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Areas › Anger › Cool the body first
This is why an angry judgement can feel so sharp and turn out to be so poor. The person in front of you has become the whole picture, and the details that would soften or complicate the story are still there, just not being seen. The useful move is not to argue with yourself about them. It is to change what your eyes are doing, and let the rest come back on its own.
The daylight so that you can see (Quran 10:67). Light is given so that a whole scene becomes visible, and not only the one thing you were staring at.
يونس
هُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ لِتَسۡكُنُواْ فِيهِ وَٱلنَّهَارَ مُبۡصِرًاۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَٰتࣲ لِّقَوۡمࣲ يَسۡمَعُونَ
It is He who made the night so that you can rest in it and the daylight so that you can see- there truly are signs in this for those who hear
Qur’an 10:67read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Be careful not to promise much here. A meta-analysis of meditation programmes found only small improvements in anxiety, depression and pain when compared with active controls, and no clear benefit for mood, attention, sleep or substance use. Attention practices are worth trying and are not a strong treatment on their own. The account of the narrowed visual field is a description of experience rather than a result from those trials.
Goyal M, Singh S, Sibinga EM, Gould NF, Rowland-Seymour A, Sharma R, Berger Z, Sleicher D, Maron DD, Shihab HM, Ranasinghe PD, Linn S, Saha S, Bass EB, Haythornthwaite JA. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis.. JAMA internal medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
What surrounds a thing is what tells you how to read it, and anger is very good at deleting the surroundings.
Rather than noting each impulse in your head, touch a finger for each one. Thumb to index, thumb to middle, and on round the hand.
The out breath is the part that quiets things down. Cells in the brain's alarm centres behave differently across the two phases of a breath, and breathing out is the calming side of that cycle.
Instead of shutting your eyes, let your gaze go soft and wide: the sky, the far wall, the space above someone's shoulder. Keep them open and let the focus loosen.