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Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
Observing keeps a small distance, which is useful early on and can quietly become the whole practice. Inhabiting is the further step: filling the space, taking up residence there. Try it with one region only, somewhere easy like the hands, and give it longer than feels necessary.
by the soul and how He formed it (Quran 91:7). The soul and its forming are named in one breath, which is a fair picture of what living inside your body means.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A controlled imaging study found that long-term meditators had greater grey matter concentration in regions associated with body awareness than matched non-meditators. The design compares groups at a single moment, so it cannot show that practice caused the difference. What it does support is that sustained attention to the body is bound up with the parts of the brain that map the body.
Hölzel BK, Ott U, Gard T, Hempel H, Weygandt M, Morgen K, Vaitl D. (2008). Investigation of mindfulness meditation practitioners with voxel-based morphometry.. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Watching from outside is still a way of staying out, and being inside your body is what you are actually after.
If you are going to bring attention to your body, start with where your body is rather than what it feels. Feet on the floor, back against the chair, the weight of your hands in your lap.
When what is happening inside gets too loud, turn outward. Name what you can see, listen for the furthest sound, press your feet into the floor.
There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.