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

289 practices

Narrow these down

Your mind wandering off during meditation is not you failing at it. Noticing that it went, and coming back, is the whole exercise.

People with restless attention often try meditation, find their head full of noise, decide they are uniquely bad at it and never go back. Nobody…

Five minutesGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 50:16Long taught, never tested

Think of your thoughts as traffic on a road. Practice thins the traffic. It does not close the road, and nobody has ever managed to close it.

This is a more useful target than clearing your mind, because you can tell whether it is happening. Some days it is bumper to bumper and the practice…

Five minutesGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 13:28Long taught, never tested

Five minutes chosen for the state you are actually in beats twenty minutes of open sitting. Pick the one labelled stressed, or cannot sleep, or about to walk into work.

Two things end a practice early: it was longer than the attention you had that day, and you had to decide what to do before you could start. Short…

Five minutesGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 33:41Long taught, never tested

Your settling kit should cost nothing. Tea you already buy, a photo already on your phone, an old jumper, a smooth stone, a puzzle that takes your whole attention.

Anything you have to buy first becomes a reason not to start, and for anyone short of money it can add a layer of shame to the thing that was meant…

Twenty minutesGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 16:80Long taught, never tested

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

Feelings and focus

Equanimity and perspective

Being seen and judged

Structure and routine

Feeling from the inside

When you use something to cope

Posture and how you carry yourself

Get started

The cost of avoiding

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Screens and attention

Rest and pacing

Anger, alcohol and the body

Growing empathy

If you are going to try a mindfulness course, give it the full eight weeks before deciding. Expect a real but moderate change rather than a different life.

Courses of this length help a good number of people and do very little for others, which is worth knowing at the start so that being in the second…

LongerGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 20:130Long taught, never tested

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

A new practice needs somewhere to live. Hook it to something you already do a few times a day, like sitting down to eat.

Vague plans to practise more collapse without anyone noticing. Name the moment instead: when I put my plate down, I take three slow breaths before…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 11:114One line of research

If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.

A lot of people turn the practice down before trying it, because the label sounds like it belongs to somebody else's religion or somebody else's sort…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 29:69One line of research

One or two minutes every day will do more for you than forty minutes once a week. The long sit sounds serious and is mostly a good way to end up dreading it.

Set the price so low that skipping it would be odd: a minute, at a moment you already have. The aim is that it happens again tomorrow, not that it…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 33:41One line of research

If a practice looks pointless, you will have dropped it by Thursday. Before you take on anything new, get clear on what it is meant to be building in you.

Ask for the mechanism in one plain sentence: this repeated thing grows that capacity. Write it somewhere you will actually see it. When the practice…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 53:39One line of research

Resolving harder is not a plan. What protects you in a hot moment is a skill you have already practised and a situation you have set up in your favour.

Willpower is at its thinnest exactly when you need it most: late, tired, hungry, already provoked. So do the work earlier, where it is cheap. Decide…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 3:200One line of research

When you offer a practice to someone, use their words for it rather than yours. Keep the fuller version ready for the day they ask where it comes from.

A plain, unmystical version suits most people and costs them nothing to accept. Anyone who gets curious can have all of it, and they will take more…

Five minutesMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 5:48One line of research

Anger gets fed from several places: blame, not being able to bear not knowing, losing sight of the other person, and needs you never said out loud. Each one wants a different kind of work.

So it is worth asking which of them is mostly yours. If it is blame, forgiveness is the road. If it is not knowing, the work is learning to sit with…

LongerMaking it stickCoreQur’an 41:35One line of research

Most children do not pick up reading by sitting near books. Around a fifth need very structured, repetitive teaching before it clicks, and about half of the rest still need a good deal of deliberate instruction, so structured teaching is the ordinary case rather than a special measure.

It helps to stop asking who qualifies for help and start asking how much teaching each child needs. A child left to fail badly enough to earn support…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:5One line of research

When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.

One state moved from flat to clearly improved reading in years when many others slipped, and what changed was not the children but how teachers were…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 22:78One line of research

Speech arrives on its own if a child is spoken to. Reading, writing and arithmetic do not, and it is no failing that they have to be taught piece by piece.

Children absorb talk from the people around them without lessons. Print is a much later invention and the brain has no ready made place for it, so it…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:4One line of research

A child working words out from the pictures and the shape of the sentence is guessing well, not reading yet. It usually holds up until around the third year of school and then gives way, because the pictures stop and the words get longer.

Ask to hear the child read something with no illustrations and no predictable pattern. That is where you find out whether sounds and letters have…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:1One line of research

In most children attention and memory sit at roughly the same level. When memory is far ahead of everything around it, ask what it has been quietly making up for.

Only fair attention with an unusually strong working memory is a signal rather than a strength to celebrate. The memory is carrying something. Look…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 28:34One line of research

Ask someone to repeat a made up word and memory cannot rescue them. That is exactly why this small task keeps finding difficulties a clever, well practised person hides everywhere else.

Real words can be recalled, and a strong memory will lift a score without the skill underneath being there at all. A word that has never existed…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 43:52One line of research

Before adding more content, look at what the child has to receive it with: attention, memory for what was just said, language. Two children given the same lesson do not take away the same amount, and that difference is usually where the real gap sits.

It is tempting to answer a gap with better materials, since materials are the part that can be bought. But if a child cannot hold a sentence in mind…

Twenty minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 4:28One line of research