Practices

Wise mind is not a calmer version of you. It is the state where what you feel and what you have thought through are both in the room, and neither has thrown the other out.

In practice it means you can feel the heat in your chest and still choose the next sentence. Neither half is the enemy: pure logic talks you out of…

Let your face go. Unclench the jaw, let the lips lift very slightly, and let the loosening carry back through your head and shoulders.

You are not pretending to be happy and nobody has to see it. The face holds a lot of the tension of a bad state, and it is one of the few parts you…

You are allowed to put something down. Put it down with a time to pick it up again: Thursday morning, with my therapist, not tonight.

Without the appointment, setting it aside quietly turns into never touching it, and the thing keeps all its power by never being looked at. With the…

Before going towards a hard feeling, decide what will hold you while you are inside it: a way of breathing, a way of standing, a sentence, a person you can picture or ring.

Going in with nothing is not brave, it is flooding, and it teaches your system that feelings really are dangerous. Pick two or three supports in…

Putting a film on, reading, letting the internet have an hour, all of it counts as a real skill when you choose it on purpose and know what you are choosing it for.

The version that hurts is the one you fall into without deciding and feel ashamed of afterwards. Choosing changes the whole thing: I am not up to…

When a feeling is genuinely unbearable, escaping it is the only regulator you have, so the drinking or the shutting down is doing a job. Build up what you can bear and the job disappears.

It helps to stop asking why you keep reaching for the thing and start asking what state you were in just before you reached. Usually it is a…