Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
If a few quiet minutes with your body turn up an ache or a tightness you had not noticed before, the practice has not made things worse. It has shown you something that was already there.
This catches a lot of people out. They sit down hoping to feel calmer, meet a knot in the stomach instead, and decide the whole thing is not for them. What has actually happened is that the discomfort has become available: you can now rest it, stretch it, ask about it, or simply know it is there while you get on with the day. Nothing you cannot feel can be looked after.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God knows everything that is in your hearts, whether you conceal or reveal it (Quran 3:29). What surfaced today was never hidden from Him, so noticing it is you catching up, not something new going wrong.
قُلۡ إِن تُخۡفُواْ مَا فِي صُدُورِكُمۡ أَوۡ تُبۡدُوهُ يَعۡلَمۡهُ ٱللَّهُۗ وَيَعۡلَمُ مَا فِي ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَمَا فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِۗ وَٱللَّهُ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدِيرࣱ
Say [Prophet], ‘God knows everything that is in your hearts, whether you conceal or reveal it; He knows everything in the heavens and earth; God has power over all things.’
Qur’an 3:29read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A theoretical review argues that sustained, unhurried attention to bodily sensation lets signals which had stayed implicit be brought into the account a person gives of their own experience. It is a reasoned account drawing on existing work rather than a trial of the practice. It does fit the everyday observation that quiet attention surfaces things that were under the surface all along.
Price CJ, Weng HY. (2021). Facilitating Adaptive Emotion Processing and Somatic Reappraisal via Sustained Mindful Interoceptive Attention.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You can only tend to something once you know it is there.
When not to
If what surfaces is more than uncomfortable, closer to panic or to memory you cannot put down, stop the practice and do this alongside someone who can help.
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
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.
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.
When someone is distressed, moving too fast to settle them can land as a message that their distress is not welcome here. Let them set the speed.