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Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.
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…
Learn a new practice in that order: the picture of what it is, then the plain steps, then actually doing it. Knowing what is coming settles most of the resistance before it starts.
Say to yourself, or to the person you are teaching, that in a minute the talking stops and the doing begins. It sounds trivial and it removes the low…
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…
Look inside. The moment you catch something going past, put a small dot on the paper and go back to looking. That is the whole exercise, over and over.
The dot is doing something specific: it turns a private, slippery moment of noticing into an act you can see and count. No words, no keeping score,…
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.
Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.
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…