I know, it sound super cheesy doesn’t it. You can see yourself in the hippie sweat lodge right now huh?! It’s ok if you’re like that cause well…I for sure am. It’s the difficult part for me in therapy, I’m super resistant to try anything hokey and kumbaya-ish. If your open to it, you’ll be fine. 😉
Ahhhk…enough horsing around. What the heck am I talking about right?!
I have this in my tool box of things to do when I get triggered/dissociative, this is really good for anyone though. I have passed it on to a few people who liked it for road rage, standing in lines, dealing with small children. lol.
You can get to where you feel out of touch with reality, like your going to fly away, fly off the handle, have a psychotic break, whatever. That’s not really a good place to be (trust me if you haven’t for some reason discovered this already, you can end up doing some dumb things!) So how the heck to you go about getting out of that place?
Breath! Sound familiar? Yeah…it works too. You know that up tight feeling, tensing your shoulders and back (eventually you become every ones nightmare all because of that backache your toting around!), feel like your head might explode, etc. ? Those things are very hard to do and feel when you are deep breathing. There are a lot of breathing exercises out there so if one hasn’t worked for you (breath count to ten, breath count to three, …doesn’t work for me much. You?) try a different one.
The thing that works for me with Tree Breathing is there is a physical and visual portion to it. You don’t need to do the physical portion if you don’t want, I think doing the visual can give you the sensation anyway. Basically what you are going to do (Hokeyness ALERT!) is imagine you are a tree. (I’ll wait for those that need to eye roll, laugh, etc.)
Your head is the top of the tree. The physical part is that you can actually use your arms if you want, stretching will really help you get back in you body. You want to imagine breathing in through the very top of your head (or through your stretched up arms). Take a big deep breath and imagine it traveling all the way through you. Don’t exhale yet.
Your feet are the start of your roots. You want your roots to grow right through the ground your feet are on. So when you exhale imaging that your exhaled breath is traveling out through your feet as your new roots. Imagine the roots growing out under the surface your on.
Do it as many times as you need. Your rooted *snicker* *smirk* *cheesy!*, you can’t float off now. I don’t always do this standing or standing still. If I’m walking I just imagine that I pull up the roots with one foot (the other is still rooted behind me) and they just grow back out in the next step.
All I can say is give it a try! If it works for you great, if not… Don’t worry I have some other suggestions for grounding and it’s always good to have a tool box full as the same ones may not work all of the time or in all situations.
Journey into the Darkness 