It doesn't matter what crisis is going on around you, it doesn't matter if everyone else is loosing their head... a steady and clear mind will always rise to the challenge.

If - or, actually, when - you are faced with a challenging situation (what day goes by without one?), take a few really deep breaths, feel the air pass through your nostrils - cool air in, warmer air out - feel it fill your chest... slow yourself down and control your emotions.

Remind yourself that all things pass - bet you you can't remember what was annoying this day six months ago! - and that, when dealt with in a clear state of mind, all things pass effortlessly.

You are the sky. Everything else... it's just the weather.

We all know people who we wish would simply evaporate! We all have - from time to time - deal with people who simply do not know how to behave themselves. The truth of the matter is that, from time to time, we all answer to that description... given that the ordinary mind is normally in neutral. Being in neutral, however, means that your mind is actively working against you... all of the time. You make sense of reality by filtering that reality through your personality (who you believe yourself to be) - a process known as cognitive appraisal. Your personality was formed during your formative years (obviously!) so that its role in evaluating and enabling you respond to current reality is pretty dubious... with the best will in the world, behaving in 2014 on the basis of how you learned to behave in 1970 is a recipe for all the little disasters that make up the average day.

As a result, we find it difficult to deal with difficult people because they make us feel as if we're under attack - they may even, in attacking us, confirm to us the bad things that we thnk we know about ourselves. In fact it is our personality that is under attack. The consequences are needless anxiety, annoyance, frustration, fear, anger. A needless waste of our precious psychological energy, we feel wasted as a consequence of an encounter with such people.

All this "toxicity" does not, in fact exist. OK, your protagonist may be an a**hole, but, in reacting to him or her in the automatic way that you do, you're only feeding the beast. OK, you may have to put up with treatment that a dog shouldn't have to endure but, the problem is, you keep replaying it afterwards... subjecting yourself to the abuse all over again - something that makes no sense at all. Toxicity, inappropriate behaviour, whatever you want to call it, persists because we, the sufferers, give it legs. In order to cut it off at the knees, we need to stop playing that bully's game, stop reacting according to an established inner stereotype and start behaving like a person in mindful control of oneself, in the moment.

How can you do that? Well, to be mindfully in control when it matters, you need to train to be mindfully in control when it doesn't. Meditation will get you there. It will enable you, first of all, understand that all things pass... and, thereby, prevent you from pushing the replay button after the event. It will enable you behave differently in the moment - meditation breaks our pathetic dependence on our out-of-date but oh so self-conscious personality. You start behaving in a way that cuts off the other's supply of oxygen... if they don't respond, chances are they'll eventually just go away and pick on somebody else who does feed their habit. OK, it's not quite evaporation but it's the next best thing!