Grounding Through The Body - Guided Embodied Practice

In this short video Tasha Colbert, co-founder of the Institute of Embodied Psychotherapy, demonstrates some simple grounding exercises which can help you to regulate your nervous system.

Grounding is an important part of establishing safety in trauma work, and can be introduced to support you to come back to your ‘window of tolerance’.

Transcript

Can you find your most grounded stance? How far apart are your legs? Or do you need to perhaps press your hands on the floor as well? Or maybe your most grounded stance is lying down and feeling your back as well against the ground. So just take a moment to just explore that for yourself. How do you feel grounded in your own body? You can also suggest to your client that they stand with their legs hip width apart, Feeling their feet fully planted on the ground. And also just softening the knees a little bit so that they can feel their centre of gravity. Is a bit further towards the ground, As well as allowing the weight of the body to drop down through the feet. And then exploring shifting the weight from one foot to the next. And as you do this, Just maybe really explore pushing the feet into. The floor. So that you're sensing the floor. With your feet. And that as you do that you can also shift forward and back. But you then find that central line where you feel there's a central line. Feel a sense of stability and grounding, Perhaps even imagining that there's like a string pulling you up. But while you're also pushing down through the ground. You can also invite a little pulsing through the knees. This can help a sense of grounding. You can imagine the weight of the body going down through the feet. So that's another way to ground. And for clients who maybe find it hard to connect with grounding just by shifting weight or using just the body, You can invite them through a visualisation to connect to grounding. So for example, You might want to close your eyes for this. That you can help them to imagine. And I'll just guide you through this, Closing your eyes. And imagine that with your feet you have roots growing from the bottom of your feet all the way down into the earth. And those roots. Really anchoring you to the earth. And that you can imagine now that as you breathe in, You're breathing up through those roots. And into your feet. And that as you breathe out, You're breathing down through your feet and through your roots. And as you breathe out, You may want to kind of soften the front of your body. You may want to allow the knees to soften or bounce. Keep that breathing in. Through your roots and this time drawing the energy up a little bit more up into the legs. You can imagine this as nourishing energy coming up through the legs. And then as you breathe out, Just allowing. That energy to release and go all the way back down into the earth. So just invite you to take a few of these deep breaths. Breath, It's often called a circular breath. We are breathing up. And breathing out and there's this sense of flow coming up through the body and then down again. Into the earth. So just taking a few of those breaths with your eyes closed. And seeing if you can draw the energy all the way up into your head and then letting it go down, Back down, Down, Down into the earth.