Self-Knowledge (Essay Books)

recognising a feeling doesn’t mean you follow it to a conclusion.

Our overall nervousness declines when our anxieties are systematically laid out and examined.

We term it Philosophical Meditation, a practice with the premise that a decisive share of the trouble in our minds comes from thoughts and feelings that have not been untangled, examined and confronted with sufficient attention. Philosophical Meditation needs a time of the day when nothing much will be expected of us. We might be in bed or on the s

Psychotherapists have developed a special term to capture what we inherit emotionally from the past: they call it our ‘transference’. In their view, each of us is constantly at risk of ‘transferring’ patterns of behaviour and feeling from the past to a present that doesn’t realistically call for it.

During our meditative session, we need to give all our anxieties a chance to understand themselves, for three-quarters of our agitation is not that there are things to worry about, but that we haven’t given our worries the time they require to be understood and defused.

The other major strategy for changing the voices in our heads is to try to become an imaginary friend to ourselves. In friendship,

We need to grip our anxieties head on and force ourselves to imagine what might happen if their vague catastrophic forebodings truly came to pass: what would happen to us if everything we are dimly worried about really came to pass? What are the real dangers? How might we still be OK, even if it all fell apart? Entertaining the most extreme consequ

The origin of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalisation of the voice of people who were once outside us.

Honourable self-love is not selfishness: it’s the feeling of correctly respecting ourselves.