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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
In the braced kind there is high alertness and a lot of held tension: jaw set, hands tight, everything ready. In the collapsed kind the tone drops out of the body and the person is somewhere else. They need opposite things. Braced stillness holds movement that wants to finish, while collapse needs slow, small, warm re entry from the ground up. Mixing the two up is how a session goes wrong.
One verse contrasts a breast that God opens with one where 'He closes and constricts their breast' (Quran 6:125). The verse is about guidance rather than about arousal, and it gives the language people reach for when they describe these states from inside.
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 meta analysis of the two standard tasks used to measure bodily awareness found they correlate only weakly with each other, which is a real problem for confident claims about how accurately anyone reads an internal state. Take it as a caution for this kind of assessment: hold whatever you think you are seeing loosely, and check it with the person. The meta analysis was about measurement tasks, not about telling these two states apart.
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 two states are doing opposite jobs, so what helps one can push the other further down.
Your heart speeds up slightly on every breath in and slows on every breath out. Sit quietly with a hand on your chest and you can feel it.
Calm is not automatically the goal, and arousal is not automatically the enemy. What you are after is a system that can move between them.
The steadiness you are training shows up in more than your mood. Sleep, digestion and how quickly you come down after a fright tend to move together.