Practices

Hold up two hands: one is you, the other is what you are feeling. Ask how far apart they are right now, and you have a quick reading of where you stand.

Hands touching means you have merged with it and the feeling is speaking as you. A gap means you can still see it as something happening. The gap…

In a row, the words themselves rarely do the damage. The damage comes from what you do once you have decided the words mean something about you.

Someone can say something ugly and you can hear it as noise coming out of a person having a bad life. That is not pretending it was fine. It is…

Instead of marking a page, press one fingertip lightly against your knee each time you notice a thought going by. Nobody in the room will see it.

The paper version is fine at home and useless in a meeting or halfway through an argument, which is exactly where you need it. A small press, like…

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…

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.…

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…