You were not doing it wrong. You were doing it without the floor. The GROUND Sequence is sequenced for a reason. The G is first because every step that comes after, the regulation, the opening, the unwind, the new pattern, the doorway, depends on a body that knows where it is.
Modern nervous systems are not practiced at this. We live in our heads, on screens, two-thirds of an inch above our actual bodies. We can think about the floor. We rarely feel it.
What grounding actually means.
Grounding is not a vibe. It is interoception, the felt sense of weight, contact, temperature, and pressure in the body, registered by the brain as live signal rather than abstraction. Without it, deep breathwork tends to overshoot. The system goes up before it has anywhere to come back down to.
You cannot integrate a state your body cannot locate itself inside.
The ninety-second version.
- Both feet flat. Notice four points of contact under each foot, heel, ball, inside edge, outside edge.
- Let the weight of your pelvis drop into whatever you are sitting on. Do not arrange it. Drop it.
- Soften the jaw. Soften the tongue from the roof of the mouth. Let the back of the skull get heavy.
- Three slow exhales, each longer than its inhale. Notice the floor again at the bottom of the third one.
That is the G. It is ninety seconds. It is also the step that decides whether the rest of the session lands or floats off. We open every session with it. We open every recorded practice with it. We will not skip it. Neither should you.
- The reason the first letter of GROUND is the one the rest of the arc depends on.
- A ninety-second protocol you can run before any practice, ours or anyone else's.
- A clear marker for whether you are grounded enough to go deeper or not yet.
- Interoceptive contact gives the nervous system a stable reference point to return to during activation.
- Long exhales engage the parasympathetic branch and re-anchor ventral vagal tone.
- Sequencing grounding before opening prevents the overshoot that ends most home-practice sessions.
- Polyvagal theory frames the ventral vagal state as the prerequisite for safe access to deeper material.[1][2][3][4]
- Interoceptive accuracy correlates with emotion regulation capacity across the literature.[1][2][3][4]
- Extended exhalation reliably increases parasympathetic tone within seconds.[1][2][3][4]
Numbers jump to the cited source ↓
Saved on this device. Come back any time to pick up where you left off.
Peer-reviewed papers and field-defining books that underpin the methodology referenced above.
- Porges, S. W. (2007). The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology, 74(2), 116-143. doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.06.009↗
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
- Zaccaro, A., Piarulli, A., Laurino, M., Garbella, E., Menicucci, D., Neri, B., & Gemignani, A. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353↗
- Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.