Lisa Cairns came to nondual teaching out of the radical-nonduality stream associated with Tony Parsons and The Open Secret. Her own account of the road there is winding. She began seeking in her early twenties inside Buddhism, and a first opening came in 2005 at a Tony Parsons talk she had initially found irritating. She spent time around Parsons in London, then in India with Ramesh Balsekar, and then several years in Australia with Roger Castillo, a student of Ramesh’s, before the seeking fell away around 2011. She began holding meetings and retreats soon after, first in the United Kingdom and then increasingly across Europe and the United States. Her teaching style is unusually direct and unusually warm at the same time. She speaks in plain conversational English, sits on the floor with the people in front of her, and refuses, with great patience, every move the seeking mind makes to keep itself in business.
The pointing she returns to is that there is only this, the immediate aliveness of what is happening, with nothing else needed. The seeker’s project is a maintained tension that disguises the simplicity of the case. Recognition is not an event in time, it is the seeing through of the assumption that there must be such an event. This is it. There is nothing missing. Nothing is happening to anyone.
Her work is mostly available through her own video recordings and residential retreats. She has been less prolific in print than some of the other teachers in the modern nondual stream, which is consistent with the strand of teaching she carries.
An example of the teaching
A typical exchange in one of her meetings begins with a sincere question about method. Someone has glimpsed the openness she describes and wants to know how to get it back, or how to make it permanent. Rather than answer on those terms, she slows the question down and looks at what it assumes: a someone who had the experience, lost it, and could own it again later. Each of those assumptions is examined in the moment, conversationally, until the questioner can see that the wanting itself is just energy arising now, in the same open aliveness it claims to be missing.
She gives the same treatment to the felt contraction that drives seeking. When someone reports anxiety or lack, she invites them to stay with the raw sensation rather than the story attached to it, and to notice that even this, met directly, is simply what is happening. There is no technique in it and she is explicit that none is being offered. What she models, meeting after meeting, is the willingness to let every experience be what it is without recruiting it into a project of becoming.
Where to start
- The official site: retreat schedule, book club, store, and meeting listings.
- Her YouTube channel: weekly live talks and a large archive of recorded meetings; the easiest way to meet her voice.
- Buddha at the Gas Pump interview: a long-form conversation with Rick Archer covering her history and the shape of the teaching.
