The "Grounding" Process
3. Breathing:
We recommend taking two or three grounding breaths as a standard part of your grounding routine. Give your full attention to your
breathing as a part of disconnecting from other tasks.
When you are grounding you are disconnecting from both content and process and your focus is only on your state of being. Grounding breaths provide an excellent focus for letting go of immediate stressors.
A grounding breath should be full, relaxed, unobstructed.
Note that you can fill your lower lungs by dropping your diaphragm and expanding your abdomen. You also can expand your chest to complete a full breath.
When we ask others to take a ‘full breath’ what we often see is that they expand their chest but fail to expand their diaphragm. People have become so conditioned to breath in this manner (stomach in, chest out) that it is difficult for them to breath into their diaphragm.
Breathing in full breaths takes practice, both to learn how to do it, and then to make it a habit to breath this way. If you have trouble expanding both chambers as you inhale, try to do it lying on your back. Put a hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen so that you can feel each chamber expand as you inhale and deflate as you exhale.
Performers, athletes, and martial artists may already have training in breathing this way. When you breathe expanding both chambers you can take in much more air.
More important for grounding purposes, you must relax the muscles in your torso from top to bottom creating an open channel for emotional charges in the hands and face to move through this area into your legs and to the ground. When you exhale, relax, let all the air out (your chest and abdomen deflate) at its own pace.
Do not hyperventilate.
If you make yourself dizzy, slow down. The idea is to ground, not pass out!
