It is clear that there is a U-shaped association between sleep duration and mortality, with both short and long sleep linked with increased death rates.  This finding is underlined by two major recent research overviews - Gallicchio & Kalesan "Sleep duration and mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis" and Cappuccio et al's "Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies".  There is so much interesting that one could write about this, but this particular blog post is triggered by a personal query that I have.  I try hard - and am mostly successful - to have a very healthy lifestyle.  I eat well, exercise well, keep a sensible weight, don't smoke, don't d

Well last night was the third session of this MBSR course.  I wrote last week about the second evening and also about mindfulness during daily activities.  We packed a lot into this session - there were four practical meditation exercises involving attending to sounds, breath & body awareness, mindfulness during movement & a brief breathing space.  We also had quite extensive group discussions of our experience during each of these practices, a pair exercise to discuss our "homework" last week (it felt helpful to me that this was a bit longer than last session's pair discussion) and more general "homework" exploration in the group.

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 genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self ... I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me I had no self to transcend ... Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness.  This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being.  It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering - fear, anger, shame - in an instant.

” - Sam Harris

“

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“ Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. ” - Franklin Jones

So it was the second session of the group yesterday.  I blogged about the first session last week.  Sadly a couple of people couldn't get to this second meeting - due to a pre-planned holiday and to an unexpected crisis.  It's quite common for participants to miss one or two evenings across a twelve session course like this, but I want to be careful when people miss such an early meeting.  It's important that they don't lose their way and get left behind.  They will get copies of the handouts and the Autogenic CD, but I also make a note to contact them myself.   

“ Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. ” - Rainer Maria Rilke

Yesterday we had the first evening of the Life Skills group.  I've written in the past about the background planning behind this group.  How did this first meeting go?  Well there were nine of us - eight participants and myself.  Rather demandingly I'm both running a new course and trying to get used to new technology at the same time.  For years, when running small group trainings here at our house, I've used an overhead projector to shine transparencies up onto the wall.  For a while I've wanted to upgrade to a laptop and data projector, and this evening I went ahead to put this into practice.

“ Healthy living has benefits hugely greater than anything medicine can deliver. ” - Bandolier 136, Oxford evidence-based medicine website

In the 1970's I taught yoga and several different types of meditation.  In the 1980's I began teaching courses in Autogenic Training, a form of deep relaxation/meditation.  I continued running Autogenic classes for about 25 years.  In addition to the relaxation/meditation exercises, the teaching also covered several other life skill/stress management techniques.  For a much fuller description of these eight session courses, visit the Autogenic Training section of this website.