Grounding

Grounding is the capacity to reconnect awareness with bodily sensation, physical support and the immediate environment.

When attention becomes scattered, flooded, abstract or pulled into imagined futures, grounding gives it somewhere concrete to return.

This can be as ordinary as feeling the floor beneath your feet, noticing the temperature of the room or becoming aware of your breath without trying to change it. The point is not to distract yourself from experience. It is to establish enough orientation that experience can be met without being swallowed by it.

Grounding is especially useful because it does not require understanding the problem first. Sometimes the body needs to know where it is before the mind can work out what is happening.