Practices
Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.
Narrowed down
264 practicesArea
How long you have · Twenty minutes
Who it is written for
Where you are right now
On your own, or with someone · On my own
Theme
Approach
Before you reach for a technique, notice what you privately think anger is. A room can hear disapproval underneath even a well chosen intervention.
It is worth spending real time on your own account of the thing: where it comes from, what it is trying to do, what it costs. If you hold it as bad…
Skills rehearsed in total calm tend to vanish at the moment you need them. Practise on something still slightly warm, a real incident from this week, close enough that you feel a little of it.
Bring the scene back in enough detail that your chest tightens a bit, then do the work right there. What you read into it, what else it might have…
If you grew up where the threat was real, your reading of a raised voice is not a distortion. It is accurate to somewhere you used to be.
So the work is not correcting a mistake. It is learning to tell one setting from another, which is slower and needs practising in daylight rather…
Some anger arrives with an argument already inside it: that they disrespected you, that this is not how you are meant to be treated. It burns cooler than the sudden kind and it lasts much longer.
Because it is made of a story, it can be handled at the level of the story. What did that gesture actually mean. What would it mean if they were…
For most people anger is weather that passes. For some it is closer to climate: quicker to arrive, bigger when it lands, slower to leave.
Knowing which you are changes what you plan for. Weather can be waited out. Climate needs arrangements: sleep kept regular, fewer things stacked on…
Live under enough strain for long enough and anger stops being an event. It settles into a new normal, and it can feel as though your character has changed.
Ask what has been running in the background: money, pain, night shifts, a job that grinds, somebody ill at home. When those ease the baseline often…
Sometimes the row is not really about the row. Some people reach for conflict because it is the one thing that makes them feel properly awake.
If you notice you feel sharp and alive during an argument and flat afterwards, that is worth sitting with rather than being ashamed of. The need…
Before treating a temper as a character problem, check the body. Poor sleep, hunger, a new medication, drinking, a head injury and a number of neurological conditions all show up as a short fuse.
This matters most when the change is recent. Somebody even tempered for forty years who is now flying off at nothing has usually got something…
The mind that runs ahead into everything that could go wrong is the same mind that plans well, sees round corners and has things ready in time. One trait, pointed in two directions.
If you have been told all your life that you overthink, it is worth saying plainly that this trait has served you. The aim is not to flatten it. It…
A small child works out how to feel about itself by looking at its parents' faces. If that face was missing, or busy, the looking does not stop, it just moves on to teachers, coaches, friends and strangers.
It is part of why being disrespected can feel so much larger than the moment deserves. Some of that old search is still running. The work is slow and…
Ask one question about the worry: is there something to be done here that has not been done? If yes, make the plan. If the plan already exists, or there is nothing to plan, the worry gets no more of your time.
Making a study timetable is useful once. Making it for the fourth time is worry wearing the clothes of work. The test is not how serious the topic is…
Online you can edit, delete, mute and leave. People who have done most of their socialising that way often find ordinary company unbearable, because ordinary company cannot be controlled.
If that describes you, the answer is not to become a different sort of person. It is practice in rooms you cannot manage: a class, a job with shifts,…
A regular sitting practice is training rather than a treat. What you practise when things are calm is what your body can find when they are not.
The state people describe in mindfulness and the state of feeling safe in your own body overlap almost completely. That is a good reason to keep the…
Yoga, slow breathing with feedback, neurofeedback and listening programmes are all aiming at the same target. Pick the one you can actually get to and keep doing.
Because they share a mechanism, they are largely swappable. Cost, travel, waiting lists and whether you enjoy it are legitimate grounds for choosing…
If you mostly run hot and jumpy, start with slow paced breathing. If you mostly go blank and far away, work that reaches you through sound and voice tends to get further.
The idea is to pick the tool that pulls against your usual tilt. Breathing practice puts the brake back on a system that has lost it. Sound and voice…
If you understand your history perfectly and nothing has changed, you are not failing at this. Insight alone is pushing water uphill against the current of information coming from your body.
Articulate people get stuck here often, because talking is the thing they are best at. What tends to be missing is an actual experience of being safe…
None of this makes thinking useless. Making sense of what happened, and changing what you concluded about yourself, does work that no breathing exercise touches.
The body work settles the alarm. The thinking work deals with the verdict you passed on yourself afterwards: that you are weak, that it was your…
Being still is not the problem. The circuit that shuts you down under threat is the same one that lets you sleep deeply, digest, rest and curl up with someone you love.
So the aim is not to stay switched on. It is to be still and safe at the same time, which is a capacity you can rebuild rather than a symptom to…
Deep rest needs a dose like anything else. If a long daily relaxation is leaving you flatter each week rather than steadier, make it shorter.
Someone can start a forty day programme of long guided rest with the best intentions and find that by the second week they are sinking instead of…
If you are the person who steadies every room, ask yourself when a room last steadied you.
Some people are very good at this because they were handed the job at six years old, in a house where somebody had to keep everyone level. It becomes…
Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.