Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
A regular sitting practice is training rather than a treat. What you practise when things are calm is what your body can find when they are not.
The state people describe in mindfulness and the state of feeling safe in your own body overlap almost completely. That is a good reason to keep the habit small and frequent instead of long and rare. Ten minutes most days, at a time you will genuinely protect, beats an hour on the days you already feel awful.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Believers, remember God often' (Quran 33:41). Often is the instruction, which puts the weight on frequency rather than on intensity.
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
A review and meta-analysis of mindfulness based stress reduction in healthy people found reduced stress, including against active control groups, though the effect was smaller than in clinical samples. A separate systematic review of brain imaging found meditators differ in several regions, including areas involved in body awareness, with moderate effects and mostly cross-sectional studies, so it cannot show practice caused the difference. Modest and real is the fair summary.
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
Fox KC, Nijeboer S, Dixon ML, Floman JL, Ellamil M, Rumak SP, Sedlmeier P, Christoff K. (2014). Is meditation associated with altered brain structure? A systematic review and meta-analysis of morphometric neuroimaging in meditation practitioners.. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Repeating a settled state makes it easier for your body to find its way back there.
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
If you understand your history perfectly and nothing has changed, you are not failing at this. Insight alone is pushing water uphill against the current of information coming from your body.
When the danger still feels like it is happening, that is not a mistake in your thinking. It is a sequence in your body that never got to finish.
There is a listening programme that filters music into the range of the human voice, given in short sittings that add up to a few hours, to make speech easier for the body to take in.