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Areas › Your body › Posture and how you carry yourself
The wording is doing quiet work here. Lift your arms, and see what happens if you lift your arms, are the same physical event, but only one of them leaves you room to decline. For anyone whose history includes being made to do things with their body, that gap is not a nicety. Say out loud that stopping, resting or doing something else entirely is a real option, and mean it when they take it.
If you are in danger, pray when you are out walking or riding (Quran 2:239). Even the prescribed form bends to what a person can manage in the moment, which is the whole spirit of an invitation.
البقرة
فَإِنۡ خِفۡتُمۡ فَرِجَالًا أَوۡ رُكۡبَانࣰ اۖ فَإِذَآ أَمِنتُمۡ فَٱذۡكُرُواْ ٱللَّهَ كَمَا عَلَّمَكُم مَّا لَمۡ تَكُونُواْ تَعۡلَمُونَ
If you are in danger, pray when you are out walking or riding; when you are safe again, remember God, for He has taught you what you did not know
Qur’an 2:239read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of qigong and tai chi for mood points out that these practices bundle several things together, coordinated posture, rhythmic breathing and directed attention, and that nobody has managed to work out which part does the mood work. How the practice is offered is another ingredient in the same bundle, and it has not been measured either. So invitational wording rests on trauma theory and clinical experience rather than on a trial that isolated it.
Yeung A, Chan JSM, Cheung JC, Zou L. (2018). Qigong and Tai-Chi for Mood Regulation.. Focus (American Psychiatric Publishing) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A body that knows it is allowed to stop does not have to brace against what is coming next.
If someone goes blank when handed a choice, that is worth noticing: make the choice smaller rather than larger.
You are not here for a longer hamstring. You are here for a nervous system that can change gear, work when work is needed and settle when it is not.
Whatever a person walks in carrying belongs in the practice. The ache in the hip, the irritation, tears that arrive for no reason, the part that thinks all of this is nonsense.
When you start paying attention to your body, things wake up. More feeling, a deeper breath, memories arriving sideways. That is the practice working, not the practice going wrong.