These home practice suggestions link with the "Compassion, wisdom & wellbeing: 2nd session content" blog post.  There are seven requests for this next week.  

So this is the second session of the "Compassion, wisdom & wellbeing: 8 week training".  I posted a description of the initial session a few days ago ...

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

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - Endnote - which currently contains well over 25,000 abstracts.  I also regularly tweet about emerging research, so following me on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ (click on the relevant icon at the top of this web page) will keep you up to speed with some of what I'm finding interesting. Additionally you can view this highlighted research by visiting Scoop.it (click on the "it!" icon at the top of the page).  At Scoop.it, I stream publications into five overlapping topic areas: Cognitive & General Psychotherapy, Depression, Compassion & Mindfulness, Healthy Living & Healthy Aging, and Positive Psychology.

This is the fourth & last post in the sequence that starts with "Upgrading the 'breathing space' meditation, some research-based suggestions (1st post): mindfulness & naming" and then goes on to "Upgrading the 'breathing space' meditation ... (2nd post): touch & affectionate releasing" & "Upgrading the 'breathing space' meditation, some research-based suggestions (3rd post): embodied values". 

Reappraisal (changing the meaning we give to experiences) has been repeatedly shown to be one of the most effective ways we have to regulate our emotions.  It's one of the star components of effective emotion-regulation, coping-skill toolkits ... and it's important to realise that these toolkits can be very helpful (De Castella, 2017).  Reappraisal is important across a variety of difficult states ... depression (Cheng, 2017), anxiety (Goldin, 2017), anger, interpersonal conflict, minor hassles (Richardson, 2017), and major life difficulties.