Mark began practising meditation in 2008 and spent the following four years living and working in retreat centres and monasteries around the UK and Asia. Motivated to make these precious teachings more widely accessible and available, in 2013 he co-founded Freely Given Retreats and soon afterwards pioneered taking mindfulness courses into UK prisons. In more recent years Mark has been especially engaged with environmental and social justice issues. He was a close student of the late Rob Burbea.
Matt has been practising Buddhist meditation since 2008 in the early Buddhist and Zen traditions. He has been studying with Leigh Brasington in the tradition of Ven. Ayya Khema since a transformative retreat at Gaia House in 2013. He qualified as a Zenways meditation and mindfulness teacher in 2017, and was authorised to teach jhana retreats in 2022. He has benefitted profoundly from these practices in his own life and is keen to share them with others for the benefit of all.
Maura Sills is the founder of Core Process Psychotherapy and founder of the Karuna Institute, Dartmoor. The Karuna Institute offered Masters Degree Trainings in Buddhist informed Psychotherapy Trainings Accredited with the U.K. Council for Psychotherapy. She was a nun in the Theravadan Buddhist tradition with Taungpulu Sayadaw of the Burmese Forest Tradition. She is an Honorary Fellow of the UK Council for Psychotherapists and the Moderator of their Members Forum Maura has led Meditation Retreats for over forty years in both the Theravadin and Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
Molly is a co-founder of True North Insight and a former guiding teacher of TNI. She has been engaging in spiritual inquiry and dharma practice since 1985, both in Asia and the West. She has been teaching Insight Meditation retreats primarily in Canada since 1997 and offers classes, retreat days & individual support closer to their home in Guelph, Ontario.
Monica Antunes has been practising Buddhist meditation in Burma and the West since 2008. She trained to teach the Dharma in the Insight Meditation tradition under the guidance of Guy Armstrong and Rob Burbea. Also a practitioner in NeuroSystemics, a bio-psychosocial approach to individual, group and community resilience, she supports humanitarian projects for child protection and teaches mindfulness to people with cancer. Monica was born and raised in Mozambique.
