Practices

If the thought arrives that this is going too fast and you cannot keep up, that thought gets a dot like everything else. There is no version of this you can fail.

Fast minds are common and they are not a disqualification. When too much is going past to mark, mark that. The exercise is not a race against your…

There is no accuracy to aim for here and nothing to beat. Every dot means you got back to the bank, and that is the entire scoring system.

People who are hard on themselves will turn anything into a test, and a test is the one thing that will wreck this. You are not aiming for a tidy…

If the page is covered in dots, that is not a mind that failed to settle. That is the number of times you came back.

Nearly everyone assumes the aim is a quiet head and then quits when the head refuses. Change what you are counting. Quiet is not something you can…

There was a moment when the urge came up and you watched it instead of acting. Notice that, mark the date if you can, because that is your proof it is possible.

People chasing this skill often think they have never managed it, when in fact they did it last Thursday in a car park and never counted it. Name the…

That small press of your own finger does two jobs. It marks the thought, and it gives you a bit of contact with yourself while everything around you is loud.

Your own touch is easy to overlook as a comfort. A hand on your knee, a thumb pressed into a palm, arms folded across your chest: quiet things people…

You can be in full control of what you do and still be burning inside. Calm is not the entry requirement.

People write themselves off because they still feel angry, as though the goal were to stop feeling it. The goal is narrower and much more reachable:…

Scratching an itch makes it itch more. Acting on anger works the same way, and each round leaves you needing the next one.

The relief is real and it is very short, and then the thing comes back stronger. This is why letting rip does not empty the tank the way people…

You can sit on a bench a few feet from a waterfall and be perfectly safe. Step in and you go over. Feeling something powerful is not the danger, and getting swept into it is.

This is why the aim is never to keep away from what upsets you. You can be right up close to a feeling, hearing it roar, and still be the one on the…

Trying to control what cannot be controlled is what makes a person feel out of control. Let the uncontrollable part be, and a surprising amount of control comes back.

Balance something on your fingertip and you will feel it: the harder you chase it, the more it wobbles. Feelings and thoughts behave the same way.…

The river is different every minute. The one sitting on the bank is the same one who sat there ten years ago, and will be there in ten more.

This is the part that offers something to people whose sense of themselves rises and falls with how they were treated that day. If who you are is the…

There is a kind of mindfulness that means sinking right into a moment, and another that means stepping back from it. When you are angry, you want the second one.

Losing yourself in the taste of a coffee is a lovely practice and it is not this one. Going all the way into a feeling makes it bigger, which is…

You did not calm yourself down. You sat still and watched, and calm turned up. It is worth having that the right way round.

If you credit your own effort for the calm, you will reach for that effort next time you are furious, and it will not be there. Then the failure…

Some signals cannot be acted on. Ringing in the ears, an old ache, a resentment about something long finished: the alarm is real and there is nothing to answer it with.

Fighting a signal you cannot switch off lays a second misery on top of the first. People who live well with long term pain tend to do something else…