Grounding Through Anxiety With Senses

We explore how to meet anxiety, overwhelm, and dissociation with gentle presence instead of force. We focus on finding safety through sensory anchors, kind inquiry, and practical tools that help us return to the moment.
• navigating difficulty by building a safe harbor for awareness
• responding to dissociation with curiosity and questions about safety
• choosing anchors that feel safe enough: sound, breath, touch, movement
• using sound as a primary practice: bell, silence, breathing, repeating “love” or “safety”
• incorporating walking mindfulness and grounded movement
• exploring anxiety by tracking future vs past thoughts, intensity, and body sensations
• widening emotional vocabulary with lists of emotions and sensations over time
• using self-compassion and the question “What would I like for myself?”
• starting softly with comfort, gratitude, and connection before deeper practice
Go to self-compassion.org

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Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

Hosted by Sean Fargo — a former Buddhist monk, mindfulness teacher, and founder of MindfulnessExercises.com — this podcast explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work.

Each episode offers a mix of:

• Practical mindfulness and meditation teachings
• Conversations with respected meditation teachers, clinicians, authors, and researchers
• Real-world insights for therapists, coaches, yoga teachers, educators, and caregivers
• Gentle reflections for anyone navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, grief, or change

If you’re interested in:

• Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
• Trauma-sensitive and compassion-based practices
• Teaching mindfulness in an authentic, non-performative way
• Deepening your own practice while supporting others

…you’re in the right place.

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Transcript

Welcome And The Practice Theme

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. I know a lot of us are going through some difficult times, and we probably have lots of friends and colleagues who are going through some difficulty. So today we're going to be exploring how to navigate difficulty and these storms of our lives with a sense of gentle presence and how we can find safety in the midst of these challenges. When the mind becomes overwhelmed by anxiety or starts to drift away through disassociation, this practice becomes about finding a safe harbor or refuge for our awareness. So we're going to explore how to use our senses, like the sound of a bell, or the feeling of our feet on the ground, or the warmth of a hand as anchors to help us to feel secure again. It's a gentle awareness dance where we meet fear with curiosity rather than resistance, learning to love what is, even when it feels difficult. Would anyone like to share comments, questions, requests, experiences with your practice or teaching? Anything at all. Everything is fair game right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Hi Sean. Hi Nicholas. I wanted to share experience, ask you a question because the other day I I was leading a loving kindness and meditation with a person who has this diagnostic that it is generalized anxiety disorder. He takes medication, but after the meditation he said to me that during the meditation he kind of dissociated. He like went outside of the situation. His mind like dissociated from the present moment. So during inquiry, I asked him how does this dissociation feel in his body and what did he do to come back? But I wanted to ask you how to deal with this.

Listener Question On Dissociation

Start With Safety And Choice

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah. Well, I love your response. I love your question. Inquiring what his experience is like. I think that's a beautiful way of responding and learning what's coming up for him. I would ask him also if he's feeling safe or to explore safety. If it feels safe to associate with the body, or certain parts of the body, or sensations of breathing in the belly, or the nose? What part of this experience seeing, smelling, touching, hearing? What parts of experience feel safe to bring our awareness to, to stay with and keep noticing? There may be events or fears that he's aware of. Maybe he wants to tell you, maybe he doesn't, maybe he's not aware. But for me, I think it would be helpful to maybe ask a little bit about safety, not to try to convince him that he's safe or to fix fear, but to explore what does feel safe enough to bring awareness to, and perhaps to explore a sense of fear or nervousness, the sense of anxiety itself, very gently, sensations of it. Maybe you can journal about it. I think working with self-compassion can be very helpful. We have some self-compassion workshops or guest teacher recordings that you can review if you want. And go to selfcompassion.org or G to explore some ways of working with self-compassion, trauma-sensitive options of giving him options or letting you know what doesn't feel comfortable. Um, you can explore different kinds of practices. But those are like the first things that I would probably explore a little bit. Maybe mindfulness of walking can be helpful to incorporate movement, feeling the bottoms of each foot touch the ground. That's what I would probably recommend. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 5:16

I know that with his reading, he's not comfortable putting attention there. And I think once we worked with the attention to sounds, he chose to pay attention to sound. I gave him options like breath, body, or sounds, and he picked sounds. So maybe that can be a reference point that he can come back when he doesn't feel safe. You think that you can give that option like if you don't feel safe, you come back to sound and then resume or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Yeah. And you could use sounds just as the primary mindfulness practice too. Sounds of breathing, natural sounds around us. You can ring a bell, bring mindfulness to the sounds of the bell, the sound of silence, the sound of you could repeat the word like love or safety.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Perhaps repeating the loving-kindness phrases with his voice or hearing his own voice.

