Practices

A face read quickly is a face read badly. Before you answer what you think you saw, allow that the flat look might be tiredness, or worry about something else entirely.

Faces get processed fast and with very little checking, which is why a neutral expression lands as contempt when you are already braced for it. If it…

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…

Sometimes you dislike a person or a room before you can say why. The fast part of you stores feelings, not explanations, so the reaction arrives whole and wordless.

If you cannot account for your reaction, you are not being evasive, and neither is anyone else who cannot account for theirs. Asking "why are you…

There is a stretch after anger fires when a person is feeling rather than thinking. In it, only information that matches the emotion gets through, so reasoning at yourself or at anyone else is wasted breath.

What does land in that stretch is physical and relational: a slower breath, a change of room, a hand on your own chest, a kind tone that asks for…

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.…

Say the difficult sentence out loud, on your feet, in something like the real conditions. Thinking it through in your head is a different skill from getting it out of your mouth when your pulse is up.

Acting it out feels awkward and that awkwardness is part of why it works: the version of you who has to speak is the aroused one, so that is the…