Welcome to this grounding meditation that's helpful for anxiety.
When we feel anxious,
We're often stuck in our heads and it almost feels like a swirling of thoughts.
This meditation will help you get out of your head into your body and into the solidity,
The stability of the world around you.
So let's begin,
Come into a comfortable seated position with your feet on the floor and feel your sit bones comfortable in the chair or on your meditation cushion and sitting up tall.
Closing your eyes or lowering your gaze,
Feel your shoulders softening down away from your ears.
And let's start with a few deeper than normal breaths.
Take a long inhale through the nose and send the breath right down to the belly.
Open the mouth and let it go with a big sigh.
And again,
Inhale,
Take a big breath in.
Exhale a long slow breath out.
One more time,
Biggest breath yet today right down to the bottom of the belly.
Open the mouth and let it go,
A big whoosh of air.
Now let your breath settle into a natural rhythm.
You might notice that as the breath settles,
The mind gets distracted.
Maybe you seem stuck in a chain of worried thoughts or maybe the physical sensations you can feel in your body.
See if you can almost take a step back,
Just allow that to be there.
You don't need to change anything about your current experience.
Even when we fight with anxiety,
We try to get away from it.
We end up feeling it more instead of just riding the tide and just letting it be there.
Instead of just riding the wave and letting it be there and letting it pass.
Bring your awareness now down to your tailbone,
The very base of your spine.
Can you imagine that as you breathe in,
You're pulling breath from down below and the breath travels up your spine to the top of your head.
As you exhale,
The breath travels back down the spine and out.
Inhale bringing breath up.
Exhale,
Sending it down,
Returning it back into the ether.
Inhale,
Exhale.
Imagine that as you breathe in,
You're bringing a sense of relaxation,
A sense of grounding and connection.
Bring that right into the body with every inhale.
And now imagine from the base of your spine,
From your tailbone,
A cord of energy starts to extend downwards.
And it's not painful or anything to have this cord of energy.
It's more curious than anything.
And imagine this string,
This cord,
Starts to extend downwards through your chair,
Your seat,
Through the floor below you.
Starts to enter into the earth.
And as it stays connected to you,
It burrows through the ground,
Through the soil,
The rock,
The water.
It goes through all the layers of the earth.
And this cord goes to the very center of the earth where it meets a ball of energy there.
And this cord staying firmly attached to your tailbone,
Going through all the layers of the earth,
And it wraps around the very center.
Wraps around this ball of energy at the very center of the earth.
And notice how connected you feel,
How grounded.
There's this unbreakable cord made up of the strongest substance.
And what color is yours?
What's the texture?
How thick is it?
Take a moment and just feel this connection that you have,
A connection to the very center of the earth.
And letting go of that image of your energy cord now.
Bring your awareness to the top of your head.
This time imagining that as you breathe,
You're bringing the breath down from the top of the head and sending it to the base of the spine.
And as you breathe out,
The breath travels back up to the top of the head and out into the space above you.
Inhale,
Breath travels down.
Exhale,
Breath travels up and out.
As you breathe in,
You're bringing a sense of levity,
A sense of lift,
Of light.
You're bringing that into the body.
And now finally,
Can you imagine bringing the breath both from below and above so that as you inhale,
The breath starts from the base of the spine and the top of the head and it meets in the center,
Swirls around and mixes and then goes back out the base of the spine and the top of the head.
Inhale,
Draw the breath towards the center of the body and exhale,
Extend it back out.
Inhale,
Bringing in both a sense of grounding and a sense of lift and light.
We need this balance in the body.
We need both.
Take one more breath like this and then let that image go.
We'll begin to transition out of the meditation.
Know that you can come back to this visual if you found it helpful.
You can come back to it at any point in your day when you need some grounding.
Take a long,
Slow breath in through the nose and a full breath side out the mouth.
And as you begin to deepen the breath,
When you're ready,
Take a few soft blinks and open the eyes coming back.
I wish you a grounded and centered rest of the day.
Thank you so much for joining me.
