(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.) 

About every three months I meet up with one of my oldest and dearest friends and we spend twenty four hours or so together checking in on how our lives are going and what our plans are - this "work" links to the post "Building willpower: the seven pillars"   Our friendship goes back nearly 30 years and we've been doing these check-in's for a decade or so.  We know each other pretty well!  I'm just back from one of these times and it leads me to think a bit about friendship.

Yesterday, Catero and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary with a ceilidh.  This is Auld Lang Syne at the end of the party.  I'm the loudmouth (on one glass of wine), with dear Catero on my left (to the right in the picture).  Laura, precious stepdaughter, is three places to my left and Kieran, precious son, only half shown four places to my right.  Celebration and gratitude ... and very relevant to this month's blog post themes of relationships and social networks.

On the 15^th March 2010 my dear, precious mother Edie Hawkins died.  She was 97 and I'm writing this post ten days later.  After the funeral, after the flurry of forms and arrangements and visits and paperwork have quietened down.

I woke early this morning.  Thought about her.  A sense of her.  She was an immensely kind, giving, determined, selfless person.  This website wouldn't be here without the influence of her and my father, Jim Hawkins (who died back in 1989) - also such a generous, caring, thoughtful human being. 

If you've found anything of value on this site - if it's helped you personally or in your work, please say an inner thank you to Edie and Jim.  This website wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them and how they've influenced what I believe in and what I work for.

They taught me more about, in the midst of all this trauma and suffering and uncertainty - of remaining true to who you are,
and what love can be about in those moments. And there are three or four of those that really stand out very strongly,
whose lives were very different but who were kind of my teachers.
A therapist describing the impact on himself of working with clients struggling with AIDS

You can access a downloadable Word format version of this post by clicking here.

I continue to slowly add handouts & questionnaires to the relevant area in the website's "Good Knowledge" section.  Here are a some that I use largely in the territory of wellbeing, mindfulness and relaxation.  Some are assessment and monitoring questionnaires.  Some provide orientating information.  Some describe specific exercises to do.

Attention, focus & time - this is a Powerpoint slide that I put together and use as a printed-out handout when discussing what we spend our time paying attention to, and how certain forms of attention focus are likely to be more helpful than others.

Four aspects of inner focus - this is another Powerpoint slide I print out to illustrate some overlapping aspects of mindfulness, meditation, relaxation, self-hypnosis, and other related practices.

Transdiagnostic wellbeing therapy - I put this Powerpoint picture together in a rather tongue in cheek way in a discussion with Tom Borkovec.  Despite its quite light-hearted origin, the diagram makes some useful points.