Some practical tips for working with your anxiety

I recently re-read Douglas Hardings short book, “On Having No Head”. He wrote this classic in 1961, and I read it first as a young man perhaps 30 years ago, but it has not aged one drop. This is a true gem of a book - it sparkles in the light and when viewed from some angles it is beautiful indeed, but there are some sharp pointy bits, and it’s quite hard.

Let’s face it, some days are pretty awful. Maybe it’s something dramatic - you are laid off at work, or someone near to you is diagnosed with something really bad, or you return to your car to find a huge scrape all the way along one side and no note of apology under the windscreen wiper. Maybe it’s something that might appear trivial to others - you tread on an errant piece of Lego and spill your cup of tea on your clean clothes.

We all have to do difficult things, but we shouldn’t just do them for the hoped-for outcome. We can chose to do them mindfully, regardless of outcome.

Equanimity for Buddhists is one of the four highest emotions, one of the states we aspire to live in and live by. We see it as the ground for wisdom, the protector of compassion and love, and as full of radiance and warmth for others. It’s a quality we can consciously cultivate through meditation.

If you’re looking for a book that will not just introduce you to meditation, but provide you with clear and careful instructions that will take you all the way from beginner to full on yogi, this is the book for you. It’s big - over 500 pages - but don’t let that put you off: that’s just because it’s covering a huge amount of ground. Now, before we go any further, something needs to be said: the author of this tome, John Yates, aka Culadasa died recently.

So sang Peter Starstedt, back in 1969 Although I’m too young to remember the song at release, it was none the less a frequent enough occurrence on the radio of my youth. The song, in a style described by its Wikipedia article as “faux European waltz tune… with brief bursts of French-style accordion”, is still bringing in significant royalties for Mr Starstedt, decades after its release. The lyrics mention all sorts of things - Marlene Dietrich, Picasso, the Sorbonne, and Napoleon brandy among them.

One of my favourite things about meditation is how I get to talk about happiness with people without it being childish. Happiness is, it seems to me, simply a good thing. Why wouldn’t people want to be happy more of the time? Well most of us might, perhaps, but somehow we don’t think we can talk about it. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, that when we talk about “being happy”, other people seem to regard us with a look that says we’re not a serious grown-up, but have instead reverted to a child-like state and are incapable of seeing all the bad stuff.

The cycle of getting distracted and then returning to what we should have been attending to is ever-present in our lives. Part of meditation is training to shorten this loop.

I love optical illusions. This particular one shows our brain trying to make sense of perspective - the two horizontal boxes are the same width, but the top one looks wider than the bottom one because of what look like the “railway lines” behind them. There are lots of theories about what’s going on in our brains when we see things like this. But what we know for sure, is that our brain is telling us something about the world that isn’t true.