Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
The old reaction does not get erased. You lay a new one over the top of it, and on a tired or unfamiliar day the old one can still come through.
So a flare after months of doing well is not everything undone. That is what relearning looks like, and it tends to turn up alongside broken sleep, real stress, or a setting you have never practised in. The move afterwards is back to the practice, not back to the verdict.
Qur’an and Sunnah
who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down (Quran 3:191). The practice is described as something threaded through every posture of the day, which is how a new pattern gets laid down over an old one.
ٱلَّذِينَ يَذۡكُرُونَ ٱللَّهَ قِيَٰمࣰ ا وَقُعُودࣰ ا وَعَلَىٰ جُنُوبِهِمۡ وَيَتَفَكَّرُونَ فِي خَلۡقِ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضِ رَبَّنَا مَا خَلَقۡتَ هَٰذَا بَٰطِلࣰ ا سُبۡحَٰنَكَ فَقِنَا عَذَابَ ٱلنَّارِ
who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down, who reflect on the creation of the heavens and earth: ‘Our Lord! You have not created all this without purpose- You are far above that!- so protect us from the torment of the Fire
Qur’an 3:191read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a trial of people recovered from depression, both mindfulness based cognitive therapy and cognitive therapy prevented relapse, each partly through its own process: standing back from thoughts in one, shifting rigid beliefs in the other. Prevention is the word the researchers use, which suits a picture of old patterns held off rather than deleted. This is one trial in a specific population.
Norman A. S. Farb; Adam K. Anderson; Arun Ravindran; Lance L. Hawley; Julie Irving; Enza Mancuso (2017). Prevention of relapse/recurrence in major depressive disorder with either mindfulness-based cognitive therapy or cognitive therapy.. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
New learning competes with the old pattern rather than removing it, so the old one is still there to be outvoted.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Bring to mind someone easy to love, a person or a pet, and let the warmth actually arrive in your body. Then send the same warmth outward in stages: a stranger, a colleague, someone who irritates you.
Light behaves like a particle in one experiment and like a wave in another, and physicists live with both. That is a good picture for two accounts of one event, and a picture is all it is.
Nobody arrives with restraint already fitted. If holding your tongue feels like unnatural work, that is what it is for everyone, and it says nothing about what you are underneath.