I was asked by a friend to write a short piece on research evidence backing up therapeutic uses of reading & writing to be used in a local initiative supporting health workers in a diverse range of settings.  Today's and tomorrow's post give the piece with hyperlinks to the various research studies that I mention.  A combination of the two posts is downloadable as a Word doc or as a PDF file.

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 posts and it's a bit messy finding them as they are strung out over many weeks.  Here are links to the ten posts organized into one place:

I wrote recently about the seventh week's practice in this eight week mindfulness course.  In today's post I'll look at the final session of the Williams & Penman course, described in chapter twelve (pp. 236 to 249) - "Your wild and precious life".  This phrase is taken from Mary Oliver's stunning poem - "The summer day".  The week-by-week course programme summary (p. 60) simply says "Week Eight helps you to weave mindfulness into your daily life, so that it's always there when you need it the most."   

I recently wrote about the fifth week of meditation practice - chapter nine in Mark Williams & Danny Penman's book.  This post is about the sixth week of practice and chapter ten "Trapped in the past or living in the present?" (pp. 183 to 208).  The week-by-week programme summary (p. 60) comments "Week six develops this process (turning towards difficulties) even further, exploring how negative ways of thinking gradually dissipate when you actively cultivate loving-kindness and compassion through a 'Befriending Meditation' and acts of generosity in daily life.  Cultivating friendship towards yourself, including for what you see as your 'failures' and 'inadequacies', is the cornerstone of finding peace in a frantic world." 

Last week I wrote about "Using Williams & Penman's book ... as a self-help resource (3rd post) - first week's practice".  It's time now to move on to the second week's practice described in chapter six - "Keeping the body in mind".

Time to roll up our sleeves and start turning Williams & Penman's book's "meditation recipes" into genuinely nourishing meals.  I have already written a first blog post on why we have good reason to be optimistic about the benefits we can achieve with this kind of self-help venture.  The second post encouraged us to get ready for the mindfulness practice.  We are now at chapter five in the book - "Mindfulness week one: waking up to the autopilot".