Time to roll up our sleeves and start turning Williams & Penman's book's "meditation recipes" into genuinely nourishing meals.  I have already written a first blog post on why we have good reason to be optimistic about the benefits we can achieve with this kind of self-help venture.  The second post encouraged us to get ready for the mindfulness practice.  We are now at chapter five in the book - "Mindfulness week one: waking up to the autopilot".

I wrote a first post last month about a workshop I went to given by Professor Colin Espie - "Sleep well and live better: overcoming insomnia using CBT".  I mentioned that he went through the sequence: What is insomnia?  Why is it a big deal?  Why is cognitive behaviour therapy relevant?  Is it clinically effective?  How can it be delivered in real world practice?  In today's post I would like to look more at Why is it a big deal?  And I would like particularly to focus on links between insomnia and depression. 

(This & last week's social anxiety blog posts are available as a PDF file or a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it)

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point"     C. S. Lewis

(This blog post is available both as a PDF file and as a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it) 

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."  Jonathan Safran Foer

"No man was ever wise by chance."    Lucius Seneca  

(This & next week's social anxiety blog posts are available as a PDF file or a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it)

"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time."         Frederich Nietzsche

This is the first in a series of intended posts about using Mark Williams & Danny Penman's excellent recent book "Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world" as a self-help training in mindfulness practice.  My hope is that these blog posts will provide some back-up resources to the many good things already present in the book, accompanying CD & linked website. 

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 over 16,900 abstracts.

So yesterday was a day seminar on Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) with Robert Elliott.  I wrote yesterday about my excitement over starting this sequence of monthly workshops - there are another five due over January to May next year.  Well how did the day go?