"If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life."    Wu-men

This is one of a series of blog posts triggered by attending a MBSR training - see for example the recent "Learning mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR): second evening of the course".  A key aspect of the training is the development of "mindfulness" in everyday life.  To me, mindfulness during daily activities seems to have different flavours at different times.  I wonder if this is useful, if varying the flavour depending on the situation can be helpful?  Here are three examples from the last three days:

A dozen Powerpoint slides I put together for this seminar are downloadable by clicking here. 

I wrote a blog post a few days ago entitled "Mindfulness: teaching & learning".  I talked about my decision to participate in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, saying "Why participate in a MBSR course? Basically because I think it would be rather interesting! There's a real groundswell of energy for mindfulness based approaches at the moment. Some of it is "faddy" and will ebb away over time. Some of the energy though is helping us understand much more about mindfulness and how it can best be used in helping us live with less suffering and more joy. So what are my "learning objectives" for the MBSR course?

Here are half a dozen interesting recent papers on mindfulness that have caught my eye.  Mindfulness research is roaring ahead a bit like a runaway train (probably not an ideal analogy for this subject matter), so it's good to get regular reviews of where we're getting to.  The first two papers I mention are "a synthesis of the empirically supported advantages of mindfulness" by Davis & Haye, including "research on therapists who meditate and client outcomes of therapists who meditate", and a review of "the empirical literature on the effects of mindfulness on psychological health" by Keng & colleagues (full details and links to all articles mentioned are given further down this blog post). 

(This blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc and as a PDF file).