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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61 practices

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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.

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

Try counting what you did rather than how long you have gone. Days passing and acts practised are not the same currency.

A pilgrim crossing a long road measures it body length by body length, and the road still gets crossed. Keep the same sort of tally: today I caught…

Five minutesChoosing your responseMindfulnessQur’an 13:22One line of research

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

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

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

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

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

The useful part of this kind of practice is not the calm. It is noticing that the angry commentary running in your head is commentary, and that you are not obliged to follow it.

You are not arguing with the content or proving it wrong. You take half a step back: there goes that thought again, and here I am hearing it.…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 29:64One line of research

You cannot argue anybody out of certainty, yourself included. What loosens a grip is play: a puzzle, a small experiment, a question where nobody has to lose.

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…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 22:46One line of research

A raised voice at home gets heard as disrespect long before anyone checks. Sometimes the person simply cannot hear how loud they are over their headphones.

Disrespect starts more fights than any other reading, and it arrives feeling like an observation rather than a guess. Try asking what a stranger…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 15:88One line of research

Hold up a cup and ask what it is. A cup, a container, a weapon, a paperweight, an odd object to a creature with no hands. The answer depends on who is asking.

Starting with a mundane object matters, because it is easy to concede there. Then carry it across: what someone said this morning is a fact, what it…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 87:17One line of research

Some drawings can be seen two ways, an old woman or a young one, and neither reading is the correct one. Feeling the switch happen in your own eyes teaches something no explanation manages.

Keep one of those images somewhere you will come across it. When you are certain about somebody's motive, look at it and let it flip. The point is…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 64:15One line of research

Light bounces off a face, lands at the back of your eye, and becomes a signal your brain assembles into a person. What you see is a reconstruction, a very good one, and never quite the thing itself.

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…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 6:32One line of research

Old traditions worked this out a long time ago: someone who cannot be certain they are right cannot be righteously cruel. Doubt is not weakness here, it is what keeps the hand down.

Notice the order of the argument. Not calm down and then reconsider, but hold the certainty loosely and the heat has nowhere to stand. For a test,…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 28:88One line of research

Loosening your grip on who you take yourself to be can go further than you meant it to. Go a little way, then come back to something solid.

There is a version of this practice that aims at a self with no fixed content at all. For some people that is freeing and for others it is…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 2:156One line of research

You get one life, and spending the whole of it at war with how it turned out is a heavy price to pay for being right.

This is not a cheerful thought and it is not meant to be. The question underneath is whether you want the years you have left organised around a…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 3:185One line of research

Diogenes lived in a jar and told Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight. If calm sounds soft to you, there is a version of it that is closer to refusing to be impressed.

Some people cannot get near gentle language about acceptance and hear all of it as being told to lie down. The Cynic flavour suits them better: not…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 20:131One line of research