Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
Practise with the noise on, at least some of the time. The quiet room is not where you are going to need the skill.
A calm that only exists in a silent house is not much use in an open plan office or a kitchen at teatime. Once you can settle in the quiet, do a short version somewhere busy on purpose: a station platform, a break room, the car with the window down. It will feel worse and go less smoothly, and that is what makes it carry over.
Qur’an and Sunnah
seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast (Quran 2:153). Steadfastness is named for the conditions that make it hard, which is where the practice is meant to be used.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis in healthy people rather than patients found mindfulness based stress reduction reliably lowered stress, with a consistent effect across the studies pooled. Those were formal courses with quiet practice conditions. Training deliberately in a noisy setting has not been tested that way, so treat that part as a sensible bet rather than a demonstrated one.
Chiesa A, Serretti A. (2009). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis.. Journal of alternative and complementary medicine (New York, N.Y.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You get good at what you actually practise, including the conditions you practise in.
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
Once a day, go from head to feet and notice what is there. A good deal of what you find will be plain need: thirsty, hungry, needing the loo, needing to stand up.
On a video call, two things still work well: touching your own face gently, and rocking. Both are yours to do, and both are visible enough to be done together.
Two senses rarely get named: the one that tells you where your limbs are, and the one that tells you which way is up. Pressing your feet into the floor or slowly turning your head feeds both.