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Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
Two or three minutes is enough. Roll the shoulders, round and lengthen the spine, turn gently side to side. It also says something without anyone having to announce it, that the body counts here and is not merely the thing carrying your head about. If you run sessions or groups, opening this way sets the tone far better than saying so would.
to make your hearts strong and your feet firm (Quran 8:11). On a frightening night, what was given first was rest and a steadied body rather than an argument.
الأنفال
إِذۡ يُغَشِّيكُمُ ٱلنُّعَاسَ أَمَنَةࣰ مِّنۡهُ وَيُنَزِّلُ عَلَيۡكُم مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مَآءࣰ لِّيُطَهِّرَكُم بِهِۦ وَيُذۡهِبَ عَنكُمۡ رِجۡزَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ وَلِيَرۡبِطَ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِكُمۡ وَيُثَبِّتَ بِهِ ٱلۡأَقۡدَامَ
Remember when He gave you sleep as a reassurance from Him, and sent down water from the sky to cleanse you, to remove Satan’s pollution from you, to make your hearts strong and your feet firm
Qur’an 8:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised experiment, people who had just been through an acute stressor shifted away from goal directed action and towards habit, which suggests being flooded narrows what a person can actually do. The study used learning tasks in a laboratory, not therapy sessions. Even so, it supports the ordering: bring arousal down before asking for careful thought.
Schwabe L, Wolf OT. (2010). Socially evaluated cold pressor stress after instrumental learning favors habits over goal-directed action.. Psychoneuroendocrinology doi
Strength of evidence: long taught, never tested. Widely used and long taught. No trial has established that it works.
Settling the body first leaves more of you available for the harder thinking that comes after.
When you offer someone a practice, ask them to tell you if it did nothing, and mean it. Say out loud that plenty of these do not land.
Left, right, left, right. Walking, swimming, drumming and rowing all give the body the same steady side to side rhythm that the seated techniques are copying.
When you have gone numb rather than frantic, try a long low sound on the out breath. Voo, drawn out until the breath runs out, so your lips and chest buzz with it.