Vidyamala
Mentor
I first met Vidyamala in the late nineties at the Manchester Buddhist Centre (MBC). She had recently moved from Wales, where she taught meditation at a retreat centre, to live in Manchester, attend events at the MBC, and serve as one of its trustees.
In 2000, Vidyamala—who is a partial paraplegic—and I, a person living with cerebral palsy (right-side hemiplegia), came together to start a project she initially called Peace of Mind. A few years later, this would be renamed Breathworks. Vidyamala was originally from New Zealand, and although I am British by birth, at this time I was considered an “international” or overseas person due to my extended time living and working in the United States prior to returning to England to study in 1996.
What Vidyamala and I shared was that we had independently turned to meditation and mindfulness as ways of managing our physical disabilities. For different reasons, neither of us had been adequately supported by the NHS, and both of us sought complementary approaches to help us live well. In the early 1990s, I regularly consulted medical doctors, a chiropractor, Dr Kimberly Beith, and an acupuncturist and Tai Chi teacher, Alan Uretz, at American Whole Health—now known as Whole Health Chicago—where I was first introduced to Tai Chi.
In 2000, having learned about my disability inclusion work, Vidyamala asked me to act as her official mentor. As she put it at the time, “You’ve inspired me not only to get back into the workplace, but to do so sustainably.” My role was to support her application to the Scope Give it a Go Millennium Award Scheme, which she was using to finance the Peace of Mind pilot project.
Vidyamala recognised that she could teach other disabled people the meditation and mindfulness techniques she had developed, helping to alleviate the suffering of those facing challenges like ours. I agreed to mentor and coach her, connecting her with the resources and networks needed to establish her project work and future business.
Today, Breathworks—now a Community Interest Company (CIC)—is a highly successful international organisation offering mindfulness-based approaches to living well with pain, stress, and illness.
A few years after its founding, Vidyamala changed the organisation’s name from Peace of Mind to Breathworks, and later established a complementary social enterprise. With the assistance of Sona Fricker and Gary Hennessey, both experienced mindfulness practitioners and teachers, she developed a train-the-trainers programme. This model mirrored a similar framework I had created earlier for the Workable Centre Network (WCN)- Europe project in 1998, which I led as WCN-Europe’s lead partner.