Grounding Meditation for Stressful Times

Are you holding onto stress? Try this recorded grounding meditation to help you release tension in your body, clear your mind of worries, and open your heart to the beauty of life.

Stress tends to build this time of year for many people who have difficulty aligning with nature’s cues to rest more, to let go, and to adopt an introspective mood. We fight against the natural flow of increasing receptive yin energy and as a result, we become sick with overwork and opportunistic pathogens. Or we might dread the holiday events that have filled our calendar when these should be relaxed, happy times connecting with others.

But now, we have a community that is amped-up and still reeling from the surprising (in CA) election results from over a week ago. This amount of stress, this time of year, is not good for anyone’s health.

Using Social Media For Stress Relief Is Not Effective

If your Facebook feed is like mine, then you’re probably seeing many people trying their best to process this stress. Normally, journaling is an effective means when you are writing about your feelings to yourself, engaging in an inner discourse that provides insight. But the engagement I’m seeing in the social media community does not seem to be effective and is just venting blame and fueling arguments. The stress has transformed into suffering because it’s tightly mingled with fear and anger and no one on Facebook can adequately ease your heart. This is an inside job.

Meditation for Stress Relief

Yoga and acupuncture are great ways to manage stress and we’ll be exploring their use in the next few weeks in this blog. But for the degree of stress we’re seeing right now, the best way to deal with it is through meditation and finding your spiritual root.

It requires time, dedication, and and a willingness to accept what is happening right now. You don’t have to like what is happening right now, but you do need to acknowledge what is happening in an objective manner in order process your feelings and relieve suffering.

Grounding Meditation

The meditation I’m offering here will help you feel grounded and secure, regardless of what is happening outside of yourself. It will help you see with a wider perspective. In time, it will help to keep your heart open and develop tolerance and empathy in general. And it will help you decide what to do next. If called to action, you can then act in a thoughtful, deliberate way.

This is an expanded version of the centering meditation I do before each yoga class, so many of you who know me personally through yoga will be familiar with it’s elements.

We visualize first to consciously let go of held tension in the body and then we’ll engage in a simple Vipassana (“clear seeing”) meditation. It’s the method that is keeping me grounded right now and I remain optimistic about my life and our collective future on this planet.