Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
That is not a trick, it is how seeing works, and it applies to everything you are sure you saw. It is worth a moment of vertigo, because the certainty that powers most arguments rests on a picture your own head built. You can still act on it. You act with a little more room for being wrong.
The life of this world is nothing but a game and a distraction (Quran 6:32). What we take to be plainly solid is described as much less final than it looks.
الأنعام
وَمَا ٱلۡحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنۡيَآ إِلَّا لَعِبࣱ وَلَهۡوࣱۖ وَلَلدَّارُ ٱلۡأٓخِرَةُ خَيۡرࣱ لِّلَّذِينَ يَتَّقُونَۚ أَفَلَا تَعۡقِلُونَ
The life of this world is nothing but a game and a distraction; the Home in the Hereafter is best for those who are aware of God. Why will you [people] not understand
Qur’an 6:32read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Reviews of mindfulness based stress reduction in healthy people report lower stress and better wellbeing, while noting frankly that many of the trials had weak methods. The same humility applies to the evidence as to your own eyes: useful, and not the final word. Confident summaries usually cover over how much remains uncertain.
Chiesa A, Serretti A. (2009). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis.. Journal of alternative and complementary medicine (New York, N.Y.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
If all your seeing is assembled, then certainty about what happened is a feeling rather than a guarantee.
This kind of change is slow, and saying so at the start is a kindness. A goal you can actually reach beats a promise that turns the first bad week into proof of failure.
There is an old set of pictures: a boy loses an ox, catches sight of it, chases it, tames it, and finally rides it home. Asking which picture you are in this week is kinder and more useful than asking whether you are doing well.
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.