The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
What you first do, is you would close your eyes, this could be done sitting or standing. But you would close your eyes and you would focus as much of your attention, including your visual attention on your inner landscape, on your interoception. So that would be your breathing, your heart rate, maybe even the surface of your skin, but really focusing internally.
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Well, the reason it's useful, I believe, is that it has you deliberately step your awareness, your perception through every position along that interoceptive-exteroceptive continuum.
You close your eyes and you focus your attention either on your third eye center or your breathing, and you try and put 100% of your perceptual awareness onto your breathing or your third eye center for the duration of three breaths, okay? So you're 100% or trying to be 100% in interoception. Then you open your eyes, you focus on the surface of your body someplace. I find that holding out my hand at sort of arm's distance and focusing on the palm of my hand and focusing there visually, so I'm splitting my attention now between my hand, and I'm also going to pay attention to my breath for the duration of three full inhales and exhales while also focusing on my hand, so you're splitting interoception and exteroception as best you can, about 50/50. Then you subsequently look at some location in your immediate environment, maybe 10, 15 feet away, and you focus your attention on that location while also splitting your attention so that you're still paying attention to your breathing, you do that for the duration of three breaths, but now you are in exteroception and interoception. Then you focus your attention at some distance further away, maybe the furthest distance you can see. Now, this is why it's useful to do out of a window or on a balcony or outdoors. You focus on the furthest point, maybe a horizon, some furthest point for the duration of three breaths while also paying attention to your breathing, and sort of imagine a bridge between the two if you find it to be challenging to focus on both. And then, and this is where it can be a little tricky, but then what you actually focus on is the fact, and this is not an imaginary thing, this is a fact that you are a tiny spec on this big ball that's floating out in space, right? The Earth that's floating out in space. And you try and focus on your three breaths while also acknowledging that you are a small body, literally, on this very seemingly large body, the Earth, but that's floating in a much larger, larger, expansive place, the universe, and you do that for three breaths.
It balances interoception and exteroception, it balances interoception and dissociation, and it crosses the various time domains that the brain can encompass using vision.
What you first do is you would close your eyes and you would focus as much of your attention including your visual attention on your inner landscape on your interosception. So that would be your breathing, your heart rate, maybe even the surface of your skin, but really focusing internally. And you would do that for a duration of approximately three slow breaths. Then you would open your eyes and you would focus your visual attention on some area on the surface of your body. So for me, the way that I typically do this will be to focus on say the palm of my hand. So I'll focus my visual attention on the palm of my hand. And I then do three breaths again focusing on my internal state.
The ratio or the split of attention is about 9010. About 90% of your attention is on your internal state.