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Areas › Your body › Posture and how you carry yourself
Two things get practised in one position. First the doing: strong legs, clear gaze, a body that is ready. Then the yielding: still there, still strong, but no longer driving it. Most people find one half easy and the other half almost impossible, and it is the harder half that deserves the minutes.
Stand before God in devotion (Quran 2:238). Standing is asked for and devotion is asked for in the same breath, in the same body.
البقرة
حَٰفِظُواْ عَلَى ٱلصَّلَوَٰتِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِ ٱلۡوُسۡطَىٰ وَقُومُواْ لِلَّهِ قَٰنِتِينَ
Take care to do your prayers, praying in the best way, and stand before God in devotion
Qur’an 2:238read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Tai chi is built on slow deliberate posture and shifting weight, and pooling randomised trials of it found reductions in stress, anxiety, depression and mood disturbance. That is the closest evidence to held, attentive posture doing psychological work. It was tested as a whole practice, so nobody can tell you that the pairing of will and surrender is the active part.
Wang C, Bannuru R, Ramel J, Kupelnick B, Scott T, Schmid CH. (2010). Tai Chi on psychological well-being: systematic review and meta-analysis.. BMC complementary and alternative medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Rehearsing effort and surrender inside one shape trains the switch between them, and the switch is what gets stuck.
Play belongs here. Being a lion, a tree, a hissing snake, the way children do it with no embarrassment at all.
Grounding and relaxing are two different prescriptions. A squat with your back against a wall puts you back into your legs. Deep guided rest takes you downwards. Reach for whichever one is missing.
Picture a cat getting up from a nap. One side lengthens and reaches while the other side curls in, then they swap over. Do that. Add breath and sound if you want them.