As always, we begin the peer group support meeting by introducing ourselves (if we feel comfortable introducing ourselves) and briefly saying why we have come to the group today … “what we are working on” or “what we are hoping for hoping for.” It generally turns out that we all have some painful behavior, past or present, that we are recovering from, and we also generally know what drives that behavior, so we are trying to manage whatever drives us in the painful direction. What challenge came up for us, and, even if small, what successes we have had.
Today’s meeting begins with an online guided meditation (to get us all into a comfortable state of mind). We talked a bit about today’s guided meditation. Generally, we find that we have shared feelings for parts of the meditation, and sometimes we also talk about what we felt was missing or distracting for us. Sometimes word choice seems to matter. Sometime the guide’s accent or their pace of talking. Then we draw our focus onto a specific topic that relates to our efforts to recover from and manage our challenges. Today we spoke about “grounding exercise” in general terms, because we have been using a different grounding exercise at the start of each of our meetings.
Our peer group leaders introduced us to six ways to thinking about grounding ourselves. The basic idea, they explained, is to hold ourselves in the present. If we start to worry about the future (or the past coming back to us in the future) we may trigger our anxieties.
One approach works to pull ourselves into our bodies, feeling ourselves laying on the ground, feeling our toes pressing into sand, or feeling our hands squeezing putty. It figures that if we get back into our bodies, and our bodies exist in the present, we can ground ourselves to the present. Another approach focuses attention on things that will elevate our awareness to our senses. We could add aroma to the air, put on really, really comfortable clothing, or mindfully enjoy a refreshing beverage. A related approach tells us to be kind to ourselves. Maybe treat ourselves to a massage, take a swim, or dive into a pile of leaves. This is more intentional and active than sensing our immediate surrounds alone. And a fourth approach suggests that we sketch, write about, or talk about a specific object in the present. When we immerse ourselves deeply in the experience of thinking about something (like studying a small corner of a forest during “forest bathing”) we anchor our thinking to something that is real and immediate. Breath control is another grounding practice. When we make a point of controlling the depth and duration of breathing in and out, we feel ourselves breathing in the present. Sometimes simply distracting ourselves with a simple task is enough to dodge a trigger for anxiety. The sixth approach suggests that we challenge ourselves to list all objects of a particular color or a particular shape, to count by sevens, or to recall the date for each day of the past week.
We shared some of our experiences with these approaches, and some of the ways that we used combinations of these approaches.
Source: The Growlery