What is mindfulness?
Last updated on 3rd November 2011

You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.
- Thomas Traherne
Yesterday we had the twelfth & final session of this "Life skills" evening class. There was scheduled to have been a bit less than a three month gap since the last - eleventh - session. However the heavy winter snow we'd experienced had resulted in this last session being postponed.
Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine. - Leo Tolstoy
I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
- E. B. White
I wrote yesterday about the first part of this tenth "Life skills" evening. I particularly discussed development of Goodwill practice - very much in the "Nourishing positive states" section of the "Four aspects" diagram (below). In the second half of the evening we moved on to the "Exploring & processing" section of the diagram with the introduction particularly of various forms of therapeutic writing.

If you want others to be happy, practise compassion. If you want to be happy, practise compassion. - The 14th Dalai Lama
If you want others to be happy, practise compassion. If you want to be happy, practise compassion. Dalai Lama
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.
- Warren Buffet
Yesterday was the ninth evening of this "Life skills" training. I wrote about the eighth session last week. The sequence of regular weekly classes now moves on to increasing gaps between sessions - so it's three weeks until the tenth, a further five weeks until the eleventh, and then an additional eleven weeks until the final twelfth session. My hope is that we will be able to arrange occasional follow-up meetings even after that.
One shouldn’t complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
- Jacques Derrida
I never lose. I either win or learn.
- Nelson Mandela
Until lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter. - African proverb
Yesterday we had the sixth session of this twelve evening "Life skills" course. I wrote last week about the fifth session. A dozen slides covering material we explored are viewable/downloadable at slides 1-6, Powerpoint or slides 1-6, PDF and slides 7-12, Powerpoint or slides 7-12, PDF.