Put out an empty chair: learning to sit with yourself

In my friend Lao Xu's therapy room there is one particular chair. It's usually empty. Whoever comes sits in it.

She keeps it for clients to keep themselves company. Most people start pouring things out the moment they sit down, faster and faster, as if they're running from something. She asks them to stop, drink some water, say nothing, and just sit for a minute. What surprises her is that most of them tear up inside those sixty seconds. They haven't sat quietly with themselves in a very long time.

Lao Xu says our era has a common ailment: we have far less patience with ourselves than with our phones. A dead battery makes us anxious. Cold food irritates us. But the question of whether we're tired can go unasked for months.

Inspired by her, I did a year of empty-chair practice.

The method is so simple it feels embarrassing to call it a method. One evening a week, all screens off, sit in the armchair at home that otherwise never gets used. Twenty minutes. No meditation, no reflection, no planning. Just sitting. Let the mind wander where it wants. When you drift, come back. If you get sleepy, doze.

The first month was hard. Twenty minutes sounds like nothing. At the start it is an enormous amount of time. In week one I lasted under ten minutes and reached for my phone three times, hand out and pulled back again, like quitting cigarettes. In week two strange things started surfacing. I remembered an afternoon at my grandmother's watching rain when I was small. I remembered a friend I hadn't called in years. I remembered a small errand I'd postponed for six months, and a grievance I'd been too "lazy to make a fuss about." They had all been there the whole time. It was just too loud to hear them.

One night in the third month I was sitting there and suddenly asked myself a question: have you been pushing yourself too hard lately? Just that one sentence, and I stayed in the chair a long while. It's hard to describe. It was like someone finally noticed how tired I was, and the someone was me.

Company with yourself isn't thought up. It's sat out. The body goes quiet first, and then the heart has somewhere to sit down.

After a year, a few things had quietly changed. I stopped "resting" by scrolling; the kind of rest that leaves you emptier afterwards was gone. I got much more honest with myself. When I'm tired I say I'm tired. Dinners I don't want to attend get declined. Feelings I've been postponing get written down. And there was an unexpected gain: I got better at listening to other people. Lao Xu says that's normal. Once your relationship with yourself loosens, all your relationships loosen.

If you want to try it, a few small suggestions. Fix the chair, fix the time, put the phone in another room. Don't set a goal — those twenty minutes produce nothing, and their only output is that you kept yourself company for twenty minutes. Wandering off, getting irritable, being unable to sit still: all normal. They come, they go. The point is not to sit well. The point is to still be in the chair when the twenty minutes are up.

Someone once asked me whether this is just spacing out. It isn't. Spacing out is being absent. This is being present.

We make time for friends. We tell children stories. We sit through our parents' favorite dramas with them. We spend patience by the handful. Then it's our own turn and we dismiss it with "no time." Put out an empty chair. The person in the world who most needs your company has been waiting at home the whole time.