Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Some drawings can be seen two ways, an old woman or a young one, and neither reading is the correct one. Feeling the switch happen in your own eyes teaches something no explanation manages.
Keep one of those images somewhere you will come across it. When you are certain about somebody's motive, look at it and let it flip. The point is not that nothing is true, only that your first reading arrived on its own and a second one was there the whole time.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Your wealth and your children are only a test for you. There is great reward with God (Quran 64:15). The verse takes the things you are surest about and offers a second reading of them.
إِنَّمَآ أَمۡوَٰلُكُمۡ وَأَوۡلَٰدُكُمۡ فِتۡنَةࣱۚ وَٱللَّهُ عِندَهُۥٓ أَجۡرٌ عَظِيمࣱ
Your wealth and your children are only a test for you. There is great reward with God
Qur’an 64:15read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of randomised trials of mindfulness based programmes with university students found improvements in mental health, with small to moderate effects and variable trial quality. These programmes are built out of exercises people do rather than explanations they sit through. The effects are real and modest, which is the sensible expectation for any one exercise.
Dawson AF, Brown WW, Anderson J, Datta B, Donald JN, Hong K, Allan S, Mole TB, Jones PB, Galante J. (2020). Mindfulness-Based Interventions for University Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials.. Applied psychology. Health and well-being doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Experiencing a switch yourself convinces you in a way that being told other readings exist does not.
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
When someone protests that swallowing their feelings is unnatural, agree with them, because it is. Then add the part they have not said: it is also necessary, and there are better ways to do it than swallowing.
Diogenes lived in a jar and told Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight. If calm sounds soft to you, there is a version of it that is closer to refusing to be impressed.
You cannot argue anybody out of certainty, yourself included. What loosens a grip is play: a puzzle, a small experiment, a question where nobody has to lose.