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Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
This is not avoidance. The outward senses and the sense of where your body sits both carry information about now, which is exactly what the flooding is missing. Stay there until the volume drops. You can go back inside later, and often you will want to.
when their very souls closed in around them (Quran 9:118). The verse names that shut in feeling exactly, and what follows it there is mercy rather than blame.
التوبة
وَعَلَى ٱلثَّلَٰثَةِ ٱلَّذِينَ خُلِّفُواْ حَتَّىٰٓ إِذَا ضَاقَتۡ عَلَيۡهِمُ ٱلۡأَرۡضُ بِمَا رَحُبَتۡ وَضَاقَتۡ عَلَيۡهِمۡ أَنفُسُهُمۡ وَظَنُّوٓاْ أَن لَّا مَلۡجَأَ مِنَ ٱللَّهِ إِلَّآ إِلَيۡهِ ثُمَّ تَابَ عَلَيۡهِمۡ لِيَتُوبُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ ٱلتَّوَّابُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ
And to the three men who stayed behind: when the earth, for all its spaciousness, closed in around them, when their very souls closed in around them, when they realized that the only refuge from God was with Him, He turned to them in mercy in order for them to return [to Him]. God is the Ever Relenting, the Most Merciful
Qur’an 9:118read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A conceptual review draws a line between attending to bodily sensation and worrying about it, and argues the two have opposite implications for wellbeing. Flooding sits on the worrying side of that line. Stepping out to the room is a way of stopping the worried kind of monitoring without having to suppress anything.
Mehling W. (2016). Differentiating attention styles and regulatory aspects of self-reported interoceptive sensibility.. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The outer senses report on the present, so they crowd out a signal that is coming from the past.
Before inviting anyone to turn attention to their body, ask first. How do you feel about trying this now, and would you like to?
There is a difference between watching your hand and being in your hand. See whether you can move from looking at a part of your body to living inside it.
Your nervous system decides whether a room is safe before you have had a single thought about it. Tone of voice, a face, the way someone walks in: it reads all of that and answers underneath your awareness.