Need to Ground? Put Your Anchor Down

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to share with you a mindfulness practice called dropping anchor. So this practice is going help you to ground yourself in mindful awareness throughout the day, but it's particularly helpful in those times when you feel stressed, emotionally reactive, or just caught up in your head. We all have times like that. So in general, when it comes to mindfulness training, there's this basic invitation to anchor or ground our attention in the immediacy of the present moment.

Now, the easiest way for us to do this is usually by bringing our attention to our sense perceptions. But probably the most powerful way to ground yourself when you're feeling really caught up is through the medium of physical sensations in the body. So there's two really simple ways you can do this. One is just by taking your hands and placing them over the body. So often over the heart or some people like to do it on the belly.

And just taking a few moments to anchor your awareness on the feeling of the breath. So you could try this right now. If you want to just placing hands over either the belly or the chest, and just anchoring your awareness on the feeling, the flow of the natural breath for a few moments. And breathing in and the breathing out. You can do this with eyes open or eyes closed, that's fine.

And so most people find this really soothing and really helpful in grounding in mindful awareness. But it isn't always practical to place hands over the body. You know, you might be in public, you're not quite comfortable to do that. So another way you can anchor awareness is by taking your awareness to the sensations in your feet. The feet against the ground.

So just for instance, right now, can you, without even changing your body position or moving in any way, can you just feel the sensations in the soles of the feet? Even if your feet are not against the ground, you can still do this. So just feeling all the sensations in the soles of the feet. So if you care to, really just letting go of everything on the mind. Just tuning into the immediacy of the sensations that are here right now in your body, in the feet. And so just noticing right now, even with this small practice, if there's any sense of feeling more present and grounded.

And this practice is particularly good, because I think that, you know, the feet is about as far away from the head as you can get in the body. So when you want to drop anchor, you can have this feeling of dropping your awareness out of your head and taking it all the way down to the ground, down into your feet. So as you got about your day today and for the rest of this week, just remembering this simple practice. And when you need to ground, you can put your anchor down and you'll be able to tap into a more calm, clear, and mindful awareness when you need it the most. So.

As always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's just settle in for today's meditation.