"Sitting with it sounds like therapy-speak"

Some readers will have flinched at the direction this is going. Sit with the feeling. Ride the wave. Name it. You've heard this language before and it sounds like something from a leaflet, and you're not a leaflet person.

I'll concede the language. It's been worn smooth by overuse, and I've tried to keep it to a minimum. So let me say plainly what the method is and isn't.

It isn't meditation. You don't need a cushion, an app, a quiet room or ten years of practice. It isn't a belief about anything. It doesn't require you to think the feeling is wise or a teacher or a message from your body. It's not a therapy and it doesn't replace one.

What it is, is ten minutes of not reaching. That's the whole of it. The flicker comes, you notice, you say what it is, and you carry on with what you were doing for ten minutes without giving it anything. In those ten minutes you'll notice it rise a little, sit, and fall. That noticing is what the leaflets call sitting with it, and it's less mystical than a bus timetable.

Bowen and Marlatt's smokers were given brief instructions, in a single session, and they weren't meditators. They were students who wanted to smoke less. The instructions didn't lower their urges. They changed what the students did when the urge came, and a week later there were fewer cigarettes. That's the evidence for the method, such as it is, and it's the evidence for something ordinary, which is that an urge you don't act on goes away and you do the thing less.

The word surfing, which Marlatt used, is the one bit of the vocabulary I'd keep, because it's accurate about one thing. A surfer doesn't stop the wave and doesn't get off it. They stay on it while it does what waves do, and it puts them down on the beach. That's the whole of the skill. Nothing about the wave changes. Only what you do while it's under you.

Nor does it require you to feel nothing. The feeling will be there, and you'll feel it, and that's the point. The leaflet version sometimes sounds as if the aim is a calm blankness. It isn't. The aim is to find out what a two does, which means letting it be a two for long enough to see.

If it helps, don't call it anything. Call it the ten minutes. Or call it finding out, because that's what it is, finding out what the flicker does when nobody helps it, which you've never once done.