Caroline Cavanagh leads a grounding practice that moves through hearing, smell, bodily sensations, and sight to quiet anxious thoughts. The exercise anchors awareness in the body rather than letting your head rule your heart, and daily repetition can retrain your brain to better regulate emotions.
Chapters
Does your head rule your heart? And if we're being honest with ourselves, most of us would need to say yes to that question. We allow our thoughts to control how we feel, and the evidence being that we can be sitting at home in an environment that's completely safe but feeling anxious because we're responding to thoughts in our head. And with most things, we've learned that behaviour by repeating something over and over again. It becomes easier to do and we're better at doing it, which is why anxiety tends to escalate. But one way to reduce anxiety is through regular practice that gets you out of your head and back in To your body. And I'd love you to experience something with me now. And to start off with, I would love you to take just 2 really deep breaths and focus on that breath, taking the biggest breath that you can, and then very slowly breathe it out, almost as if you're blowing on a candle flame without extinguishing it. And you keep breathing out until you literally can't breathe out anymore. And then the air will naturally flow back in. Conscious breathing. And once you've taken those 2 breaths, close your eyes for me. And now I'd love you to really focus on what you can hear. Find 3 things, 3 sounds around you. One of them may well be my voice. And actually, I can now notice silence. Notice what you notice. Now move that awareness to your sense of smell. What aromas, what scents can you now detect? I'm aware of the smell of cooking that's going on downstairs. And again, if you recognise nothing, that's okay. You're noticing there are no aromas around you at the moment. And now move that attention to your body. What can you notice about your body? I'm now aware of how my feet feel inside my shoes, how my clothes feel against my skin, and actually I'm a little bit cold. I've got a cold nose. What can you notice, both external to your body or within your body, right now? And now open your eyes for me and just look around you. Look at that environment you've probably been in for quite some time. I've got a candle over there that's all the colours of the chakras. That a client gave to me. What can you see that you don't normally look at? And now just notice how you feel. And even now with that question, your head may well have just popped back in and go, well, that was a bit stupid, that was a waste of time, what do you do that for? Your head's taking over again, and it will because that's what it's used to doing. But in that very short exercise that took little more than a minute, you have just got back in your body and your mind was quiet. And the more you quieten your mind, the quieter it will be. You can call that exercise mindfulness, relaxation, meditation. I don't care what you call it. But what I would love you to do is now practice this. Doing this several times a day, it takes so little time, is going to retrain that brain to not want to be in charge and to actually start to get you very much in tune with your feelings. Because when you're in control of your feelings, you are much more in control of your day, and that's a really good place to be. Give it a go and let me know what you experienced. So is your head ruling your heart?
