Behavioural Activation Part 1 – A Common Sense Approach to Mental Health Your Gran Would Agree With
I think the best psychotherapy and well being programmes have common sense overflowing from each practice, intervention or tool. Would your Gran have told you to do this when you were a child? Did the Greeks, Stoics and indigenous cultures do these things either consciously or as part of ‘the Good Life’? If the answer […]
The Acceptance Spectrum
It can feel insulting when someone tells you to accept your anxiety, depression or other mental health symptoms. Especially if they appear to be an academic expert who does not have the intense lived experience of an anxiety or a mood disorder. They haven’t awoken with primal terror as if their heart is trying to […]
Kind Thoughts and Tricky Brains
When Professor Paul Gilbert developed Compassion Focused Therapy it was in part to solve a clinical Rubik’s cube. Cognitive Therapy helped some of his clients to re-frame their negative depressive thoughts. Their inner critic would utter the usual ‘helpful’ mental stream of ‘you’re useless, you’ll never achieve x or y, you might as well go […]
Acceptance – One of the Most Useful Skills
Before I focused on mindfulness I used to practice a number of meditation practices which emphasised concentration. They used to teach things like ‘throw thoughts away’ or ‘just let go of emotions’ and the principle that if you developed enough focus then you could overcome all fears, worries and concerns. Well this was all good […]
Return from the ‘Bliss’ Retreat
Leigh Brasington’s Jhana retreat turned out to be an illuminating learning experience. There were some real highs and the typical challenges of being on a 9-day silent retreat. I had moments of energising bliss, followed by deeply-still happiness and then moments of just stillness alone without obvious positive emotion. I also had moments of my […]
Going on a ‘Bliss’ Retreat
I am excited tomorrow to be going on a 10 day retreat at Gaia House (www.gaiahouse.co.uk) in Newton Abbot, Devon. The retreat will be taught by Leigh Brasington, the senior American student of the late Ven. Ayya Khema (leighb.com) and is entitled Right Concentration. This is because it focusses (no pun intended!) on meditative concentration/absorption […]
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Mindfulness
It was wonderful to see Jon Kabat-Zinn talk about mindfulness at the School of Life on the 2nd May 2015. Jon has arguably played one of the most important roles for the promotion of secular mindfulness in society, through the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Programme that he founded. MBSR was originally put together to […]
Why do mindfulness?
Before starting any endeavour it is good for us to consider why we are doing it, particularly in terms of what benefits we can anticipate. There are only so many free hours in the day and each one ideally should be used to bring more happiness to ourselves and to others. Mindfulness is no different, […]
