Guided nervous system exercise

What if calm began at your feet? We guide a simple, vivid meditation that starts by relaxing the shoulders, face, and pelvic floor, then shifts awareness into the soles to create a grounded base. From there, we play with a light Qigong-inspired image: breathe as if you’re drawing air up through your feet and legs into your body, then exhale back down through the legs. It’s not literal breathwork—it’s a sensory frame that helps the nervous system settle, quiets a busy mind, and replaces head-heavy tension with embodied ease.

Once that foundation feels steady, we raise the stakes in a gentle way. We invite you to bring a real-life trigger into awareness—maybe a relationship longing, a habit you’d like to soften, or any shiny urge that usually pulls you off center. The practice is to keep your feet rooted and your pelvic floor relaxed while the breath continues its upward flow. As sensations tighten—perhaps a closing in the chest or a clench in the gut—we use the breath like warm sunlight, offering space for the body to open. This is where grounded attention shifts from a nice idea to practical soul work: learning to hold desire without getting dragged by it.

By the end, you’ll have a repeatable technique you can use at your desk, on a walk, or before a tough choice: anchor attention in the feet, relax the seat, breathe up through the legs, and exhale down to release. Expect less rumination, more presence, and a steadier center when life presents its pulls. If the groove feels good, linger for a few extra minutes to reinforce it. Subscribe for more guided practices, share this with a friend who needs grounding today, and leave a review to tell us what shifted for you.

