Grounding With Five Finger Breathing Practice

This gentle guided practice introduces Five Finger Breathing, a simple and effective technique to help you feel more grounded and calm. By combining breath with touch, this practice supports nervous system regulation and helps bring clarity and focus back online during moments of stress or overwhelm. You’ll be guided step-by-step to trace your fingers in time with your breathing, creating a soothing, portable mindfulness practice you can use anytime. Ideal for managing stress, overwhelm, busy minds - and suitable for both adults and children.

Transcript

Hello there and welcome to this practice. My name is Jackie Barnett and I'm going to be sharing a practice with you today called five finger breathing practice. This has proven to be an extremely popular practice with many of the people I've been privileged to work with over the years and it's such a simple practice that actually many people teach it to their children. I've taught this practice to many many children as well as adults. Now the practice is a very helpful way to support us in grounding ourselves when we might feel overwhelmed or stressed and often what happens when we're feeling overwhelmed or unbalanced or stressed is our prefrontal cortex. So this is the youngest part of the brain. This starts to go offline. Now the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that helps us to make better decisions. It helps us to think rationally. So this is kind of like the part of the brain that really supports better choices and when we're overwhelmed or when we're really stressed or feeling really big emotions often the prefrontal cortex goes offline and then what happens is the more instinctive part of the brain starts to take over. So this is often when we fall into unhelpful habits. We might be doom scrolling or eating in unhelpful ways when we feel emotional and this is where we might go into fight or flight mode. So this is where our nervous system gets very dysregulated. So this practice involves so many different aspects of our awareness. It brings in touch, Our breath, Being able to synchronize our breath and touch together and this helps us to bring the prefrontal cortex back online because it's using a lot of working memory. We're kind of integrating lots of the way that our brain works together. So let's have a little practice together. It's super simple and I hope you will share it with your family and friends as well. It's a really helpful practice. So first of all, We're just going to get our hand ready. You can have it either way and starting either at your thumb or your pinky finger, Either is fine. All we're going to do is as we breathe in, We're going to trace the outline of that thumb all the way to the top and then as we breathe out, We're going to trace the finger down and then we carry on. So inhaling, We trace the finger up and exhaling, We trace the finger down. Inhaling coming up and exhaling coming down. Inhaling and exhaling. Inhaling and exhaling. And then we just come back the way we came. So inhaling coming up, Exhaling coming down. So feel free to work at your own breath rate here and it can be helpful to say the inhale and exhale because again, This helps the brain to integrate and to focus on what we're doing. It helps to anchor us. So exhaling coming down, Inhaling, Exhaling. Lovely. So you can work with that. You can stay with that and see how it feels to do one round or if you want to, You can continue to do a few more rounds. If you're very overwhelmed, It might be helpful to do the practice a little longer and you can also work with your other hand. So just using your non-dominant hand as the tracer. We often use the dominant hand instinctively first. So again, All we're going to do is inhale and exhale. Inhale and exhale. Inhale. So there you go. That's the five finger breathing practice. It's a very simple but effective practice. So you can use that several times through the day. It's a really easy practice to build into your day. You can pretty much do it anywhere. Obviously not when driving, But it is a nice portable practice that we can tap into through the day. And I would advise as well that don't wait until you're really stressed to enjoy this practice. We can do this any time of day that we really want to benefit from being more grounded and more centered. And generally the brain works much better when we're coming from a more grounded, Centered place. And like I say, You can share this with your children as well. It can be a great practice that you can do together as a family or with your loved ones. So happy practicing. Feel free to return to the practice as many times as you like. I really recommend doing it several times a day. It can really help change the direction and journey of the day. So thank you so much for sharing this with me and I hope you have many mindful, Kindful moments with the five finger breathing practice. Take really good care and looking forward to seeing you again soon. All the best. Thank you so much.