Posts tagged with 'mindfulness'
Attachment style in both health professionals & their clients, therapeutic alliance & mindfulness
17th April 2013
I had lunch with a health professional friend the other day. Later he emailed me saying "The last few times we have met you have mentioned the importance of attachment style in determining aspects of the interaction between patients and health care professionals." He went on to raise a series …
Recent evidence highlights the value of monitoring practice quality during mindfulness training
13th January 2013
Is it helpful to monitor the quality of one's mindfulness practice ... and, if so, what should one be monitoring? I've raised this question with experienced mindfulness teachers before and been answered with the concern that monitoring practice quality might increase an "achievement orientation" state of mind that could actually …
"To reach the other shore with each step of the crossing": a brief embodied cognition meditation exercise (3rd post)
30th December 2012
(This blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc and a PDF file) When I get to heaven they will not ask me, “Why were you not Moses?” Instead they will ask “Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could come?” Susya, a …
"To reach the other shore with each step of the crossing": linking this with embodied cognition (2nd post)
28th December 2012
(This post & the previous one in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file) "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes." Proust "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds …
"To reach the other shore with each step of the crossing": zazen, associative thinking & value-driven behaviour (1st post)
26th December 2012
(This post & the next in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file) "But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new." Shunryu Suzuki In 1970 I started to learn meditation with the Cambridge Buddhist …
Our minds work associatively: this is of central importance for psychotherapy and for life in general
24th December 2012
(this post is downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Word doc) In his brilliant book "Thinking, fast and slow" published last year, the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman says his aim is to help improve our "ability to identify and understand errors of judgement and choice ... …
A day spent "idle and blessed": report of an experiment
30th November 2012
In the words of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem "The summer day": Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean - the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of …
Rumination: brooding, pondering, mindfulness, hypersensitivity, concreteness, writing - raising as many questions as answers
13th November 2012
Probably most cogntive-behavioural therapists subscribe to the general comment that rumination is a bad for depression. And it is, but as Oscar Wilde said "The truth is rarely pure and never simple". Smith & Alloy, in their 2009 paper "A roadmap to rumination: a review of the definition, assessment, and …
Using Williams & Penman's book "Mindfulness: a practical guide" as a self-help resource - overview of 10 supporting blog posts
14th August 2012
Earlier this year I wrote a sequence of ten blog posts to support people working their way through Mark Williams & Danny Penman's fine book "Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world" as a self-help training in mindfulness practice. I've referred lots of people to these …
Mindfulness and the therapeutic relationship: does it make any difference?
10th August 2012
I've been asked to give a talk on "Mindfulness and the healing relationship" at a seminar later this autumn. The brief is to approach the subject via the emerging research evidence. The seminar organizer may well reduce the number of words involved, but the information I sent him read: "James …