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Areas › Your body › Posture and how you carry yourself
Stay in an easy position long enough for it to go slightly dull. Dull is the sign that the ground under you is steady. From there, small experiments: a little turn of the head, more weight into one foot, a hand somewhere different. None of it has to resemble the picture in the book, and you can come back to the plain shape whenever the exploring gets uncomfortable.
Who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down (Quran 3:191). Every position a body can be in is already named as somewhere the practice can be carried out from.
آل عمران
ٱلَّذِينَ يَذۡكُرُونَ ٱللَّهَ قِيَٰمࣰ ا وَقُعُودࣰ ا وَعَلَىٰ جُنُوبِهِمۡ وَيَتَفَكَّرُونَ فِي خَلۡقِ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضِ رَبَّنَا مَا خَلَقۡتَ هَٰذَا بَٰطِلࣰ ا سُبۡحَٰنَكَ فَقِنَا عَذَابَ ٱلنَّارِ
who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down, who reflect on the creation of the heavens and earth: ‘Our Lord! You have not created all this without purpose- You are far above that!- so protect us from the torment of the Fire
Qur’an 3:191read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A within subject study compared different styles of yoga and found that a single session shifted psychological measures differently depending on the style, with body consciousness and a sense of peace moving more in some than in others. What that supports is a modest point: what happens inside a session is not fixed by the physical shapes alone. It was a small study of styles, not a test of exploring inside a posture.
Park CL, Finkelstein-Fox L, Groessl EJ, Elwy AR, Lee SY. (2020). Exploring how different types of yoga change psychological resources and emotional well-being across a single session.. Complementary therapies in medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Curiosity only switches on once a body has stopped scanning for what might go wrong.
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.
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.
Calm is only half the training. Plenty of people are more frightened of stillness than of adrenaline, because stillness puts the guard down.