Practices

The benefit of a settling practice is cumulative. A fortnight of it now and then does little; the people who get most out of it are the ones who kept going for years.

This cuts both ways, and both are worth knowing. Two weeks of daily practice with no obvious result is not proof that it will not work for you. And…

Your mind wandering off during meditation is not you failing at it. Noticing that it went, and coming back, is the whole exercise.

People with restless attention often try meditation, find their head full of noise, decide they are uniquely bad at it and never go back. Nobody…

Think of your thoughts as traffic on a road. Practice thins the traffic. It does not close the road, and nobody has ever managed to close it.

This is a more useful target than clearing your mind, because you can tell whether it is happening. Some days it is bumper to bumper and the practice…

Five minutes chosen for the state you are actually in beats twenty minutes of open sitting. Pick the one labelled stressed, or cannot sleep, or about to walk into work.

Two things end a practice early: it was longer than the attention you had that day, and you had to decide what to do before you could start. Short…

If you are going to try a mindfulness course, give it the full eight weeks before deciding. Expect a real but moderate change rather than a different life.

Courses of this length help a good number of people and do very little for others, which is worth knowing at the start so that being in the second…