Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
The benefit of a settling practice is cumulative. A fortnight of it now and then does little; the people who get most out of it are the ones who kept going for years.
This cuts both ways, and both are worth knowing. Two weeks of daily practice with no obvious result is not proof that it will not work for you. And large claims about quick transformation deserve a raised eyebrow. Small and often beats long and occasional, so pick a length you would still do on a bad day.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Believers, remember God often (Quran 33:41). The instruction is about frequency, which is quietly the same advice.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱذۡكُرُواْ ٱللَّهَ ذِكۡرࣰ ا كَثِيرࣰ ا
Believers, remember God often
Qur’an 33:41read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a controlled neuroimaging study, a brief focused attention exercise in people new to it already engaged the networks used for controlling attention. So a first session is doing something, even when it feels like nothing much is happening. What that study cannot tell you is how far it carries into ordinary life, which is where the long haul comes in.
Dickenson J, Berkman ET, Arch J, Lieberman MD. (2013). Neural correlates of focused attention during a brief mindfulness induction.. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Attention gets trained the way anything else does, by returning to it many times rather than doing it hard once.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Learn one plain standing position and keep coming back to it: feet under hips, hips under shoulders, ears above shoulders, chin drawn back a little, arms hanging.
Keep a short list of things that settle you, and choose from it by how you actually are, not by which one you like best. Wound up and racing needs something different from flat and switched off.
Think of your thoughts as traffic on a road. Practice thins the traffic. It does not close the road, and nobody has ever managed to close it.