Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.
If tuning into your chest feels like too much, that is worth knowing rather than pushing through. You can go instead to what your feet are pressing against, or to the sound of the room, and still be doing body work. Most people find the position of their body in space is the calmest door, and the emotional inside is the loudest one.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He gave you hearing, sight, and minds (Quran 32:9). The channels for knowing were given to you, and you are allowed to use whichever one is open today.
ثُمَّ سَوَّىٰهُ وَنَفَخَ فِيهِ مِن رُّوحِهِۦۖ وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرَ وَٱلۡأَفۡـِٔدَةَۚ قَلِيلࣰ ا مَّا تَشۡكُرُونَ
Then He moulded him; He breathed from His Spirit into him; He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How seldom you are grateful
Qur’an 32:9read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis comparing the two standard laboratory tests of body sensing, counting your own heartbeats and telling a beat from a tone, found they agree only weakly. There is no single score for how well someone senses their body, since the answer changes with the test used. That is fair reason to treat body awareness as several abilities rather than one.
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
Each channel carries different information, so if one is overwhelming you can still get a reading from another.
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
You do not have to close your eyes. If keeping them open, soft and lowered, is what lets you stay in the room, that is the better version for you.
Thirst, hunger, the ache of having sat too long: these are not nagging, they are instructions. When self-care keeps failing, it is often because the instruction never arrived.
When what is happening inside gets too loud, turn outward. Name what you can see, listen for the furthest sound, press your feet into the floor.