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Transcript

Welcome And Settle In

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning. Good day. Good evening. Whatever time of day it is for you. This is a guide of meditation. So obviously I'll be your guide. And we'll both be meditating. Just take your time to um settle into your posture if you're seated. And I do almost all my meditation seated. If I'm laying down, I fall asleep. Although I will say meditation laying down is really nice. Gonna do a little bit of like um meditation, maybe some some like um playing with some of the ideas from Qigong stuff here. So try to wrap it up at about 10, 10, 15 minutes. So let's just start off with um settling in. Just taking a minute. Just taking a minute to um to just be here. Being mindful that the shoulders can relax a little bit. The muscles of the face can relax a little bit. I don't know if this is helpful. One of the thoughts that I use a lot in meditation is uh just imagining honey is being poured from the top of my head to just my shoulders and my body, and it just has this feeling of being kind of um subdued and just kind of eased into a state of relaxation. So just allowing yourself to settle in. Highly recommend that you maybe wiggle your toes a bit, kind of stomp your feet on the floor a bit to kind of get some foot consciousness or awareness of your feet. That's a less less earth earthbound way to say that. Just kind of feel the feet on the ground. If you're wearing some shoes and you're in a place you can slip your shoes off, maybe do that. And just feel what it's like to sit with your feet on the ground, shoulders relaxed. And just being here. And see if you're able to relax it. Relax the pelvic floor. Like you would if you were urinating, how you would relax the muscles of your pelvic floor. See if you can have an equal degree of relaxation in both your feet and your pelvic floor, as if they're complementary to each other. The more you relax your feet, the more you kind of relax your seat, relax your pelvic floor, relax your your uh hip muscles into the chair. Really allow that one to go to work. I think it's a good one. Relax the pelvic floor, relax the feet. And as you're doing this practice, you can kind of play around with the idea that your feet are lightly dissolving at the bottom of them. The soles of your feet are kind of uh giving way to the ground beneath it. Almost in a way of um losing the boundary between the bottoms of the soles of your feet and the ground. Use your breath here as a kind of like a a fun magical tool, just for fun. Where pretending, imagining, feeling as if the inhale and the exhale are aiding that process of merging the feet with the floor. I know that probably sounds really funny to just kind of dip your toes in and just kind of play with it for a minute. What's really gonna happen here isn't so much that you're going to merge with the floor. You're not gonna try to get up and walk away and you're gonna be stuck. But more so these frames, these kind of like uh feelings, feeling senses, um really settle the nervous system. And that's what you're here for. This is what this is about. We're gonna do something next here in just a second, but we're creating kind of like a um a groundedness in the nervous system before we move into the next part of this meditation. So if you haven't already rooted those feet into the ground, now's the time to do it. Feel free to stomp the feet, maybe massage the feet a bit more. Really, what you're trying to do here is drop, this is what's helpful about this too, is you're dropping your awareness, dropping your consciousness, your attention to use a really uh familiar word. You're putting your attention into the bottoms of your feet, the soles of your feet as well. It's kind of absorbing them into the bottoms of your feet. Where it tends to want to stay up towards the neck and shoulders and head and be real heady, thinky, analytical stress, anxiety. And you're just allowing your attention to settle into your feet too. If it was going to make a difference, the breath, if your breath breathing in and breathing out, was actually in some universe going to actually impact the stickiness of your feet to the floor, or if it was actually going to change the way your feet were absorbing into the floor, kind of dissolving into the floor, how would you intend to breathe if you were immediately just moved into a universe where? And again, this is not j this is not like uh actually happening, it's more so of a of an intention with your body, your nervous system. And it's gonna create some really incredible relaxation. If you were just transporting to a world or universe where you were able to, through breath, every exhale, every inhale just broke off some of the particles of your feet and allowed the bottoms of your feet to become merged with the floor and in some way become rooted. So your energy was then kind of grounded. If that was possible and you and you knew it, then how would you breathe? You know, really bring that level of intention here. I don't think it's a really far out idea, the idea of grounding your energy. But definitely feel free to kind of wrap this in play as much as you would like so that you can really get on board with the practice. Now, what we're gonna do here is a little bit of soul work, my friend. We're gonna see if we can keep this state of grounded depth, stillness, and breath as we move into a little bit of more of like a challenging meditation. So let's bring our attention now into the breath, because I do think that's helpful for just a moment before we go into this next phase, the exercise itself. And with your feet grounded, with your feet on the floor, with that feeling as if the feet were dissolving as you breathe, let's now bring our attention more towards the breath a bit. And this this the first time I ever tried this, it just obviously it was the first time I didn't really uh notice much or feel much, but the thought process is there's a breathing in and an exhaling through the soles of your feet. Oh god. Okay. Um we are back. Had a little work thing pop up. So there's a breathing in through, there's a feeling as if that groundedness of the feet paired with the breath, there's a feeling as if you're drawing up air through the bottoms of your feet. Now, this is like not really gonna happen, obviously. You're not gonna breathe in through the soles of your feet from a an air level, but just play with this feeling. Again, it's what I've found is it's not so much like an actual thing that's happening as much as it is like a frame that helps you to sink into a certain energetic state. And it's a thought that makes you feel a certain way. And the way it's gonna the way it makes you feel, the way it might make you feel, I have found has been really helpful for this exercise. We're gonna walk through here in just a second. So you're relaxing the feet, you're being mindful as if the breath is changing the degree of groundedness in the feet. And now you're adding just a little subtle layer here that as if as if when you inhale, instead of pulling air in through your face, into your upper chest, you're instead drawing air up through the bottom of your body, through your feet, maybe into the lower leg, the calf, through the thigh, up the hip, into the heart, or into the torso, or just a subtle feeling of drawing upward. Maybe you're not really feeling at any specific place, but just you're intending to feel as if your inhalation is drawing upward. That's kind of the aim here. So that sense of connectivity that we established, even if it's faint, at the beginning of this practice. And these um the life forms out here are going crazy. Birds and bugs, man. Birds, bugs, and braxtons. Welcome, welcome to this experience. Drawling up through the feet. And we're just gonna settle into this for just a second, and um, and then we'll add the final component of this exercise, and we'll wrap it up in just about three minutes or so. Or so I say. And I feel this smooth feeling of of almost air, cool air being pulled into my legs. And it's really blissful. Relax the pelvic floor a bit too while you're doing this, so you're kind of drawing up through the feet. That there's an upward, there's a drawing upward through the legs. And all we're trying to do here is just kind of deepen that sense of groundedness, almost like you're somewhat merging a bit more with the ground. I don't know why this is helpful for the exercise we're doing, but it just seems to be. So now what I want you to do is to really try to play a game here called Stay Grounded as you kind of thumb through your favorite um things that make you lose sense of groundedness. This might be something you really want. Like right now in my life, I really want uh a partnership, I really want uh a relationship. And so thinking about that can pull me out of my sense of stillness, depth, bliss, groundedness, and move me into somewhat of a chasing energy, kind of a uh clamoring desperation of sorts. This might be about having a relationship. This might be a certain compulsive behavior. Maybe it's something that you would like to do less of. You feel like it yanks at your attention, it pulls you out of this place that we've cultivated here. So the idea here is to just gently invite that thing, whatever that thing is, to be in your mind, to be in your awareness, as you also stay grounded in your feet, stay grounded in your pelvic floor, stay grounded in even that breath, that kind of drawing upwards of the breath. All we're doing here is trying to practice straddling the fence, so to speak. One foot in groundedness, one foot in kind of um the shiny objects that pull us, that pull us. And that's all we're doing here. And what I really hope happens here, what I really hope happens here is that maybe you notice something specific in your body. For me, it's a closure of the heart or a clenching, you know, kind of like if you whatever that compulsive behavior is, the kind of nagging, sharp prodding that happens when you need. And to see, this is where it gets uh funky, to see if you can use that kind of drawing upwards of the breath through the feet, or the kind of the flow through the feet, as a as a means of giving that closure some kind of space to open. Almost as if it's sunlight for a flower that needs to open. Just kind of creating an environment in the body that's conducive for release, relaxation, letting go. And all that we're looking for here is noticing and softening. I'm noticing the tendency for me to want to hop up and go to chase the thing, or noticing the tendency for my entire awareness to be absorbed into that pursuit, or absorbed into that fixation, or that behavior. And we're noticing that, and we're just softening the intensity of that draw. Pulling up through the feet, relaxing the pelvic floor. Maybe even imagining as you pull up, you're kind of filling the body. Exhaling, you can just exhale back through the feet. You can exhale out just the legs, just kind of as if it was porous, kind of just exhaling the um the energy. And this is all that we're doing. This here. If you are really liking this, if this is really good for you right now, then stay here for a couple more minutes, and just kind of you know, deepen the groove in your mind that this is a behavior, this is a practice that is useful. This is something that's giving me good things right now, and maybe it's something I should return to. Enjoy.