Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
There is an old set of pictures: a boy loses an ox, catches sight of it, chases it, tames it, and finally rides it home. Asking which picture you are in this week is kinder and more useful than asking whether you are doing well.
Searching, glimpsing, wrestling and riding each have their own next step, and none of them is a grade. Someone still looking for the ox needs to learn what sets them off. Someone riding home needs to keep riding rather than announce that it is finished.
Qur’an and Sunnah
lasting good works have a better reward with your Lord and give better grounds for hope (Quran 18:46). Slow work is the kind that gives grounds for hope, which is worth holding onto in the picture where you are still chasing.
ٱلۡمَالُ وَٱلۡبَنُونَ زِينَةُ ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَاۖ وَٱلۡبَٰقِيَٰتُ ٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتُ خَيۡرٌ عِندَ رَبِّكَ ثَوَابࣰ ا وَخَيۡرٌ أَمَلࣰ ا
Wealth and children are the attractions of this worldly life, but lasting good works have a better reward with your Lord and give better grounds for hope
Qur’an 18:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Inside a randomised relapse prevention trial, the ability to stand back and see thoughts as passing events grew specifically in the group given mindfulness based cognitive therapy, rather than in the medication or placebo groups, and it tracked with how well the treatment worked. Placing yourself on a sequence is a small version of that same stepping back. It comes from a process analysis within one trial, so it describes a mechanism rather than proving one.
Peter Bieling; Lance L. Hawley; Richard T. Bloch; Kathleen Corcoran; Robert D. Levitan; L. Trevor Young (2012). Treatment-specific changes in decentering following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy versus antidepressant medication or placebo for prevention of depressive relapse.. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Knowing where you are on a path gives you a next step instead of a verdict.
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
Losing your grip has a sequence too, running the other way: the hold loosens, thinking thins out, and then you are simply angry. Finding where it loosened is more use than going over how it ended.
Light bounces off a face, lands at the back of your eye, and becomes a signal your brain assembles into a person. What you see is a reconstruction, a very good one, and never quite the thing itself.
When someone insults you they are aiming at a description of you: your job, your name, your reputation. The more loosely you hold those, the less of you is standing in the way.