Sound Anchors And Gentle Touch

Mapping Anxiety In Thoughts And Body

Comfort Tools And Soft Beginnings

SPEAKER_01 6:19

The sounds of sighs, like uh. Sometimes, like, you know, I have whiskers on my cheeks, and so sometimes I'll put my left hand on my right cheek and listen to the sounds of my fingernails across my whiskers. Yeah, or the sounds of the breath moving in and out of the nostrils. Sometimes you can kind of hear and feel the sounds of the heartbeat. You know, if you put your hand over your ear, sometimes you can listen for the beating of like the pulse, things like that. Maybe you put your hand on his back and you can just feel the hand from his back with permission. Sometimes that sensation can be quite healing and can be a sensory connection with what I can feel right now. There's some research showing that when you hug someone for like more than 20 seconds, and if you smile during it, that changes the body. I mean, if you want to, you have permission, if both sides agree. Not with like a total stranger or forcing it, but you know, if you're like hugging someone and smiling, there's like a nice reboot. You can ask him to think of some creative ways to connect with something in this moment with curiosity as to the actual sensations and sustain it over a longer and longer period of time. Not to feel a certain way, not to get to a goal, just exploring with curiosity the experience of this journey that we're in. You can also invite in like a noticing of the flavor of the anxiety. So do the thoughts go to the future possibility or the past? Even just noticing that, you know, are 80% of his thoughts about the future, how many of the thoughts are future versus past? And then what's the intensity level of the thoughts about the future? Intensity level thoughts about the past. And then exploring the sensations of that are the thoughts about the future, are they pleasant or unpleasant when you feel them in the body? And then when the thoughts are about the past, do they feel pleasant or unpleasant? And where in the body are those sensations? Certain thoughts in the future, they may be around the chest or the head or the shoulders, the belly, or somewhere else. Different kinds of thoughts may live, or they may show up physically in different parts of the body. So noticing if they're pleasant or unpleasant, the intensity level, the frequency. And then over time, you start to sense into more and more detail, nuance, layers, shapes, temperature, movement, dryness, or like liquid, different kinds of energy associated with some of these thoughts about the future, the past that bring up a sense of anxiety. We don't even have to put a name on it. It's easy to call it anxiety. You could show them a big list of emotions, a big list of sensations. Circle the emotions that feel most specific to this experience. Maybe you have like 10 copies of a list of emotions, and 10 copies of a list of sensations. And each time you work with them, maybe there's anxiety about something or dissociation. Like, okay, well, in this moment, what are the emotions? What are the sensations? And over time you can track what happens with each session. Because maybe each session is very different. One question I find helpful is what would I like for myself? What would I like for myself? It brings me back to me and how I show up instead of worrying about what other people are doing or not doing or saying or not saying, or what might happen. What would I like for myself right now? Usually comes back to like, okay, I wanna feel a sense of nourishment or care or be me. I want to accept me, I wanna do what I think is right, I want to let this go, I wanna work on this. Like for me, it's helpful to clarify how I can show up instead of wrestling with a slippery expectation of the world. You can also just let him know that if it's helpful for him to wear super comfy clothes, bring a stuffy, bring a good luck charm, or something that is comforting. Sometimes that's very helpful. And also to start with practices like gratitude or thinking about things that make you happy. We don't always have to start with hardcore mindfulness practice. We can start with something like friendly conversation. You know, you can let him know that you appreciate him. There's things that you like about him, that you believe in him, he's safe, or that you're here to support him, or offer ways of helping, or just accepting him. You know, maybe you bring a piece of chocolate, or you both sit down for a cup of tea, and you do a little wiggle dance. Little things like that can go a long way for those of us who may feel a little anxious. It's normal, it's common, it's totally understandable. It's okay. You're not there to make him feel different, but you're inviting him to bring awareness to more parts of life, too. Is that helpful, Nicholas?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Yeah, yeah, I think it's helpful. Yes. I don't have much experience, but the few times that I taught loving kindness meditation, I was surprised because very effective. But with this person I found okay, different reactions. It gives me a clue that I have to be more skillful to give him some tools or some space to relate with his experience, more space as you explained with with your examples. I think that that's what the goal is.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Yeah, this gentle awareness. Dance with what's coming up, with loving kindness, or loving what is. And if anxiety is here, then we love that. And that like spaciousness can be quite healing.