Experts suggested last week that we could all benefit from meditation, but you don’t need to go east to learn how – try Scotland instead It is mid afternoon and already getting dark as we approach Samye Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Scotland. The air is bitter, and bright prayer flags – red, yellow, blue and green – hang dripping in the Scottish rain, while a gold Buddha shines out of a pond choked with weed. My friend Jo and I have been deposited by the number 112 bus from Lockerbie for a weekend’s mindfulness meditation course at the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery to be built in the west. The building’s arcs of red and gold have been standing proud in the Scottish Lowlands since 1967. We walk down an avenue of white pillars and bare trees, passing a peacock bravely holding out against the cold. At the reception a monk, swathed in burgundy and orange robes, signs us in, palpably irritated. You might think a not-so-welcoming greeting would dampen our enthusiasm for the weekend – far from it. An irked monk: how brilliant that the tedium of office life gets to us all. We pay £114: £62 for the weekend course in mindfulness meditation (one Friday night session and four over the weekend), and £26 a night for a twin room and three vegetarian meals a day – making this my cheapest retreat ever. Then we go upstairs and make our own beds. The bed linen, like the crockery, has been rescued from Oxfam. My duvet cover is 70s floral, while Jo’s has the kind of red, black and grey graphics I last saw when I hung out with teenage boys and did a lot of snogging. Perhaps we’re responding to whatever karma brought the monks to this spot in the first place, or it may just be that this is a non-manipulative environment, but we already feel happy to be here

Original Source Scotland’s Buddhist retreat