Grounding Meditation
We all need some grounding, at times. Our modern lives can be so hectic that we can feel disembodied and lost in “head space”, disconnected from ourselves and our surroundings. Even our usual meditation practices might not help in these cases, especially if we fall into the trap of trying to manipulate our thoughts rather than meeting our direct experience.
So how do we become more grounded? Let’s do grounding meditation. It’s not difficult to do, although it might not be perceived as easy at first. To put it simply, we need to go back to our truest experience, as it is unmediated by thoughts. A simple way to do so is to re-learn to connect with our body, staying true to what we are sensing and feeling in this moment.
A grounding meditation can help. These are very simple meditation practices that bring us back in touch with our experience of our body and senses in the present moment. The difficulty often comes from our mind’s desire to hijack the process and complicate matters.
In the PDF below, you’ll find a very simple Grounding Meditation, which offers a starting point for grounding practice, whatever your current level.
If our Grounding Meditation has been useful and you would like to explore further, keep reading. We’ve listed two more somatic meditations below.
Going deeper: Somatic Meditation practices
Here are two grounding meditation practices you might enjoy if you are looking to explore your experience of your body further.
1. The Hand Sensing Exercise, by Eckhart Tolle
This is a very simple grounding meditation by Eckhart Tolle, designed to help us get in touch with our inner sense of aliveness.
You might close your eyes and hold out your hand. Allow yourself to feel your hand.
Now you might ask yourself: without touching anything, without moving your hand and without looking at your hand, how can you know that your hand is still there?
If you pay attention, you may realize that you can feel the inside of your hand, a subtle sense of warmth or tingling.
That’s it.
Now you might move your attention slowly to the rest of your body and feel that sense of warmth or tingling throughout. You can add progressively more and more parts of your body until you feel that sense of aliveness in every single cell.
This is a simple and pleasant exercise you can do anywhere, at any time.
2. Somatic Descent, by Reggie Ray
Another practice is Reggie Ray’s “Somatic Descent”.
Inspired by the yogic practices of Vajrayana Buddhism, Somatic Descent teaches us how to be present in the body, so that we can allow the depth of our body-based intelligence to reveal itself. It teaches us to go deeper into the body and experience its fullness, rather than staying in more rarefied, “above-the-neck” states of consciousness.
This practice requires a bit more time and commitment. You can hear Reggie Ray introducing it. There’s also a PDF you can download with the full practice. If you prefer step-by-step audio guidance, you can find it in his audiobook “The Practice of Pure Awareness: Somatic Meditation for Touching Infinity”, where he walks us through nine step-by-step sessions for “waking down” into the body and reconnecting with it.
Both practices are simple to return to. As you re-train yourself to be in your body in a simple and natural way, you may find yourself more open, connected, and compassionate.
