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.

What matches

367 practices

Narrow these down

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 64:15

There is more about anger than the practices: the anger area has the themes and the courses too.

One 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

Stoics, Cynics, Buddhist teachers and your own grandmother were all working on the same problem: how to stay steady when life leans on you. You are allowed to use the version that is already yours.

You do not have to import somebody else's whole worldview to get a practice of steadiness. If sitting with a breath count feels foreign, a…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 3:191One 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

Bring to mind someone easy to love, a person or a pet, and let the warmth actually arrive in your body. Then send the same warmth outward in stages: a stranger, a colleague, someone who irritates you.

The order matters more than the wording. Start where warmth comes freely, notice what it feels like, and move outward only while you can still feel…

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

Take from a bad encounter only what you need to get through it. Then stop, before it hardens into a rule about how things always are.

The mind wants to bank the lesson in the widest form it can: people are like this, that sort never changes, it always goes this way. That is how one…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 25:62One line of research

One bad experience with someone in a uniform, or from any group, tells you something real about that encounter. It is not a verdict on everybody who resembles them.

This is not a request to talk yourself out of what you saw. If your wariness was earned, keep it, and keep yourself safe. The narrower move is to let…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 2:286One line of research

There are two different jobs here. One is getting through the flare when it is on you. The other is quietly changing, over months, what counts as a flare in the first place.

The first job is breathing, leaving the room, waiting before you reply. The second is slower and less dramatic: the practices that shift what you…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 18:46One line of research

Look back at a fight you went out of your way to have and pride is often what was driving. Being right and being respected feel like needs in the moment, and they cost far more than they return.

This changes what there is to work on. Breathing exercises will not touch a fight you are having in order to prove you are somebody. The question…

Twenty minutesEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 28:88One line of research

The real skill is not spotting the hole in their reasoning. It is running the same test on the belief you hold most tightly.

Pick something you are sure of, something you would defend at a family dinner, and ask what it would look like if it were only mostly true. Where…

Twenty minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 53:39One line of research

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.

If you are helping someone, name the timescale honestly and say out loud that lapses come with it. If it is your own work, write down what a…

LongerEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 2:286One line of research

Nobody arrives with restraint already fitted. If holding your tongue feels like unnatural work, that is what it is for everyone, and it says nothing about what you are underneath.

This matters because the story you tell about a flare decides what you do next. Broken means give up quietly. Unbuilt means pick one situation, the…

LongerEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 53:39One line of research

The old reaction does not get erased. You lay a new one over the top of it, and on a tired or unfamiliar day the old one can still come through.

So a flare after months of doing well is not everything undone. That is what relearning looks like, and it tends to turn up alongside broken sleep,…

LongerEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 3:191One line of research

Telling someone they have changed their brain lands harder than telling them they have changed their mind. That is worth knowing, and worth handling carefully.

Brain language feels solid and permanent, so a person can lean on it. That same weight is why it should not be stretched: promising rewiring you…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 9:105One line of research