The "Grounding" Process
4. Shake out the kinks:
Once you have your posture and breathing correct, it is important to loosen any obvious tension.
Remember that tight muscles resist the flow of emotional energy and the idea here is to let your emotional energy move through you to the ground. Shake out your hands; stretch your neck face and jaw.
Your jaws are two of your strongest muscles and can hold a lot of tension. Notice where you sense tension when you feel emotions. Make sure that especially these muscles (usually in the face and hands) are not holding tension.
At the end of this step you should feel loose and relaxed yet still holding a shape of strength and balance. This is the end of the basic physical steps.
Now turn
your attention to your thinking.
5. Self-talk:
Self- talk is one process for programming yourself with thought patterns that are helpful to you. What you are consciously thinking has a significant effect on how you are feeling or
how grounded a state you are in.
Your brain and nervous system is a molecular computer more complex than any we have built. Nature gave you this “Human 10,000” model at birth, and it is beauty. Unfortunately, it did not come with an instruction manual or a keyboard. It just runs all the time. No “off button”.
Sensory data that you take in and the associations you make with that data determine the software that your computer holds.
We are constantly being externally influenced by our experiences. Media advertisers are experts at understanding how to program you toward certain products or services. Repetition and catchy phrases and music for example make it more likely that you will make the desired association at the right time.
Most of us have unknowingly programmed a lot of negative self-talk into our human computers. If you are muttering negative things about yourself or others, your stress increases.
If you become consistent in giving yourself positive messages when you ground, you will begin to associate those thoughts with the desired state of being and thus become more centered and relaxed more
quickly. You may develop any set of grounding self-talk that helps you to reach the desired state.
