If you want others to be happy, practise compassion.  If you want to be happy, practise compassion.    Dalai Lama 

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.

"Better together: Scotland's patient experience programme" works to use the public's experience of NHS Scotland to improve health services.  At the end of April they published provisional results for GP Practices throughout Scotland, and pilot results for a few initial hospitals are beginning to come through as well.  I find this fascinating, sobering, helpful stuff. 

Nearly every year for the last twenty years I've come down to a four day Spring residential "Mixed Group" in Cumbria.  I wrote about this group last year and the year before, and I'm also involved with a similar pattern of autumn "Men's Groups".

In yesterday's post I talked generally about the presentations at the BABCP spring conference.  Today I'd like to look more closely at what for me was the day's highlight - Willem Kuyken's talk on "Compassion in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: therapist embodiment and client change".  One reason I liked the talk a lot was that it was a good example of how painstaking research gradually adds stepping stones of knowledge across the swamp of our ignorance.  There's so much to learn.  As Ralph Sockman put it "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder".  And it's true.  The more I know, the more questions come up about what I realize I still don't know.

Friday was the "conference" day.  A real old fruit salad of presentations.  Nearly always I find it hard to stay awake and focused during this kind of "educational event".  It does however allow a lot of speakers to throw a lot of information at the audience!  The 2007 Marinopoulos et al review on the "Effectiveness of Continuing Medical Education" commented that " ...