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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Mobilising starts deep in the middle of you and travels out to the edges, first the eyes and jaw and voice, then the arms, then the legs. Stopped partway, that is where the tension stays. Noticing which of yours is holding is useful information, and it points at the kind of movement that might help.
'He closes and constricts their breast' (Quran 6:125). The Qur'an puts constriction in the chest, so naming where you feel yours is in keeping with how it speaks.
الأنعام
فَمَن يُرِدِ ٱللَّهُ أَن يَهۡدِيَهُۥ يَشۡرَحۡ صَدۡرَهُۥ لِلۡإِسۡلَٰمِۖ وَمَن يُرِدۡ أَن يُضِلَّهُۥ يَجۡعَلۡ صَدۡرَهُۥ ضَيِّقًا حَرَجࣰ ا كَأَنَّمَا يَصَّعَّدُ فِي ٱلسَّمَآءِۚ كَذَٰلِكَ يَجۡعَلُ ٱللَّهُ ٱلرِّجۡسَ عَلَى ٱلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ
When God wishes to guide someone, He opens their breast to islam; when He wishes to lead them astray, He closes and constricts their breast as if they were climbing up to the skies. That is how God makes the foulness of those who do not believe rebound against them
Qur’an 6:125read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review and network meta-analysis compared physical relaxation methods for occupational stress head to head, and found several including yoga and massage reduced stress, with small differences between them. Working through the body helps in general. The specific map from a stuck jaw to an interrupted defence is a clinical model rather than something these studies tested.
Zhang M, Murphy B, Cabanilla A, Yidi C. (2021). Physical relaxation for occupational stress in healthcare workers: A systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.. Journal of occupational health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The action that was interrupted is still queued in the muscles that would have carried it out.
Long stress does not have one look. Some people end up permanently switched on. Others end up flat, heavy and hopeless. The two need opposite things.
If you try to call up a good feeling and nothing arrives, you are in ordinary company. That blankness is common after a long stretch of hard years, and it is workable.
None of this makes thinking useless. Making sense of what happened, and changing what you concluded about yourself, does work that no breathing exercise touches.