Practices

If you finish and say you managed to calm your mind down first, something has quietly slipped. You are not cleaning the water or blocking the flow, you are only sitting beside it.

This matters because a practice built on making yourself calm works fine on an easy evening and collapses on the night you need it. Let the river be…

Trying to control what cannot be controlled is what makes a person feel out of control. Let the uncontrollable part be, and a surprising amount of control comes back.

Balance something on your fingertip and you will feel it: the harder you chase it, the more it wobbles. Feelings and thoughts behave the same way.…

The river is different every minute. The one sitting on the bank is the same one who sat there ten years ago, and will be there in ten more.

This is the part that offers something to people whose sense of themselves rises and falls with how they were treated that day. If who you are is the…

Once the plain version is familiar, try sorting instead of dotting: T for a thought, F for a feeling, S for a sensation, V for something you see, I for an urge.

Write the key at the top of the page so you are not holding it in your head. The sorting is useful because putting a rough name to something is often…

If you want to start noticing what goes on inside you, start with the urges. The pull to speak, to stand up, to say the cutting thing: those have a push behind them that thoughts and moods do not.

Thoughts slide past before you can get hold of them, feelings blur into each other, and body sensations are vague. An urge announces itself, because…

Try sorting whatever passes through your mind into three: good for me, bad for me, or neither. That third option is real, and most of us forget it is there.

Your mind tags things before you have had any say in it, and anger tends to follow the tag rather than the event itself. Sitting for a few minutes…

A compliment and an insult are both just somebody's opinion arriving. Either one can land as a plain fact of the day rather than as a verdict on you.

This is easier to practise with praise, because praise feels harmless. Notice how much you want the good tag and you begin to see why the bad one has…

Being unbothered by your own thoughts and being unbothered by another person are two separate skills. Getting good at the first does not hand you the second.

You can sit quietly and watch your own mind with real steadiness, then lose the lot the moment somebody smirks at you. That is not backsliding. It is…

If watching your mind feels too open, rest your attention on your breathing instead. Do not deepen it or slow it down. Just feel the breath you are already taking.

Managing the breath turns it into one more thing to get right, and for some people close attention to the body winds them up rather than settling…

When your head goes quieter during practice, nothing has been emptied out. It has filled up with something that does not need judging.

People take the quiet as proof they have finally cleared their mind, then feel cheated when the noise comes back. It never left. Attention was…

Eventually the pen goes down and the finger stays still, and you simply notice what moves through you. That is the whole thing with the scaffolding taken away.

The props are there to teach you what noticing feels like, not to be carried around forever. Once you can tell the difference between being inside a…

There is a kind of mindfulness that means sinking right into a moment, and another that means stepping back from it. When you are angry, you want the second one.

Losing yourself in the taste of a coffee is a lovely practice and it is not this one. Going all the way into a feeling makes it bigger, which is…

Got drowsy doing it? Nothing has gone wrong. Your body has decided there is no threat here, which was rather the point.

People apologise for getting sleepy, as though they failed to concentrate hard enough. The heaviness is your alarm system standing down, and it is a…

You did not calm yourself down. You sat still and watched, and calm turned up. It is worth having that the right way round.

If you credit your own effort for the calm, you will reach for that effort next time you are furious, and it will not be there. Then the failure…

Some signals cannot be acted on. Ringing in the ears, an old ache, a resentment about something long finished: the alarm is real and there is nothing to answer it with.

Fighting a signal you cannot switch off lays a second misery on top of the first. People who live well with long term pain tend to do something else…

Most of us think there are two things to do with anger: hold it in or let it out. There is a third, which is to stop, stay still, and watch it without doing either.

Holding it in has you clamped shut and seething. Letting it out has you saying things you will be repairing for weeks. The third one feels like doing…