Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
One of the earliest signs that you are drifting out of the present is that your hands and feet go vague. Not numb exactly, just less there.
It tends to happen before you notice you have gone anywhere. If you learn your own version of it, you get an early warning: a chance to press your feet down, hold something cold, or say out loud where you are, while all of that is still easy. Someone sitting with you may spot it before you do, in how still you have gone.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves (Quran 41:53). Some of the signs worth reading are as close as your own hands and feet.
سَنُرِيهِمۡ ءَايَٰتِنَا فِي ٱلۡأٓفَاقِ وَفِيٓ أَنفُسِهِمۡ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمۡ أَنَّهُ ٱلۡحَقُّۗ أَوَلَمۡ يَكۡفِ بِرَبِّكَ أَنَّهُۥ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ شَهِيدٌ
We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses everything
Qur’an 41:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis in schizophrenia found that dissociative experiences and difficulty identifying one's own emotions were both raised compared with people without the diagnosis, at moderate size. That is a specific population, and the study does not test which comes first. So treat the hands and feet marker as a clinical observation worth watching for, not as something the literature has pinned down.
O'Driscoll C, Laing J, Mason O. (2014). Cognitive emotion regulation strategies, alexithymia and dissociation in schizophrenia, a review and meta-analysis.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The sense of where your body is fades before your sense of the conversation does, so it warns you first.
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
Picture what you feel as weather. A clear morning, a wind picking up, a storm sitting on the far hills. Weather is real, and weather moves.
If something will not shift, pair it with the breath: 'I am' as you breathe in, 'letting go' as you breathe out. Let the out breath be the longer one.
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.