“ A leader is a dealer in hope. ” - Napoleon

So it was the second session of the group yesterday.  I blogged about the first session last week.  Sadly a couple of people couldn't get to this second meeting - due to a pre-planned holiday and to an unexpected crisis.  It's quite common for participants to miss one or two evenings across a twelve session course like this, but I want to be careful when people miss such an early meeting.  It's important that they don't lose their way and get left behind.  They will get copies of the handouts and the Autogenic CD, but I also make a note to contact them myself.   

“ And now, let us believe in the new year that is given us - new, untouched, full of things that have never been. ” - Rainer Maria Rilke

Yesterday we had the first evening of the Life Skills group.  I've written in the past about the background planning behind this group.  How did this first meeting go?  Well there were nine of us - eight participants and myself.  Rather demandingly I'm both running a new course and trying to get used to new technology at the same time.  For years, when running small group trainings here at our house, I've used an overhead projector to shine transparencies up onto the wall.  For a while I've wanted to upgrade to a laptop and data projector, and this evening I went ahead to put this into practice.

“

Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow - perhaps it all will.

” - Einstein

In the 1970's I taught yoga and several different types of meditation.  In the 1980's I began teaching courses in Autogenic Training, a form of deep relaxation/meditation.  I continued running Autogenic classes for about 25 years.  In addition to the relaxation/meditation exercises, the teaching also covered several other life skill/stress management techniques.  For a much fuller description of these eight session courses, visit the Autogenic Training section of this website.

I wrote yesterday about a couple of 'notes of caution' when using mindfulness approaches and the "The bus driver metaphor".  I pointed out that many primary emotions & constructive thoughts help energise and direct us towards healthy goals.  I also mentioned the importance of integrating head & heart in mindfulness practice.  In today's post I want to extend the head/heart integration to include 'gut' as well, and also talk a little about the importance of sometimes using 'emotional processing' methods with some of our most persistently troublesome 'freeloader bus passenger' inner voices.

These posts on "The bus driver is warm-blooded" are downloadable as both Word and PDF handouts.

“ A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. ” - Anonymous

I wrote just a few days ago about the fourth session of this "Opening up" group.  This fifth session was a full day meeting.  Good to have a whole day together.  A bigger pool to swim in, more time to explore.  Nice too to share food together - we all brought contributions for lunch.

Here are half a dozen recent research studies - two on aspects of mindfulness, two on sobering prevalence rates, one on imagery in health anxiety, and one on CBT with children.  Fuller details, links and abstracts for all studies are listed further down this page.  Willem Kuyken and colleagues looked at "How does mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) work?" in helping recurrent depression sufferers.  They came up with some fascinating and provocative findings.  For example it appears that MBCT acts differently from standard CBT, although they are both helpful in reducing risk of depressive relapse.  Standard CBT (and maintenance antidepressants too) reduce cognitive reactivity to experiences of induced low mood, and this appears important in how they lessen relapse risk.  MBCT however seems to act not by reducing cognitive reactivity so much as by decoupling the reactivity from a tendency then to slide into depression.  It appears this decoupling is mediate

I wrote just a few days ago about the fourth session of this "Opening up" group.  This fifth session was a full day meeting.  Good to have a whole day together.  A bigger pool to swim in, more time to explore.  Nice too to share food together - we all brought contributions for lunch.

This year's annual British CBT conference jamboree has been a bit unusual for me.  I've been coming to these British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) conferences for years now, and routinely I would start with one of the full day pre-conference workshops before launching into the three days of conference proper.  I was booked into Emily Holmes's "Mental imagery in cognitive-behaviour therapy: PTSD and beyond" workshop, but then poor Catero my wife hurt her back at the weekend and so plans were changed and I delayed coming down from Edinburgh.  Recovery proceeds and here I am - a day & a half "late" and checking my mobile for news from home - but here for the first afternoon of the three day conference proper.