These 'homework' instructions are phrased to fit with the "Compassion, wisdom & wellbeing: 8 week training" that we're running.  If you're going through this material independently of the structured group format, of course you can pace it to suit yourself and you may take longer or shorter than a week to do the 'homework' between the content sessions.  I've written about the first evening of the course in "Compassion, wisdom & wellbeing: 1st session content".  This blog post describes seven homework tasks it would be great if you would complete before the 2nd session of the course ...

I've already introduced this course in an earlier blog post "Compassion, wisdom & wellbeing: an 8 week training".  This post gives background for the first session of the training.  It will be particularly relevant for participants, but others not coming to the course itself may well find these ideas interesting & helpful.  I certainly hope so!

General details of this course have already been given in the blog post "Compassion, wisdom & wellbeing: an 8 week training".  Before, during & after the course, there's encouragement to fill in questionnaires.  This is suggested for at least three reasons.  One is that when we measure something, we tend to pay more attention to it.  Keeping track is often a therapeutic intervention in its own right.  Secondly we're using questionnaires to see if changes in our behaviours actually produce the improvements we're hoping for.  Does working through this training over a couple of months genuinely improve our compassion, wisdom & wellbeing?  There are more comprehensive ways to measure this, but questionnaires are 'low tech' and one of the most straightforward ways to asses

A good friend & I have just been sorting out the practical details of running an 8 week course together on "Compassion, wisdom & wellbeing", starting in January.  Some aspects still need to be tweaked, but the basic publicity information runs like this:

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

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

After a rather inauspicious start on Friday (see yesterday's post), the next day - Saturday, the first full day of the group - was, for me, deeply wonderful.  One of the really special days of my life.  An ocean of a day, so much happened. A bit like a lifetime in itself.

I wrote yesterday about the two pre-European Conference on Positive Psychology (ECPP) workshops I went to on "Positive supervision" and on "Positive relationships".  Then in mid-afternoon on Tuesday, the conference proper began.  It was heralded by Taiko drummers and a cluster of brief welcoming speeches.  Apparently there are 920 people at the conference from about 50 different countries.  The country spread is similar, but the numbers are up 50% on the approximately 600 attendees at the 5th ECPP I went to in Copenhagen four years ago.

Last September I went back to Cambridge for a reunion ... the first time I'd ever been back to school or university for such a thing.  It was an experiment in "emotional archaeology" and I wrote a series of blog posts about it.  At one stage I experimented with a dialogue between the 22 year old and the current 62 year old versions of me.  In the post "Going back for a university reunion: self-esteem, hallucinogens, wonder & the transpersonal", I wrote "I changed subject too from philosophy to medicine (in 1970).

In the words of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem "The summer day":