Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
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.
This is a more useful target than clearing your mind, because you can tell whether it is happening. Some days it is bumper to bumper and the practice is simply watching it go past. Other days there are gaps. Both are the practice working as intended, and expecting an empty road is what makes people give up in the second week.
Qur’an and Sunnah
it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace (Quran 13:28). Peace is located in the remembering itself, not in an empty head.
ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ وَتَطۡمَئِنُّ قُلُوبُهُم بِذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِۗ أَلَا بِذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ تَطۡمَئِنُّ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ
those who have faith and whose hearts find peace in the remembrance of God- truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace
Qur’an 13:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of mediation studies asked how mindfulness based programmes actually produce their benefits, and found the effect runs partly through less rumination and worry, alongside more mindfulness and self compassion. Less circling, rather than no thoughts, is what the evidence describes. These studies trace the route of the benefit and not its size.
Gu J, Strauss C, Bond R, Cavanagh K. (2015). How do mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction improve mental health and wellbeing? A systematic review and meta-analysis of mediation studies.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A goal you can picture and partly reach keeps you going, where an impossible one only tells you that you failed.
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
To come down, move slowly and rhythmically: rock, sway, walk at half speed. To come up, move properly: jog on the spot, jump, dance fast, or carry something heavy.
Rolling or throwing a ball back and forth with someone is more useful than it looks when one of you has gone blank. It gives the body a job and the two of you a rhythm at the same time.
Tap the fleshy side of one hand with the other and say it plainly: even though I am feeling all this in my body right now, I can accept that this is how I am.