Practices

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…

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…

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.

Soothe yourself through the senses: a warm drink, a soft cloth, a good scent, a slow walk. Be kind to the body.

When you cannot fix the feeling, comfort the one who is feeling it. Small kindnesses to the body settle the mind.

Anger and doubt cannot really occupy the same moment. Anger sharpens everything to a point, and a genuine maybe blunts it.

This is why an honest question does more than an argument. Not a challenge, which hardens things, but a real one: what if I have got part of this…

Your mind is always slightly behind what is happening. Reality moves and you are the response, which leaves you permanently a step late and permanently not quite sure.

Put that way, uncertainty is not a flaw in your thinking, it is the position you are standing in. You are flying into the next moment without having…

A lot of angry certainty is frightened certainty. Needing to know exactly what is going on, and exactly who is at fault, is more comfortable than admitting the situation cannot be fully read.

From the outside it looks like arrogance, and from the inside it feels like clarity. Underneath it is usually the same discomfort as any other…

Not knowing is not a fault in you. It is the ordinary condition of being alive, and much of the distress comes from the belief that it ought to be otherwise.

There is the discomfort of not knowing, and then a second layer on top: the sense that you were supposed to know by now and something has gone wrong.…

Righteous anger pays you something. It burns off doubt, hands back a sense of being in charge, and can feel very close to intoxicating.

Any plan that treats anger purely as a skills problem runs into this. You are asking somebody to give up a thing that works, and it is fairer to say…

Understand more so that you may fear less. That line is the whole point of learning how your anger works: not cleverness, just less fear.

People with a temper are rarely persuaded by being told to calm down, and are often genuinely interested in how the machinery works. Knowing what…