Grounding Exercises for People With(out) Learning Difficulties

How do you know when you’re not grounded and need to get grounded when you’ve never come across grounding before?  Furthermore, are there any grounding exercises that can help you?

When you’re not grounded you may have:

• a million thoughts rushing through the head at once and feel overwhelmed
• heart palpitations
• a static shock when you touch an object
• abrupt mood swings
• no feeling and dislike of being touched
• limited access to your internal dialog [ = the voice inside you that tells you what to do]
• impaired immune system and circulation
• flickering eyes
• inconsistent sight.

You may be:

• very unclear and have difficulty with articulating thoughts
• uncomfortable in your body / skin and not know why
• very sensitive to noise
• daydreaming a lot
• forgetful
• confused
• stressed a lot
• twitching
• dehydrated.

You may feel:

• spaced out, not really here, not really present on earth
• unbalanced, clumsy, wobbly, losing core stability
• sick, dizzy, overwhelmed
• your senses to be out of kilter: your hearing may be poor or too sensitive

or you may also:

• lack focus and concentration
• comfort eat, smoke too much, or feel the pull to excessively engage in other unhealthy activities
• get into difficult situations due to inappropriate behaviour
• argue with people and not be able to get your point across
• often misspell, mistype, or leave out parts of words while typing / writing
• be unable to visualize / imagine things [which is at the core of literacy learning difficulties]
• falter in speech, stutter, slur, mispronounce words, or change your voice
• some of your bodily organs may not work properly
• your automatic nervous system may not work properly
• children with learning difficulties may bang their heads or have a lot of tantrums as a way of expressing overwhelm
• develop tourettes over a long period of ungrounded time
• have a hazy mind, probably from many and fast-moving pictures.

So how can you get grounded when appropriate?  This tells you all about grounding.

Other interesting facts about grounding are also in this article about grounding and learning difficulties.

These grounding exercises

will certainly help you if you have come across grounding and how useful it is for anyone anywhere in any situation, but struggle with how to get grounded.

Grounding exercise 1  

Stand on one leg and pay attention to the contact of the sole of the foot with the ground.  How does the contact feel?  What does the charge building up in your leg feel like?  After some time stand on the other leg and repeat the process.

Grounding exercise 2  

Stand on one leg with the knee bent and extend the other leg behind you for support and balance so that all your weight rests on the leg on which you’re standing.  Hold the pose for 15 – 30 seconds until you feel vibrations of your muscles working. Switch legs and repeat the process.

Grounding exercise 3  

Stomp your feet alternatively on the ground.  Experiment with the ways in which you can do this; alter the angle of the blow, stomp only with the heel, or do whatever else you can devise.  This action also has great metaphorical value and can be used when a person needs to stand his/her ground, or put his/her foot down, i.e. assertively put a point across in a situation.

Grounding exercise 4

Stand against a wall and then go into a squat with your back flat against the wall.  Cup the hands behind the head. Breathe fully and openly.  Sustain this posture at least to the point of vibration of your working muscles.  This exercise is also very useful for building a solid energy charge in the legs and for strengthening.

Grounding exercise 5

…consists of these 5 alternatives of jumping:

1. Jump up and down, banging the feet loudly on the floor like a protesting child.
2. Jump as high as you can, but land on flat feet to get a solid sense of the ground.
3. Stand on the heels and do your best to jump from this position.  The metaphorical value of this action is that if you aren’t well grounded, you cannot take a leap into new situations in life. And there is also something about digging the heels in…
4. Jump from and return to the ground on the toes, giving the experience of “springing up”, “taking a leap”, and returning lightly to the ground.
5. Jump with a skipping rope or on a small trampoline.  Concentrate attention on your feet and legs.

Finally, if this article inspired questions, insights, perhaps more grounding exercises, or you’d like more NLP help, we can certainly talk.