Practices

You do not need a diagnosis to be worth teaching this to. Something that takes seconds, costs nothing and travels with you is worth having before you need it.

Practise it on an ordinary day, sitting on the bus or waiting for the kettle, so your hands already know it when the day is not ordinary. That is…

If talking about feelings has always felt foreign or a bit embarrassing, treat this as a once a day checklist instead. Five boxes, no discussion, nothing to perform.

Plenty of people who go blank at how are you feeling can tell you straight away whether their shoulders are tight or their breathing is shallow.…

Ask who you are today and what body you are living in today, and let the answer be different from yesterday's. You are more fluid than solid.

Hard experience tends to freeze a person into a description: the damaged one, the difficult one, the one who cannot cope. Asking the question daily…

When you sit down to breathe, notice your pelvis. Tucked hard under or tipped hard forward both squeeze the breath; somewhere in the middle lets the diaphragm move.

Rock gently forward and back a few times and stop where the breath feels easiest, rather than aiming for a posture that looks correct. You will…

Before twisting, draw your belly gently in towards your spine. It looks after your lower back, and it is worth feeling for its own sake: you steady the middle before you turn towards anything.

The physical version is simple. A light drawing in of the abdomen, not a clench, held while you rotate and released as you come back. The felt…

Learn one plain standing position and keep coming back to it: feet under hips, hips under shoulders, ears above shoulders, chin drawn back a little, arms hanging.

The point is not that this posture is correct. It is that having one shape you return to gives you something to measure by, so you can tell that…

If your attention has no filter, everything in the room arrives at once, and you are tired before the day's actual work begins. That is not laziness, it is a bill coming due.

Two things drain you at the same time: the unfiltered noise itself, and the effort of holding yourself together in spite of it. That is why the…

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…

Once a day, go from head to feet and notice what is there. A good deal of what you find will be plain need: thirsty, hungry, needing the loo, needing to stand up.

When you get absorbed in something these signals go unheard for hours, and then you wonder why you feel dreadful by four o'clock. The scan is dull,…

Brain imaging does show that practice changes something. Be careful with anyone who tells you a great deal more than that.

It genuinely helps to know that sitting and breathing is not nothing, particularly if you have been told your whole life to just try harder. It also…

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 have spent thirty years being told you are careless, lazy or too much, no attention technique will touch that. Kindness practice, aimed at yourself, is the part that does.

It usually feels absurd at first, and slightly embarrassing, which is worth expecting rather than reading as a sign that it is not for you. Start…

In muscle relaxation you are usually told to let go slowly. If slow leaves you fidgeting, let go all at once. The version you will keep doing is the better version.

The standard sequence is to tense a muscle group, hold it, then release gradually, and for some people that long release is unbearable to sit…

Your eyes are an input too. A photo of someone who loves you and a plain soft coloured wall will settle you; a busy bright screen will lift you.

Hardly anyone thinks to arrange what is in front of them, and it is one of the easier things to change. Put a picture where you actually sit. Turn…

Once a day, run through five things in order: how your mind is, what your body feels, how the breathing is going, what the emotional weather is, and how much energy you have. Curious, not marking yourself.

The order matters more than the answers do. Without a set path, checking in with yourself slides easily into chewing over the same worry, and you…

The same check-in can take two minutes or fifteen. Match the length to the day you are actually having, not to the version you were taught.

A long deep look inward is not always the better one. On a day when you are already far from yourself, going deeper can take you further out rather…

Finish a check-in by asking what actually brought you here. Not the task in front of you, the thing underneath it that you want.

Noticing how you are can leave you sitting in it. One more question turns it outward: what am I hoping for, what am I moving towards. It might be…

Take the spine through all six of its movements: forward, back, bending to each side, turning to each side. Standing or sitting, it takes under five minutes.

Doing the whole set matters more than doing any one of them beautifully. Left to ourselves we skip the direction that feels stiff or guarded, and…