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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
In practice it means you can feel the heat in your chest and still choose the next sentence. Neither half is the enemy: pure logic talks you out of what you actually need, and pure feeling picks the thing you will regret by evening. Naming which one is currently driving is often enough to let the other one back in.
it is best to be patient: from God alone I seek help to bear what you are saying (Quran 12:18). Yaqub names the wrong done to him and chooses his response in the same breath, feeling and judgement both present.
يوسف
وَجَآءُو عَلَىٰ قَمِيصِهِۦ بِدَمࣲ كَذِبࣲۚ قَالَ بَلۡ سَوَّلَتۡ لَكُمۡ أَنفُسُكُمۡ أَمۡرࣰ اۖ فَصَبۡرࣱ جَمِيلࣱۖ وَٱللَّهُ ٱلۡمُسۡتَعَانُ عَلَىٰ مَا تَصِفُونَ
and they showed him his shirt, deceptively stained with blood. He cried, ‘No! Your souls have prompted you to do wrong! But it is best to be patient: from God alone I seek help to bear what you are saying.’
Qur’an 12:18read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised experiment, a brief mindful breathing exercise increased people's sense of standing back from their own thoughts more than muscle relaxation or loving kindness practice did, and it reduced how badly they reacted to repetitive thoughts. That is a short laboratory task rather than a capacity measured over months. What it supports is that a small exercise can create some distance without having to shut the thought down.
Feldman G, Greeson J, Senville J. (2010). Differential effects of mindful breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and loving-kindness meditation on decentering and negative reactions to repetitive thoughts.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A decision holds better when the feeling behind it has been heard rather than overruled.
Whether a feeling is nowhere to be found or far too much, the questions are the same: what breath, what movement, what sentence, what person helps me stay with this?
Whoever is going to do the feeling picks what to work with. The tightness in the chest, the closing throat, the anger, the grief, whichever one they are ready for today.
Sometimes the thing that stops your tears is an order somebody gave you decades ago, and you are the one carrying it out now. One woman found her father's words sitting behind a habit of wiping her face dry the moment she cried.