How to stay steady in a tense meeting without anyone noticing

Someone in the meeting says something that makes your jaw tighten. You can't leave the room and you can't close your eyes. So, under the table, you touch your thumb to your forefinger and let go again.

Nobody sees it. That small loop is the anchor from Chapter 4 of my book, The Way Within, which is out on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. The book's own line for it is the one I like best: "Your equanimity is none of their business."

Here is how it works, what it takes to set up, and the two-minute exercise it rests on, so you can try the core of the book before spending anything.

What the touch is, and what it isn't

The anchor is adapted from the uptime anchor in Paul Jones's book How to Live in the Here and Now, and the book takes the principle from neurolinguistic programming. You pair a small physical action, thumb and forefinger together on the hand you don't point with, with a state you are in right then. Repeat the pairing and the touch becomes a cue to look again. The book cites no trial of it. It's a method, not a finding.

You build it in layers. First put your attention in your body. When the feeling is clear, close the loop and hold it for ten or fifteen seconds. Let go the moment your attention starts to drift, so the touch stays tied to being present. Do that four or five times. Then do the same while really seeing the room, then while listening. Taste or smell is optional. The last layer is the pointing exercise below. The book puts the five layers at about five minutes. For the first two or three weeks you rebuild it once a day, and in between you fire it often, for a few seconds at a time (The Way Within, Chapter 4).

What it doesn't do matters as much. The touch doesn't produce calm. The book says so plainly: "It's a reminder, not a generator." It won't be strong at first, and when it works it works "not perfectly, not every time" (Chapter 4). What it gives you is a way back to something you have already seen, in the middle of the day, with your eyes open.

The something is what the next exercise shows you.

Try it: the two-minute exercise underneath

This is the pointing exercise, the first thing the book asks you to do, in the five steps from its quick reference (The Way Within, Appendix B). Have one hand free.

The pointing exercise

Point at something across the room. Look at it: colour, shape, distance.

Point at the floor. Then your foot. Your knee. Your chest. Notice each step is less object, more you.

Turn your finger around, six inches from your nose, pointing at where your face should be.

Look past the finger, at the place you are looking out from. Take your time.

Notice what you find there. Not what the mirror says. What is actually there, in your first-person experience.

When I do it, I find no face. "Where I've always assumed my face to be, there's nothing of the sort." Not a blank, either. In the book's words, "Open. Awake. The whole scene pours straight into it with nothing in the way" (Chapter 1).

You might find the same. You might describe it differently, or not be sure. "You didn't do it wrong. If you looked, whatever you noticed is what there is to notice" (Chapter 1).

That open space is what the thumb and forefinger are tied to. In the meeting the irritation is still there. You're just no longer only the irritation. Chapter 6 puts it more bluntly: "The fury is still here, hot as ever, but it's in the space now, and you're the space rather than the fury."

What's in the rest of the book

It opens with a toddler who sees a sparrow and is filled with wonder. A year later it's just a sparrow. He gained a word and lost the seeing. The book says the same thing happened to you. You got a name, a face in the mirror and a story, and that label has been doing your seeing ever since (The Way Within, Introduction).

The chapters turn the pointing exercise into a practice for ordinary days. There are more ways to see, the anchor, and an exercise that goes looking for the one who is having a resentment. There's a chapter on strong emotion on a bad day, and one on what tends to get in the way. The exercises are physical and visual. They take seconds rather than sessions, and they don't ask your thoughts to stop. The book treats thoughts "as scenery rather than as the enemy" (Introduction).

It's also clear about who it isn't for. If you want an argument for nonduality or a philosophy of consciousness, it's the wrong book. If you won't put a book down mid-page and point a finger at your own face, it's also the wrong book, "and better to know it now" (Introduction).

Why I'd take it seriously, and the limits

The pointing exercise comes from the English philosopher Douglas Harding. In 2024 the philosopher Brentyn Ramm and colleagues published an interview study of it in the journal Mindfulness. Twenty adults who had not done the exercises before were guided through nine of them in one sitting of one to two hours. Most already meditated: the median was six years of practice. Twelve of the twenty reported a void-like experience, a sense of emptiness (Ramm, Lumma, Sparby and Weger, 2024, Mindfulness 15(4), 958 to 976). That came from a guided session with an interviewer, not from two minutes on your own.

The authors call it preliminary evidence. It was a small qualitative sample, it measured what people experienced on the day rather than any lasting change, one researcher coded every transcript, and the authors say some of the interviewer's questions may have led the answers. The book's own view is the right one: "your own looking outranks every study anyway" (Introduction).

My route in was slower than two minutes. I first met Harding's Headless Way in his writing, and reading gave me more ideas rather than a change. Around 2010 I went to a workshop in a house in Leamington Spa where Richard Lang was sharing it, and being walked through the exercises took me from insight to knowing. Later, as a certified mindfulness teacher in a voluntary role, I trained more than a thousand colleagues (The Way Within, About the author).

The 2018 book, and this one

I first published The Way Within in 2018, as The Way Within: Your Path to Enlightenment, under the pen name James Capra. That book explained. This one has you do it: the same material, rewritten from philosophy into practice (The Way Within, Amazon description).

Where to get it

Amazon.com lists the Kindle edition at $4.99 and the paperback at $9.99 (checked 25 October 2026). It's also free to read with Kindle+, which is what Amazon now calls Kindle Unlimited.

In the UK it's on amazon.co.uk at £3.99 for Kindle and from £7.99 for the paperback (checked 25 October 2026).

The book page has both formats: jamiewatters.work/the-way-within.

I've recorded a guided version of the pointing exercise in my own voice. Leave your email on the book page and I'll send it to you.

One ask. If the book helps you, even once, a short honest review on Amazon helps the next reader find it. A sentence is plenty, any rating is fine, and if it didn't help, that's worth saying too.

Thumb to forefinger, under the table. Your equanimity is none of their business.