Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
The screen tells you nothing and asks you nothing. The plane simply flies better or worse, and the adjusting happens on its own.
That suits people who cannot easily put what they feel into words, which includes a great many children and a great many adults after trauma. There is no right answer to produce and no report to give afterwards. If describing your inner life is the hard part for you, or for someone you care for, this counts in its favour.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'brought you out of your mothers' wombs knowing nothing, and gave you hearing and sight and minds' (Quran 16:78). Learning starts long before any of it can be explained.
وَٱللَّهُ أَخۡرَجَكُم مِّنۢ بُطُونِ أُمَّهَٰتِكُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ شَيۡـࣰٔ ا وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرَ وَٱلۡأَفۡـِٔدَةَ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تَشۡكُرُونَ
It is God who brought you out of your mothers’ wombs knowing nothing, and gave you hearing and sight and minds, so that you might be thankful
Qur’an 16:78read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
There is good reason not to lean on people describing their internal states. A meta-analysis found the two standard laboratory tasks for bodily awareness correlate only weakly with each other, a real problem for claims about how accurately anyone reads their own body. That work is about heartbeat perception rather than brainwaves. It supports the value of a method that does not depend on self-report.
Hickman L, Seyedsalehi A, Cook JL, Bird G, Murphy J. (2020). The relationship between heartbeat counting and heartbeat discrimination: A meta-analysis.. Biological psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Feedback that carries no judgement lets learning happen without anybody having to explain it.
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
Rest your attention in the middle of your chest, let your breath slow as though it were moving in and out through there, and bring to mind something you feel warmly about.
There is a difference between not being upset anymore and actually being settled. The first is a rough tuning. The second is finer.
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.