Loch Kelly: The Way of Effortless Mindfulness

Loch Kelly’s new book, The Way of Effortless Mindfulness, is a practice manual for living a fully embodied, open-hearted life. Loch insists the goal of effortless mindfulness is not to escape or transcend, but to recognize and embody wakeful pure awareness, which is ever-present in the midst of the full range of human experience. To help listeners directly know effortless mindfulness, Loch offers a few mindful glimpse practices along with in-depth structural descriptions of what differentiates effortless mindfulness from mainstream mindfulness, or what he calls, deliberate mindfulness. The Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism says nature of mind or pure awareness is hard to recognize precisely because it is so close, so subtle, so simple, and so good! Our dialogue cuts though the esoteric clouds of confusion which often pervade instructions on how to recognize this extraordinary yet, so completely ordinary mind. Loch shares the unique framework explicated in The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: The Eight Types of Awareness, the Five Foundations of Effortless Mindfulness, and what he calls no-self Self. And because we are both clinicians, Loch and I also discuss how effortless mindfulness skills can be delivered in clinical contexts to alleviate cognitive, affective and physical distress.

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Loch Kelly, M.Div., LCSW has been teaching seminars, supervising clinicians and practicing awareness psychotherapy in NYC for 30 years. Loch is a graduate of Columbia University and Union Theological. He was awarded a fellowship to study forms of non-dual meditation in Sri Lanka, India and Nepal from 1981-1982 and has studied with teachers from around the world. He studied Buddhism with Professor Lily de Silva at the University of Kandy, Sri Lanka, Insight Meditation with Godwin Samararatne and at the Theravada monasteries, Inter-Spiritual Contemplative Meditation with Fr. Bede Griffiths and Anthony de Mello, Advaita at Sri Ramana Ashram, and Dzogchen and Sutra Mahamudra with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche in Nepal. Loch spent 10 years establishing homeless shelters and community lunch programs and working in a community mental health clinic in Brooklyn, New York. He also served as Coordinator of Counseling and Interspiritual Chaplain at Union Theological Seminary and worked extensively with families recovering from the trauma of 9/11.