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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Wound up: slow the out breath, lower the lights, less input. Shut down: more input, movement, sound, a change of room. The common mistake is running a stillness practice while already flat, then concluding that nothing works for you. One question is usually enough. Am I too much, or too little?
'who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down' (Quran 3:191). The practice is not tied to one posture, which leaves room to meet your body where it actually is.
آل عمران
ٱلَّذِينَ يَذۡكُرُونَ ٱللَّهَ قِيَٰمࣰ ا وَقُعُودࣰ ا وَعَلَىٰ جُنُوبِهِمۡ وَيَتَفَكَّرُونَ فِي خَلۡقِ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضِ رَبَّنَا مَا خَلَقۡتَ هَٰذَا بَٰطِلࣰ ا سُبۡحَٰنَكَ فَقِنَا عَذَابَ ٱلنَّارِ
who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down, who reflect on the creation of the heavens and earth: ‘Our Lord! You have not created all this without purpose- You are far above that!- so protect us from the torment of the Fire
Qur’an 3:191read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Reading your own body is less precise than it sounds. A meta-analysis of the two standard laboratory tasks for bodily awareness found they correlate only weakly with each other, which is a real problem for claims about how accurately anyone judges their internal state. So use a rough question rather than trusting a fine grained read. Rough is enough to pick a direction.
Hickman L, Seyedsalehi A, Cook JL, Bird G, Murphy J. (2020). The relationship between heartbeat counting and heartbeat discrimination: A meta-analysis.. Biological psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The same technique can help or backfire depending on which direction your body has gone.
If you cannot feel your own state yet, a device that shows it on a screen can stand in until you can.
Coming alive at night is a common pattern after trauma. Mornings are flat, the day is heavy, and something lifts around the time you are meant to be winding down.
Thinking about a feeling tends to slow it down. Feeling it in your body tends to speed it up. Between those two you have a throttle.