(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 of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."    Rumi

"Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men."   Confucius

     (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 Society.  It was the year that Shunryu Suzuki's great book "Zen mind, beginner's mind" was published.  I was deeply intrigued.  So much of his writing was challenging:

This is the sixth and final blog post about going back to my old university for a reunion dinner.  I wrote three posts last month and a further couple earlier this month.  In the first post of the series, I said: "I've never been back for any kind of reunion before ... not to school, not to university, not to medical college. Why not ... and why am I going back now?  I'm a medical doctor, but primarily I work as a psychotherapist ... as a specialist in stress, health & wellbeing.

"Who will prefer the jingle of jade pendants if he once has heard stone growing in a cliff?"  Lao Tzu

"To stand and stare, to watch the rising sun, fills me with such calm happiness, I am sure I have
dwindled away too much time on inessentials."  Diana Gault (when dying of cancer)

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:

In June I wrote a series of five posts reporting on a pre-conference workshop (about treating chronic fatigue) and the first day of the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) main annual conference, held this year in Leeds.  Then last month I wrote a further couple of posts.  Now here is the eighth and final report in the sequence:

The last day of the BABCP main annual conference in Leeds was the usual mix of presentations & conversations.  I had breakfast with a couple of delightful researchers earnestly discussing the technicalities of a proposed new questionnaire about genital dissatisfaction.  Mm ... not a very appetising topic over the tea & toast. 

I wrote an initial blog post in May entitled "Personal directions in mindfulness teaching: an overview" where I said that I was "excited, stimulated, happy, frustrated, challenged, and hopeful" about the current surge of interest in mindfulness and introduced the following diagram:
 
                                          (This diagram is downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Powerpoint slide).  

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."