Practices

Anger pulls your attention towards whatever provoked it, the way a vacuum cleaner pulls at a curtain. Naming it that way makes it something happening to you rather than something wrong with you.

Rumination is an accurate word and a heavy one, and people who already feel judged tend to close up when it appears. A picture does the same job…

If open awareness sounds like too much, put it plainly: look at the background instead of the thing in front of it. That is the entire instruction.

People who bounce off contemplative language will happily follow a physical direction about where to point their eyes. Say background, say the space…

Open gazing and long unfocused staring do not suit everyone. If things start to feel unreal or far away, stop and look at something you can name.

This caution is usually left out, and it should not be. Practices that are open, unguided and without an anchor are the ones most often followed by…

Ask the question twice. What do you see, and what else do you see. What do you think, and what else do you think. The second one does all the work.

The second question takes for granted that another answer exists, so instead of defending the first you go looking. Used on yourself it works just as…

Try putting a qualifier on the front of your strongest claims. In some ways this is true. In some ways it is not. In some ways I cannot tell from here.

Jain thinkers built a whole grammar out of that, seven careful ways of stating a thing, precisely so assertion stayed honest. Used well, a qualifier…

When someone tells the story with every detail, the exact words, the way the door shut, what she was wearing, they are not wandering off the point. The detail is telling you how unsafe it felt.

Steering them back to the summary usually lands as being told their experience is a nuisance. Let it run a while and hear the detail as a reading of…

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.

If you want someone to hold a view more lightly, resist correcting it. Give them something to look at that shows them their own mind at work, and let…

Have three or four openers ready before you need them. For what it is worth. Can I run something by you. You might not like this, so give me the benefit of the doubt.

When you are stirred up you will not compose diplomatic language on the spot, so the phrases have to be picked in advance and worn in. Say them aloud…

Say it plainly whenever you teach anything: the way I am showing you this is not the way it has to be done. Change it until it works for you.

Anyone who has failed at the standard version of something several times will not try again unless they are told clearly that adapting it is allowed.…

If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.

A lot of people turn the practice down before trying it, because the label sounds like it belongs to somebody else's religion or somebody else's sort…

What you are doing when you sit on the bank has a name. Researchers call it metacognitive distancing, and it has been studied for decades.

Knowing the name matters more than it should. Plenty of people, and especially people who were sent to get help rather than choosing it, quietly file…

If a river on a summer afternoon does nothing for you, use something plainer. Counting the traffic from a porch, or standing outside a shop counting how many people walk past, does the same job.

Metaphors are personal and there is no prize for liking the poetic one. Some people take to it straight away when it is a road and a stopwatch…

If the language of mindfulness puts you off, drop the language. Call it noticing what your mind is doing, and use it anyway.

Some people hear anything that sounds spiritual and close the door, and then a useful skill goes unused over a word. There is nothing here you have…

Learn a new practice in that order: the picture of what it is, then the plain steps, then actually doing it. Knowing what is coming settles most of the resistance before it starts.

Say to yourself, or to the person you are teaching, that in a minute the talking stops and the doing begins. It sounds trivial and it removes the low…

Afterwards, ask what that was like rather than whether it worked. Every answer is usable, including the ones that sound like complaints.

People come back with all sorts: restful, stressful because my head is so fast, mostly sounds and aches rather than thoughts, strangely reassuring.…