The importance of being grounded and focused

Creating a solid ground for your emotions (and yourself)

Many people have learned to avoid and repress their emotions, because some emotions can come on very strong. If we don’t have emotional skills, we can be carried away by our emotions (and the emotions of others).

Because of this, I teach a number of practices that I call the Empathic Mindfulness practices. I created them specifically to help you work empathically with your emotions.

Working with your emotions instead of against them

Many mindfulness practices teach us to avoid, transform, or rise above emotions, or let emotions float away, and that can be helpful in early movements toward emotional awareness.

But true emotional awareness requires us to develop a working relationship with our emotions. Learning how emotions work, and how to work with them is the foundation of my empathic approach to emotions.

This work teaches us to listen to the intelligence in each of our emotions, and in order to do that, we need to be grounded and focused.

Grounding and focusing can help you create a healthy structure for your emotional life

The following practice is the first one I usually teach, and it helps you recruit the healing balm of soft sadness and the intuitive focus of soft fear as you learn to soothe, center, and focus yourself.

You can learn it with me in this video below.

Grounding and focusing are skills that you can develop over time; you don’t have to be good at them right away!

Grounding was one of the most difficult skills for me early on, but now I remain grounded pretty much all the time with no effort. It has become second nature, even though I was pretty hopeless at grounding when I first tried to learn how.

Have a wonderfully grounded and focused day … or whatever you can manage right now!