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Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
If you want someone to hold a view more lightly, resist correcting it. Give them something to look at that shows them their own mind at work, and let them draw the conclusion. Corrections get defended. Things you noticed for yourself are much harder to dismiss later.
Have these people not travelled through the land with hearts to understand and ears to hear? (Quran 22:46). Understanding is described as something you go out and meet, not something won off you in an argument.
الحج
أَفَلَمۡ يَسِيرُواْ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ فَتَكُونَ لَهُمۡ قُلُوبࣱ يَعۡقِلُونَ بِهَآ أَوۡ ءَاذَانࣱ يَسۡمَعُونَ بِهَاۖ فَإِنَّهَا لَا تَعۡمَى ٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرُ وَلَٰكِن تَعۡمَى ٱلۡقُلُوبُ ٱلَّتِي فِي ٱلصُّدُورِ
Have these people [of Mecca] not travelled through the land with hearts to understand and ears to hear? It is not people’s eyes that are blind, but their hearts within their breasts
Qur’an 22:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised field experiment, working adults who took up loving kindness meditation reported more positive emotion day by day, and those days accumulated into lasting personal resources. Lightness is not merely decoration; in that study it built into something durable. It was one workplace trial of one practice, so the wider claim about play stays a reasonable guess.
Fredrickson BL, Cohn MA, Coffey KA, Pek J, Finkel SM. (2008). Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Being told you are wrong makes you defend the position, while seeing it for yourself does not.
Practising the perfect reply in your head feels like letting off steam. It works more like rehearsal, and what you rehearse gets easier to perform.
Every one of us is trying to tame ourselves, which no other animal is attempting. Finding it hard is the ordinary result, not a sign that something is wrong with you in particular.
If you are still polishing the reply weeks afterwards, the argument is not still running. The injury is, and that needs a different kind of care.