Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
When you offer someone a practice, ask them to tell you if it did nothing, and mean it. Say out loud that plenty of these do not land.
People agree that things helped for all sorts of reasons: not wanting to seem difficult, not wanting to disappoint you, having learned long ago that agreeing is the safest option. If you never hear a no, you are probably not getting accurate information. Taking a flat report calmly, and being ready to try something else, teaches more about safety than the practice itself would have.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Whatever good things you possess come from God (Quran 16:53). If what helps is given rather than manufactured by you, there is less to defend when it does not arrive.
وَمَا بِكُم مِّن نِّعۡمَةࣲ فَمِنَ ٱللَّهِۖ ثُمَّ إِذَا مَسَّكُمُ ٱلضُّرُّ فَإِلَيۡهِ تَجۡـَٔرُونَ
Whatever good things you possess come from God, and when hardship afflicts you, it is to Him alone you cry out for help
Qur’an 16:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised experiment comparing mindful breathing, progressive muscle relaxation and loving kindness practice, mindful breathing produced the most decentering, which suggests these practices work along different routes rather than being interchangeable. That is a good reason to expect any one of them to suit some people and not others. The study looked at short inductions in a laboratory, not at what clients report back.
Feldman G, Greeson J, Senville J. (2010). Differential effects of mindful breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and loving-kindness meditation on decentering and negative reactions to repetitive thoughts.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If saying no costs the other person nothing, what they tell you starts being true.
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
Let the breath go along with the movement rather than counting it out. If you are guiding someone, do not set the pace of their breathing for them.
Once a day, go from head to feet and notice what is there. A good deal of what you find will be plain need: thirsty, hungry, needing the loo, needing to stand up.
Posture does not only show what you feel, it decides what you can feel. Anger is very hard to reach with a collapsed chest, and grief is hard to reach when you are held rigidly upright.