Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
If nobody helped you learn to settle when you were small, you can still learn it now. Slower and more deliberately, but genuinely.
Reading about early development can leave people feeling sentenced, as though the window shut at three and that was that. The same capacity to adapt that made you watchful and self contained is the capacity that lets this change. It happens through repetition and through other people more than through insight, which is slow news but hopeful news.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'So remember Me; I will remember you' (Quran 2:152). The offer stands now, whatever was or was not built for you earlier.
فَٱذۡكُرُونِيٓ أَذۡكُرۡكُمۡ وَٱشۡكُرُواْ لِي وَلَا تَكۡفُرُونِ
So remember Me; I will remember you. Be thankful to Me, and never ungrateful
Qur’an 2:152read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review and meta analysis of brain imaging in meditation practitioners found differences in several regions, including areas involved in body awareness, with effect sizes described as moderate. The caveat is the authors' own: most of those studies are cross sectional, comparing practitioners with non practitioners, which cannot show that the practice caused the difference. Encouraging rather than conclusive.
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
The nervous system keeps adapting to whatever it meets repeatedly, and that does not stop in childhood.
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
Not all stillness is the same. One kind is braced and wide awake. The other has gone soft and far away.
Safety comes in through three doors: your body, the place you are in, and the people around you. If one is shut, try another.
Yoga, slow breathing with feedback, neurofeedback and listening programmes are all aiming at the same target. Pick the one you can actually get to and keep doing.