About
Anya Adair is a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner trained in the Kagyu lineage. She grew up at Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland and became a student of Mingyur Rinpoche in 2003, studying Mahamudra. She co-founded the Tergar Edinburgh practice group in 2017. Adair works as a transplant and liver/pancreas surgeon in Edinburgh and has been involved in healthcare outreach in Tibet and Nepal since 2003.
Teaching focus
Adair's core teaching draws on shamatha, analytical meditation, deity practice. The frame is the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra, but the language stays plain. Adair doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include bodhicitta, emptiness, and tonglen. None of those get presented as abstract ideas. They're worked into the body, into ethics, into how a practitioner shows up in family life or at work, so that the dharma stops feeling like a separate compartment. There's a steady invitation in the talks to keep practice human-sized. Sit when you can, return when you've drifted, and trust that small consistent attention does more over the years than dramatic breakthroughs. Format-wise, Adair teaches in in-person, group, and the tone moves easily between guided sittings, dharma talks, and Q&A. Questions tend to get answered the way they were asked, without being reframed into something cleaner. That alone tells you a lot about how the room feels.
Background
Anya Adair is a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner trained in the Kagyu lineage. She grew up at Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland and became a student of Mingyur Rinpoche in 2003, studying Mahamudra. She co-founded the Tergar Edinburgh practice group in 2017. Adair works as a transplant and liver/pancreas surgeon in Edinburgh and has been involved in healthcare outreach in Tibet and Nepal since 2003. Anya Adair grew up at Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre, which was founded in Scotland in 1967 by Akong Rinpoche. She was fortunate to meet many great meditation masters. She met Mingyur Rinpoche while visiting Palpung Sherab Ling in India in 2000 and became his student in 2003 when he began teaching Mahamudra in the United Kingdom. In 2017 she co-founded the Tergar Edinburgh practice group. Anya works as a Transplant and Liver/Pancreas Surgeon in Edinburgh and has been involved in outreach healthcare in Tibet and Nepal since 2003. Adair's teaching home is Tergar, where the practice community shapes the rhythm of retreats, sittings, and dharma talks. That work sits within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra, and the recurring concerns of Adair's teaching, ethical foundation, steady attention, and the slow softening of habitual reactivity, echo the older texts without sounding distant from a 21st-century practitioner's life. What stands out across Adair's talks isn't a single technique but a steadying tone. Practice is treated as something built slowly, in ordinary life, with care. There's room for the difficulties practitioners actually bring into the room, grief, restlessness, the body's complaints, family obligations, and the encouragement is consistent without being pushy.
Lineage
Adair teaches within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra. Current affiliations include Tergar. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Adair talks about practice, with steady reference to the older Buddhist vocabulary while keeping the door open for people who've never read a sutra. Whether that framing lands as monastic or lay depends on the specific talk, but the consistent thread is care for the form without letting the form become the point.
What to expect
Sitting with Adair, you can expect grounded instruction in shamatha, with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. Group settings have a community feel without becoming social. People sit, listen, and check in. The teaching voice is steady. Adair won't push you past your edge, and there's a clear preference for slow, sustainable practice over breakthrough chasing. Bring a notebook if you like, or don't. Either way, you'll be met where you are.
