Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Thinking about a feeling tends to slow it down. Feeling it in your body tends to speed it up. Between those two you have a throttle.
When someone is flooded, moving to words, naming and a little distance brings it down. When someone is flat and describing their week from behind glass, attention to the body brings it closer. Good sessions, and good evenings on your own, move back and forth rather than committing to one. The rule of thumb: too much, go to words. Too little, go to sensation.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Night prayer makes a deeper impression and sharpens words' (Quran 73:6). Conditions change how a practice lands, which is worth knowing before you decide a method has failed you.
إِنَّ نَاشِئَةَ ٱلَّيۡلِ هِيَ أَشَدُّ وَطۡـࣰٔ ا وَأَقۡوَمُ قِيلًا
Night prayer makes a deeper impression and sharpens words––
Qur’an 73:6read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised mechanistic trial in 102 combat veterans with post traumatic stress disorder deliberately separated mindfulness from slow breathing so the two could be compared, and found each engages somewhat different pathways. Different routes are not interchangeable. That trial compared those two components, so calling one a brake and the other an accelerator is clinical shorthand rather than something it measured.
Wahbeh H, Goodrich E, Goy E, Oken BS. (2016). Mechanistic Pathways of Mindfulness Meditation in Combat Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.. Journal of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Words and sensation pull in opposite directions, so having both means you can adjust instead of only enduring.
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
If your usual trouble is going blank, feeling unreal or watching yourself from a distance, this is the kind of work that tends to reach that.
The stress hormone that carries you through a hard month also quietens your immune system while it is high. When it drops, the immune side comes back up.
A healthy heart rate is not a metronome. The small variations between beats are a sign your body can still adjust to what is in front of it.