Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Try locking your ankle and holding everything rigid while you balance. You will fall over. The wobble was doing the work.
People who are frightened of losing control often try to hold themselves regulated: clamped, monitoring, allowing no drift. It is exhausting and it fails in the way rigid balance fails. Staying in touch with the small shifts, and letting yourself correct, is what keeps you upright. Worth trying in your body rather than taking on trust, because falling over is much more convincing than being told.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'hearts find peace in the remembrance of God' (Quran 13:28). Remembrance is something returned to again and again, a different shape from holding on tight.
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 narrative review of qigong and tai chi describes practices that combine coordinated posture, deep rhythmic breathing and mental focus, and reports promise for regulating mood while saying plainly that the mechanisms are not established. Flexible continuous adjustment is the common thread through those practices. What the review does not offer is a test of rigidity against flexibility, which is the specific claim here.
Yeung A, Chan JSM, Cheung JC, Zou L. (2018). Qigong and Tai-Chi for Mood Regulation.. Focus (American Psychiatric Publishing) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Correcting needs movement, so gripping removes the very thing that was keeping you steady.
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
Three minutes of slow breathing between one person and the next is not a break. It is part of the work.
Being strong, trained or brave does not decide which way your body goes. People who could easily have fought have frozen instead.
None of this needs explaining to work. A child who cannot say what happened can still be helped by breath, movement and sound.