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?

The UK branch of UNICEF very recently stated "In 2007, UNICEF's child well-being report put the issue of child well-being firmly on the UK's political agenda. When compared with 20 other OECD countries, including substantially poorer ones, the UK was at the bottom of the league table of child well-being.  Subsequent reports have shown that inequality among children in the UK is greater than in other countries. UNICEF UK commissioned Ipsos MORI and Dr Agnes Nairn to explore some of the reasons behind these statistics by comparing children's experiences in the UK with those of children in Spain and Sweden."

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."   George Bernard Shaw 

Wednesday morning - half way through this two day workshop with Scott Miller on client-directed, outcome-informed (CDOI) therapy.  I flew into Copenhagen on Monday evening, the plane blown fast from Edinburgh on the last gasps of Hurricane Katia as she slowly expired in her long journey across the Atlantic.  I like Copenhagen.  Bizarrely, having never been here before, I have now visited three times in the last 18 months - the European Positive Psychology Conference in June last year, a long weekend with my wife in December, and now this two day workshop.

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). 

Ouch, a very interesting international health survey, that has just been released, reports:

"Middle-aged Britons are experiencing a mid-life health crisis, according to new research from Bupa, which shows that those aged 45-54 are more likely to be obese, more likely to smoke and more likely to suffer from depression than their peers around the world.

The international Bupa Health Pulse study, which asked more than 13,000 people in 12 different countries questions about their health and lifestyles has shown that late-middle age is the toughest time health-wise for Britons. No other country in the survey - which included Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia showed such a consistent range of unhealthy results for this age group.

The study, which questioned more than 2,000 people in the UK, found:

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 16,600 abstracts.