I had lunch with a health professional friend the other day.  Later he emailed me saying "The last few times we have met you have mentioned the importance of attachment style in determining aspects of the interaction between patients and health care professionals."  He went on to raise a series of questions about health professional-patient relationships, about the way that the attachment style of both health professional and patient can affect outcomes, about how adult attachment is measured and the possibility of improving attachment patterns, and about links between attachment & mindfulness.  Gosh a lot of interesting questions being raised here.

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

When I get to heaven they will not ask me, “Why were you not Moses?”  Instead they will ask “Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could come?”   Susya, a Hasidic rabbi

"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."  Thich Nhat Hanh

(This post & the previous one in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file)

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes."   Proust

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."    Rumi

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

     (This post & the next in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file)

"But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new."    Shunryu Suzuki

In 1970 I started to learn meditation with the Cambridge Buddhist Society.  It was the year that Shunryu Suzuki's great book "Zen mind, beginner's mind" was published.  I was deeply intrigued.  So much of his writing was challenging:

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

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

Earlier this year I wrote a sequence of ten blog posts to support people working their way through Mark Williams & Danny Penman's fine book  "Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world" as a self-help training in mindfulness practice.  I've referred lots of people to these posts and it's a bit messy finding them as they are strung out over many weeks.  Here are links to the ten posts organized into one place:

I've been asked to give a talk on "Mindfulness and the healing relationship" at a seminar later this autumn.  The brief is to approach the subject via the emerging research evidence.  The seminar organizer may well reduce the number of words involved, but the information I sent him read: