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.

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90 practices

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There is always a small gap between the urge and the act. Nearly all of this work is learning to stay in it for a second longer.

Most people never notice the urge at all, only the wreckage, so the first job is spotting it: a hand tightening, the breath going shallow, a sentence…

A minuteChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 3:134One line of research

Keep a short phrase you can actually reach for. Two or three words you already know: not now, or this can wait, or let it go past.

It has to be short and familiar, because nothing new and clever survives a jolt of adrenaline. Attach it to the moment you feel your body change, so…

A minuteChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 25:63One line of research

Stepping back does more than settle you. It lets the rest of the room back into view, and the rest of the room is usually where the explanation lives.

Under threat, attention narrows onto the person in front of you and everything else falls away: what happened before you walked in, who else is in…

A minuteChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 23:96One line of research

Your body goes first and you come second. By the time the feeling has a name, the reaction has already been running for a couple of seconds.

That lag is why anger seems to arrive fully formed. It does not, quite, and the earliest part of it is physical: heat, a jaw setting, a change in…

Five minutesChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 7:201One line of research

Thinking about your own thinking sounds abstract until you try it. It is the difference between being angry and noticing that you are angry.

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

One is a lens you look through, the other is an object you look at, and a thought you can look at has already loosened its hold. Put a small label in…

Five minutesChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 7:199One line of research

Standing back and watching a thought, rather than arguing with it, is nobody's private invention. Contemplative traditions and several separate modern therapies arrived at the same move independently.

The names differ: watching from the bank of a river, cognitive distancing, defusion, wise mind. Underneath them the step is the same, which is…

Five minutesChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 7:201One line of research

Gritting your teeth works right up until you are tired, hungry or already stretched. Watching the anger from a small distance is the steadier option, because it does not need holding up.

Keeping a lid down costs effort, and the effort runs out at the end of a long day, which is exactly when you need it. The observing stance is…

Five minutesChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 15:85One line of research

Angry eyes are not unfocused, they are too focused. Everything funnels down onto the person or thing in front of you and the rest of the room goes missing.

That narrowing is part of why anger feels so certain. You are not seeing less because you are careless, you are seeing less because the state does…

A minuteCool the body firstMindfulnessQur’an 27:86One line of research

Anger pulls your attention towards whatever provoked it, the way a vacuum cleaner pulls at a curtain. Naming it that way makes it something happening to you rather than something wrong with you.

Rumination is an accurate word and a heavy one, and people who already feel judged tend to close up when it appears. A picture does the same job…

A minuteCool the body firstMindfulnessQur’an 89:27One line of research

When one thing fills your view, everything around it stops registering. You can be staring hard and taking in almost nothing.

This is why an angry judgement can feel so sharp and turn out to be so poor. The person in front of you has become the whole picture, and the details…

Five minutesCool the body firstMindfulnessQur’an 10:67One line of research

Put four dots on a page, one at a time, and by the fourth you will see a square. Now try to point at the square. Your mind supplied it in under a second and never asked you first.

Keep the paper. It is a small undeniable demonstration that you make patterns as much as you find them. The next time you are certain what somebody…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 31:34One line of research

Faces in the curtains, a figure in the dark: the part of you that spots danger would rather be wrong ten times than miss once. It reads people the same way.

That bias is old and cheap insurance rather than stupidity. Knowing it is running lets you add a second look before you act, especially with thin…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 9:129One line of research

Ask the question twice. What do you see, and what else do you see. What do you think, and what else do you think. The second one does all the work.

The second question takes for granted that another answer exists, so instead of defending the first you go looking. Used on yourself it works just as…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 10:24One line of research

Listen to how you narrate it to yourself. What on earth is this nonsense keeps the heat on. I am puzzled, what might this be does not.

The words are not cosmetic. Outraged narration keeps the body up, and curiosity is hard to hold at the same time as fury. Choose your replacement…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 3:191One line of research

Focus on the person and it feels personal. Widen out to what is around them, the hour, the queue, the week they are having, and it usually stops being about you.

That single instruction covers a lot of ground: it works on a picture, on a rude reply, and on your own attention when it has narrowed to one face.…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 20:131One line of research

Light behaves like a particle in one experiment and like a wave in another, and physicists live with both. That is a good picture for two accounts of one event, and a picture is all it is.

Reaching for a big idea from physics can settle the room while proving nothing at all. Use it the way you would use a photograph: helpful for seeing,…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 3:190One line of research

Not knowing what to make of something does not have to be an emergency. See if you can find it interesting instead, even for a moment.

Most of us treat confusion as a gap to be closed fast, and anger is one of the quickest ways to close it: decide they meant it, decide what it says…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 31:34One line of research

Try putting a qualifier on the front of your strongest claims. In some ways this is true. In some ways it is not. In some ways I cannot tell from here.

Jain thinkers built a whole grammar out of that, seven careful ways of stating a thing, precisely so assertion stayed honest. Used well, a qualifier…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 65:3One line of research

Not knowing what somebody else is carrying is reason enough to go easy on them. It is certainty about what they deserve that gives cruelty its permission.

You do not need a generous story about the person in order to hold back. Maybe is enough: maybe they are frightened, maybe something happened this…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 2:155One line of research

You do not actually know what they are about to say, or why they did it. Swapping the finished sentence in your head for help me understand costs nothing and changes the whole exchange.

Finishing people's sentences, deciding in advance what they meant, hearing the insult before it has been made: all of it feels like insight and most…

A minuteEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 6:59One line of research