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Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
Welcome the first few times. Being tired enough to drop off the moment nobody needs anything from you is worth knowing about, and the honest response is usually more sleep at night, not more discipline in the chair. After a while, though, it is worth asking which kind of sleep this is. Rest that leaves you clearer is doing its job. Sleep that has become the way you leave the room whenever things get quiet is doing something else.
Truly, man is a clear witness against himself (Quran 75:14). You are the one with the evidence about which kind of tiredness this is, even when you would rather not look at it.
القيامة
بَلِ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَلَىٰ نَفۡسِهِۦ بَصِيرَةࣱ
Truly, man is a clear witness against himself
Qur’an 75:14read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A conceptual review separates attending to bodily sensations from worrying about them, and argues the two have opposite implications for wellbeing. The wider lesson holds here: what matters is not only what the body does but the stance you take toward it. The paper is an argument about how to think about body awareness rather than a study of sleepiness in practice.
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 same behaviour can be genuine recovery or a way of leaving, and only you can tell which by how you feel afterwards.
Before inviting anyone to turn attention to their body, ask first. How do you feel about trying this now, and would you like to?
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.
A long body practice is a teaching version. In real life, take one small piece: just the feet, just the hands, just a minute of noticing.