Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
Stand on one leg for a few breaths. Your body has to work to keep you upright, and that work is loud enough to feel on a day when nothing else registers.
Balance pulls in the joints, the inner ear and the muscles all at once, so it gives a far stronger signal than sitting still and hoping to notice something. Hold a wall or a table if you need to. Ten or fifteen seconds a side is plenty, then swap.
Qur’an and Sunnah
do you not see how God has made what is in the heavens and on the earth useful to you (Quran 31:20). Gravity is part of that provision, and standing against it is one way to feel yourself here.
أَلَمۡ تَرَوۡاْ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ سَخَّرَ لَكُم مَّا فِي ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَمَا فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَأَسۡبَغَ عَلَيۡكُمۡ نِعَمَهُۥ ظَٰهِرَةࣰ وَبَاطِنَةࣰۗ وَمِنَ ٱلنَّاسِ مَن يُجَٰدِلُ فِي ٱللَّهِ بِغَيۡرِ عِلۡمࣲ وَلَا هُدࣰ ى وَلَا كِتَٰبࣲ مُّنِيرࣲ
[People], do you not see how God has made what is in the heavens and on the earth useful to you, and has lavished His bless-ings on you both outwardly and inwardly? Yet some people argue about God, without knowledge or guidance or an illuminating scripture
Qur’an 31:20read 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 yoga and the brain concluded that improvements in body awareness are consistently reported and plausible, while the imaging evidence behind them is still preliminary. Balance work sits inside that literature rather than having its own trials. So the practice is reasonable and costs nothing, but the evidence for it is not yet firm.
Rivest-Gadbois E, Boudrias MH. (2019). What are the known effects of yoga on the brain in relation to motor performances, body awareness and pain? A narrative review.. Complementary therapies in medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Working against gravity produces a strong stream of information from the body that is hard not to feel.
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
An alarm system can be wrong in two directions. It can scream in a safe room, and it can stay silent somewhere it should not.
One question does a lot of work: is what my body is doing right now a fair match for what is actually in front of me? Ask it plainly, and let the answer be either yes or no.
There is a difference between watching your hand and being in your hand. See whether you can move from looking at a part of your body to living inside it.