"When I get to heaven, God will not ask ‘Why were you not Moses?'. He will ask ‘Why were you not Susya?
Why did you not become what only you could become?'"   Susya, a Hasidic rabbi  

(This post on purpose in life questionnaires and the previous one on the importance of purpose in life for health & wellbeing have been combined into a handout that is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file)

I wrote an initial blog post in May entitled "Personal directions in mindfulness teaching: an overview" where I said that I was "excited, stimulated, happy, frustrated, challenged, and hopeful" about the current surge of interest in mindfulness and introduced the following diagram:
 
                                          (This diagram is downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Powerpoint slide).  

I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database -

I have already written four blog posts about the pre-conference workshop I attended (on Fatigue) and a couple of posts on the conference proper - "Two symposia on how CBT works, Paul Salkovskis's plenary and the compassion special interest group" and "Therapeutic stories & metaphors".  Today's post looks further at the second day of this annual BABCP get-together with comments on Kelly Wells's plenary lecture on Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Jennifer Cumming on application of imagery for athletes and exercisers.

I wrote yesterday on stress, abuse & mind-body links that might be relevant for some chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers. There is a good deal of research too on other - possibly linked - vulnerability factors that may predispose some people to later development of fatigue problems - including a number of studies on unhelpful levels/types of perfectionism.

In yesterday's post, I described the pre-workshop publicity for this day on treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome.  How did I find the workshop in actual practice? Well, I enjoyed meeting Trudie Chalder. She came across as very alive, friendly, bright, knowledgeable. Great.  And her two decades or so of dedicated exploration of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is so impressive ... one of those research journeys that I find it heart-warming to look at.  For me the workshop itself was a bit of a funny mix. In the morning session we were given an overview/update on chronic fatigue syndrome and its standard CBT treatment.

The 40th British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) conference is at Leeds University.  As usual it's preceded by a choice of pre-conference workshops. Three of the nineteen initially on offer have been cancelled, but there's still a wealth of options. I'm due to go to Trudie Chalder, from the London Institute of Psychiatry, speaking on "Emotional Processing in the Context of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Implications for Persistent Physical Symptoms in General".  The pre-workshop publicity states: "More than half of people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have co-morbid depression or anxiety.