Anchoring & Reorientation

A little grounding exercise

Sometimes the day, or a moment, leaves us feeling a little shaken and stirred. It might be more like a feeling that you are lost, unsure of which direction to take. Or it might be more like you are falling and falling and can’t stop… you just want to grab hold of something, some truth to help you feel still again.

“Grounding” is an act of making physical contact with the Earth. People often do this by taking off theirr shoes and going barefoot into the grass for a while. It’s great! They say it helps calm the nervous system.

There are times when we need a little more than just physical grounding — a grounding of our mind as well as our body. When our mind is a little lost and a little disconnected a physical and mental grounding sometimes helps me remember how to be me.

Here is a very short exercise I do to “get back” to my foundation / my “self” and find my sense of direction again:

Write down the following and fill in the gaps (thinking is too chaotic and fast, writing it down will help you think clearly):

The feeling/s blocking me right now is .....

It’s likely linked to my belief that....

One truth I need to remember right now is.....

Two actions I would do if I wanted my future self not to experience regret is:

Three things body needs so I can help it carry out the actions are:

Four core traits that make me “me” are:

What these prompts aim to do is help you reconnect you with your values then work out your next steps. The ones that are aligned with your values.

Very often in times of turmoil or disruption we forget to act in line with our values because we are so busy re-acting to our fears, our frustrations and more often than we realise — our shame. This is dangerous for a number of reasons, the number one being that when we habitually don’t act in line with our values we get depressed it’s so subtle that we may not even know why we feel so bad.

A little moment to re-calibrate can help immensely. Like a hiker looking down at their compass before moving forward again so they don’t get lost.

Whoever you are and whatever it is that you are struggling with right now, please know that you are never far off from where you are meant to be. Give yourself a little grounding (and a lot of self-compassion), and the path forward will reveal itself to you.

Lyd