be with you today for another episode of Live Love Engage as you just heard from the intro. And I've got a guest who I'm really looking forward to talk with today because Neil McKinlay is a meditation teacher and mentor, and he offers a range of resources that encourage and empower us to link meditation and daily living to let the wisdom we touch through our practice come into the world. And these include two online communities, and he has his own podcast called Bringing Meditation to Life. So I want to welcome you first off, Neil, to live, love, engage. Neil McKinlay Thanks very much, Gloria. It's great to be here. I appreciate this opportunity. Gloria Grace Rand As I said, I'm looking forward to it because meditation is a practice that I've been doing for, oh, my goodness, let's see, since 2009. So what does that make? That's a long time now. Let's just put it that way. I don't feel like doing the math right now, but it's been a while, and I've gotten a lot of benefits out of it. And so I know we'll talk a bit more about that, but I do like to start off on our podcast, asking our guests a little bit about their journey. And I know you've had a unique experience with meditation, and where you are now that wasn't always pleasant. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about that. Neil McKinlay Yeah, well, I learned to meditate as a teenager. I was a competitive swimmer, and a swim coach taught us one rainy night in Vancouver. It was an interesting time to be involved in athletics. This is the late 70s, early 80s, and what we now consider commonly as sports psychology was beginning to edge its way into my world. At least the coaches that I worked with were open to this. And so we did all this really weird stuff for the time, like visualization and progressive relaxation and goal setting and subliminal messaging and all this stuff. And part of that suite of tools and resources was meditation. I was taught to meditate at a swim meet during my competitive swimming years. And about 30 years ago, I started to give my engagement with the practice a little bit more formal shape. I was compelled by something that I still can't describe what, but I was compelled by something from the beginning. I started to study and practice in two successive communities. Both of them were grounded in Tibetan Buddhism. Both of them provided opportunities for formal engage, to engage formal curriculum, to do long retreats. And then, as you suggested, around 2016 or so, my relationship with the second community started to unravel to a certain extent. I started to feel uncomfortable with the way the leader was treating students, especially close students, senior students, long standing students like myself. It just became apparent to me over a period of these years that in spite of what I'd believed, in spite of what I'd been told myself, in spite of what I told others as a senior member of that community, what was driving that community was not the teachings. It wasn't the practice, it wasn't the development or the well-being of students, but really the self-centered impulses of a leader. And the extent that he was willing to go, to assert these impulses, to my eye, created an environment that was characterized by manipulation and disrespect and disempowerment. To give you an example of this, one general example. He was a master of what I call the bait and switch, promising one thing we're going to do this, and then taking it away and replacing it with something else. Expecting all of us to go along silently pretending like what had ever happened before had never actually occurred. Which, maybe in isolation doesn't sound like much. But when the dynamic repeats over a period of years and when plans and schedules and lives are upended by this, all by an authority figure that one trusts and an authority figure who seems to have little concern for the consequences of this, the effect was, for me, crazy making. It really distorted my relationship with my own inner knowing. And by 2019, that disorientation or that distortion had become so severe that I was mentally compromised. I was physically compromised and I had to just leave. So in February 2020, I made this difficult but utterly necessary choice to leave this 20 year relationship with this teacher in this community and opened up a path of recovery and healing, path of exploration and discovery, path of renewing my relationship with meditation that continues to this day. Gloria Grace Rand Wow. And it's interesting the timing of that too. It's like right before the Pandemic shut down too. How did that affect you or not affect you? Neil McKinlay Well, it was a very difficult one to blow if I focus only upon my own experience. And that's really difficult when we're talking about the Pandemic, because, of course, the effects of the Pandemic, I mean, global, they're incredibly far reaching. But focusing only upon my own experience with blow number one, I saw this community that I'd been part of for 20 years, this relationship, fall apart. I saw a significant amount of my livelihood because it was invested in that context, fall apart. And then with the Pandemic showing up, all the rest of it disappeared. And so within the span of two or three months, 100% of my livelihood vanished. And there are certainly other things that we could talk about in terms of impact, but, oh my gosh, that was a really intense impact just there. Gloria Grace Rand So what did you do? How did you kind of obviously you're doing well now and it seems to be anyway, so what did you do to kind of get yourself back going again, shall we say? Neil McKinlay Well, I was really lost, so we've got this one-two blow. And I was lost and literally lost. I didn't know where I was, I didn't know what I was going to do. And there were two things that happened that were noteworthy in my path of personal and I guess professional recovery that I need to be clear is ongoing. This is not something that's in the past, I still have good days and I still have bad days. So this is what I did, this is what I'm doing. So there are two things that were really interesting that arose in this context is the first is I turned towards what was familiar to me. I turned towards meditation. And it was just like that first time when I was taught how to meditate, when I just felt compelled toward the practice in a way I couldn't describe. I couldn't tell you why I turned toward meditation in this context, but that's what I did. And I started to settle into what was happening for me through the practice. So not getting rid of, not changing, but settling into that sense of lostness. And as I settled into that sense of lostness, there was this experience of knowing that became apparent that often spoke directly to what was happening to me, directly to what I was going through, which suggested to me a phase of meditation that I had never recognized before. One in which I let the wisdom that arises out of the settling of meditation actually guide me into my life. And that's what I started doing. That's a silver lining of being completely lost. It's like, well, what else am I going to do? And if what arose suggested I was tired, I would rest. It was that basic. If it suggested I was lonely, I would reach out....