Practices

Writing down what happened puts a little distance between you and it. Later you are not inside the row any more, you are a person reading about one.

Two things come out of a few weeks of this. You get data: the same time of day, the same person, the same bad night behind it. And you get practice…

Think of your mind as a river and yourself as someone sitting on the bank. Thoughts, feelings, aches, pictures and urges all go past in the current, and you are the one on the grass watching them go.

The point of the image is that it gives you somewhere to sit. Being told to observe your thoughts is abstract, while a bank and a river gives your…

Do not write down what the thought was. No words, no summaries, just the mark. This is not journaling and nobody is going to ask you what came up.

The moment you start describing a thought you are back in the water with it, sorting and explaining and defending. What you are training is the…

If you finish and say you managed to calm your mind down first, something has quietly slipped. You are not cleaning the water or blocking the flow, you are only sitting beside it.

This matters because a practice built on making yourself calm works fine on an easy evening and collapses on the night you need it. Let the river be…

Once the plain version is familiar, try sorting instead of dotting: T for a thought, F for a feeling, S for a sensation, V for something you see, I for an urge.

Write the key at the top of the page so you are not holding it in your head. The sorting is useful because putting a rough name to something is often…

If you want to start noticing what goes on inside you, start with the urges. The pull to speak, to stand up, to say the cutting thing: those have a push behind them that thoughts and moods do not.

Thoughts slide past before you can get hold of them, feelings blur into each other, and body sensations are vague. An urge announces itself, because…

Try sorting whatever passes through your mind into three: good for me, bad for me, or neither. That third option is real, and most of us forget it is there.

Your mind tags things before you have had any say in it, and anger tends to follow the tag rather than the event itself. Sitting for a few minutes…

A compliment and an insult are both just somebody's opinion arriving. Either one can land as a plain fact of the day rather than as a verdict on you.

This is easier to practise with praise, because praise feels harmless. Notice how much you want the good tag and you begin to see why the bad one has…

If watching your mind feels too open, rest your attention on your breathing instead. Do not deepen it or slow it down. Just feel the breath you are already taking.

Managing the breath turns it into one more thing to get right, and for some people close attention to the body winds them up rather than settling…

When your head goes quieter during practice, nothing has been emptied out. It has filled up with something that does not need judging.

People take the quiet as proof they have finally cleared their mind, then feel cheated when the noise comes back. It never left. Attention was…

Eventually the pen goes down and the finger stays still, and you simply notice what moves through you. That is the whole thing with the scaffolding taken away.

The props are there to teach you what noticing feels like, not to be carried around forever. Once you can tell the difference between being inside a…

Got drowsy doing it? Nothing has gone wrong. Your body has decided there is no threat here, which was rather the point.

People apologise for getting sleepy, as though they failed to concentrate hard enough. The heaviness is your alarm system standing down, and it is a…

Most of us think there are two things to do with anger: hold it in or let it out. There is a third, which is to stop, stay still, and watch it without doing either.

Holding it in has you clamped shut and seething. Letting it out has you saying things you will be repairing for weeks. The third one feels like doing…

To react is to act again. Some of what fires in you belongs to an older scene, and the person in front of you has simply walked into it.

This is not a way of excusing what you do, it is a way of aiming the work. When a reaction is far bigger than the moment deserves, ask what it…

If waiting has always been hard for you, and your attention has always been restless, that belongs in the anger picture rather than in a separate story.

Irritability, reactivity and a mind that will not settle often arrive as a set. Working on the anger while ignoring the attention leaves the ground…

Most of us rehearse the crushing line we wish we had said. Try spending that same time writing what you would actually like to say next time, and keep it short enough to remember.

Take one real episode from the past week and write two things: what happened, and one sentence you would rather have used. Something like I am…

Even one go at this leaves you with something. You have seen for yourself that the anger can be handled, and that does not expire when you walk out of the room.

The picture is not killing the anger off. It is closer to getting a big animal under control and walking it home: still strong, still yours, going…

The alarm stores as well as reacts. Every flare that ends badly teaches it a little, and so does every one you handle gently.

That is why triggers pile up over a lifetime, and why one calm response never feels like it changed anything. It is doing work you cannot see yet.…

This started as a way to stop yourself snapping, and it will do that. It also happens to be a way of noticing your whole life while you are in it.

The same watching works on wanting, on worrying, on the hour you lose to your phone. Anger is just the doorway you came in through, usually because…

Tell yourself the true thing: this feeling is real, and it is temporary. No state lasts. Ride it out.

You do not have to fix it right now. You only have to outlast it. Feelings crest and fall like weather.