Areas › Your body › Posture and how you carry yourself
Find the place that is always tight, your jaw, your shoulders, the top of your back. Take it over deliberately. Squeeze it harder than it holds itself, then let it go.
Do that a few times and something changes. The holding stops being weather that happens to you and becomes something you are doing, which means it is something you can stop doing. The release is where the useful information lives, so go slowly there and notice how far down the letting go travels. Little and often works better than one heroic squeeze.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Believers, bow down, prostrate yourselves, worship your Lord (Quran 22:77). Positions taken on purpose are ordinary furniture in the practice, so choosing what your body does is nothing strange.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱرۡكَعُواْ وَٱسۡجُدُواْۤ وَٱعۡبُدُواْ رَبَّكُمۡ وَٱفۡعَلُواْ ٱلۡخَيۡرَ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تُفۡلِحُونَ۩
Believers, bow down, prostrate yourselves, worship your Lord, and do good so that you may succeed
Qur’an 22:77read 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, people who held an expansive posture for a short period reported less state anxiety and better awareness of their own body than people in a neutral posture. That is the nearest test we have of deliberately taking a shape in order to change how you feel. The sample was small and this corner of research has a contested history of results failing to replicate, so hold it as encouraging rather than settled.
Weineck F, Schultchen D, Hauke G, Messner M, Pollatos O. (2020). Using bodily postures to reduce anxiety and improve interoception: A comparison between powerful and neutral poses.. PloS one doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot let go of a grip you cannot feel, and tightening it on purpose makes it findable.
When not to
If an area is injured or genuinely painful rather than merely tight, leave it alone and ask someone qualified.
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
Play belongs here. Being a lion, a tree, a hissing snake, the way children do it with no embarrassment at all.
Keeping your eyes open holds you in the room while you feel what is going on inside. One channel on where you actually are, one on yourself.
What frightens a body is usually not how hard a thing is, it is having no way out. So put movement as an offer. If it feels alright, you might try lifting your arms.