Deborah Hill Cone: My new secret to inner peace - and it's not colouring books

Colouring in books promoting mindfulness are super trendy at the moment.

Meditation is a challenge, so compiling lists is the next best thing.

One. I can hear Delphi the labrador shaking the rain off her shaggy coat and it is making her collar jingle. Two. It is 4pm and Gussie's Star Wars pyjamas are still in a puddle in the middle of the living room floor. Three. The fridge is making ominous knocking sounds like it is preparing to blow up. My former therapist told me: "I think meditation would be very challenging for you." Thanks, brother.

You were right. I am a dud at mindfulness. It may be super trendy - all those colouring books - but it does not work for everyone. (Falling short of the ideal of being able to meditate can become another reason for individuals with trauma to feel bad about themselves.)

So I've started doing this other thing where you just pause and quickly as you can write down five random things you notice around you. Okay, I know that probably sounds more like Play School than the teachings of the Dalai Lama. But two of the most useful words you can remember are, "Notice that." We just don't notice things most of the time. And that matters, because you can't do what you want till you know what you're doing.

Coming out of your head and into reality is almost druggy: like waking up from a trance. But I don't think I would have realised this if last week I had not been given what some call "the gift of desperation". This doesn't sound like a gift, I know. But turns out it is only when you have the awareness that all your strategies to control your inner chaos have failed that you get desperate enough to stop running, to stop fighting your pain. Giving up is the start of all the good stuff.

This is the astonishing bit: I seemed to find it possible to feel some gentleness and to stop persecuting myself. Winces: I'm going to write something embarrassing now. Here goes. The only way to heal is to allow our hearts to be touched by suffering - our own and others. Touching the rawness of our pain transforms our suffering into compassion. There. I said it.

Scoff away if you like.

I have befriended my longing, my weirdness, my obsessiveness, my freakish grief and pain, and even my self-loathing. Well, maybe not befriended them, exactly. For now I am content just to notice them, sitting there, in a banal way. Sometimes you have to sort of sneak up on reality.

"Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense." (W.H. Auden)

Noticing new things this past week, I have been trying out different stuff. I got my fakey Parnell yummy mummy hair extensions taken out. I am now au naturel, with a strange mullet. I look a bit like 1980s self-defence expert Sue Lytollis, but that's okay, I just speed up around mirrors and hopefully no one will mess with me. One needs to be able to tolerate some discomfort in order to be real. Anyway, I am also trying to reflect (gently) on my need to be superior to other people and reduce or eliminate it.

Trying to be glamorous may be just another iteration of trying to be "one-up", and it is a relief to let that need go as - tie-dyed lingo alert - a belief that "doesn't serve me".

And we are all on a hiding to nothing caring about the surfaces. No matter how hard you try or how much money you feed into the system on the required outfits and status signifiers, time is relentless. "We are all destined for disgusting," a famous feminist said. I think she meant it in a good way, though.

I'm also noticing the ways in which I have the tendency to invest other people with imaginary power. That is scary. History is full of stories showing human beings may be induced to sacrifice everything they hold dear and true, including their sense of self, for the sake of being loved and approved of by someone in a position of authority.

I have had a habit to assign too much value to other people with unrealistic expectations for this person, any person, to give me "unconditional positive regard". But you know what? Nobody else can give you unconditional positive regard. Except you.

That comes from seeing joy in things as they are. So back to my noticing. Number four. I have a half-drunk cup of Earl Grey tea next to me in a cup covered in violets which my late mother gave me before she died. Number five. My journal is open next to me and written on the page is this quote: "Meet whatever is inside you with unconditional friendliness."