Practices
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.
Narrowed down
466 practicesArea
How long you have · Twenty minutes
Who it is written for
Where you are right now
On your own, or with someone
Theme
Approach
Emptying the feeling out at somebody does not shift it, and being told what to do instead skips over it. What changes things is feeling it with someone who stays.
You can tell the difference from the inside. Venting has a rehearsed quality, the same phrases coming round again with the heat kept up. Advice…
Take one episode from this week and give it five lines: what set it off, how you read it, what happened in your body, what you took it to mean, and what you wanted to do.
Doing this with an actual event, rather than in general, is what makes it useful. Keep the lines short and resist tidying them into something more…
You cannot taste food you are eating fast. Feeling works the same way, so slow the pace until there is something to actually notice.
In practice that means one sentence at a time, with a pause after it, and questions like what happened in you just then. Both of you will want to…
When you are trying to reach a feeling, stay with the actual sentence that caused it rather than paraphrasing it into something milder.
She said you are too difficult. Said again, gently, it keeps the moment alive in the room instead of turning it into a memory being reported.…
You cannot decide to feel closer to people. You can decide to eat with them, walk with them, sit near them and say one true thing, and the closeness tends to follow.
The chemistry gets talked about a great deal and it is the least useful part. What you can act on is the diary: a standing meal with someone, a hand…
Go long enough without company and almost anyone will do. That is worth knowing about yourself, and worth watching for in someone who lives alone.
Loneliness does not make you a poor judge of character on purpose. It just lowers the bar until whoever turns up seems fine. The steadier answer is…
Four ordinary things take the edge off a hot temper: being touched by someone you trust, eating with people, moving your body hard enough to breathe, and sitting still for a few minutes a day.
None of them are about anger directly, which is the point. Exercise lowers what you are already carrying before the argument starts. A shared meal…
If eating together helps, it is the together that is helping. Being full is not a route to feeling close, and treating it as one goes wrong quickly for some people.
Sit down with somebody once a week and eat whatever you were going to eat anyway. That is the whole practice. If you notice yourself reaching for…
The aim is not to become someone with no force in them. It is to get a harness on the force and point it at something worth doing.
Anger usually knows something true: this was unfair, this matters to me, this cannot carry on. Keep that part and drop the delivery. The energy can…
Look back at a fight you went out of your way to have and pride is often what was driving. Being right and being respected feel like needs in the moment, and they cost far more than they return.
This changes what there is to work on. Breathing exercises will not touch a fight you are having in order to prove you are somebody. The question…
The real skill is not spotting the hole in their reasoning. It is running the same test on the belief you hold most tightly.
Pick something you are sure of, something you would defend at a family dinner, and ask what it would look like if it were only mostly true. Where…
Give the anger a room rather than a target. Music up loud, walk fast, dance badly, shake your arms out until something in you settles.
Some children's grief centres keep a padded room where a child can go in and move however they need to, with nothing to hit and nothing to break.…
Write the exact thing you are furious about on a paper plate, tape it to the wall, and throw wet cotton balls at it. It sounds childish, and it does more than swinging at nothing.
Half the good of it is in the writing. Vague anger has to become a sentence before it can go on the plate, and reading that sentence back usually…
A ladder worth climbing has six things: real steps, built with you rather than for you, in your own words, a first rung that is genuinely easy, your hand on the pace throughout, and practice often enough to add up.
Most ladders come apart for dull reasons. The bottom rung was somebody else's idea of easy. The wording came out of a manual. Nobody said you were…
When something frightens you the mind offers one option: do not go. Force out two or three more before judging any of them, daft ones included. Choosing needs something to choose between.
There is an order that works. Say what the problem actually is, in one sentence. List some options without weighing them yet. Then go through what is…
Years of avoiding people leave real gaps, not only fear. How to start small talk, how to join a group already talking, how to get out of a conversation. Those can be taught, and being taught them is not an insult.
Sending someone into a peer group without the ordinary moves risks a genuinely bad afternoon, which then teaches exactly the wrong lesson. Practise…
Put a number on each step, nought to ten, and let it be your number. Two people facing the same school will not agree about which part is worst, and the ladder has to belong to the person climbing it.
One child dreads the bus and is fine once inside the building. Another would happily ride the bus all morning and cannot get through the front door.…
Run it in your head first, then act it out with someone safe, then do it for real. It is a preseason, and nobody thinks the preseason is cheating.
Each round adds a little pressure while help is still to hand. Imagining it stirs the fear enough to show whether your plan holds up. Acting it out…
If you are moving attention through the body, start at the feet and work up. Leave the throat, the chest and the face until last.
The far edges of the body carry less charge, so they are a gentle place to find your bearings. Include the back, which people tend to skip: attention…
There is a difference between watching your hand and being in your hand. See whether you can move from looking at a part of your body to living inside it.
Observing keeps a small distance, which is useful early on and can quietly become the whole practice. Inhabiting is the further step: filling the…
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