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Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Setting your worst moment against somebody else's lifetime of training only produces despair. Ask instead what that person did on an ordinary Tuesday, and do a smaller version of it. Whatever you set for this month should be something you could still clear in a bad week.
that man will only have what he has worked towards (Quran 53:39). The quiet hours put in are the part that actually belongs to you.
النجم
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a controlled comparison, a specific attention training exercise improved children's ability to delay gratification, where progressive muscle relaxation and no intervention did not. Practising a particular skill did the work rather than the general idea of calming down. It is a small study with children, so read it as a pointer about training rather than a measure of how far anyone can get.
Murray J, Scott H, Connolly C, Wells A. (2018). The Attention Training Technique improves Children's ability to delay gratification: A controlled comparison with progressive relaxation.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A goal you can actually reach keeps you practising, and practice is the only thing that moves the ceiling.
Fighting your own anger tends to make it louder. The part of you that flares does better treated as something to work with than something to defeat.
The real skill is not spotting the hole in their reasoning. It is running the same test on the belief you hold most tightly.
Sitting practice teaches four useful things about anger: everything passes, the senses are calmer ground than the story, you do not have to attend to every thought, and you are not the words you use about yourself.