Advanced · Attention10 minutes
Noting Practice
If you've done this before
For building the muscle that every other practice on this page depends on.
- Sit. Eyes open or closed, doesn't matter.
- Whenever anything arises, give it a one-word label, said silently and gently: thinking. hearing. planning. aching. remembering. wanting.
- Don't follow the thing you labelled. Label it and let it go.
- When you notice you've been lost in a thought for a while, label that too: lost. Then continue. Getting lost is not failing — noticing you were lost is the whole repetition.
- Ten minutes. Expect to get lost dozens of times.
Why it works: This is the underlying skill. Urge surfing, defusion, and schema-catching all require noticing what's happening while it's happening. Noting trains exactly that, and it's why people who practise it find the other tools suddenly start working.