Anxiety: Practical Tips To Help You - episode 1

Tracey Moggeridge, Mindfulness Practitioner & Coach presents 'Find your feet, find your seat, find your hands'

Transcript

0:05

- Hi there. So my name is Tracey Moggeridge. I am a mindfulness practitioner, and this is a session just with some short, gentle meditation and mindfulness activities that you can do if you notice that you are experiencing anxiety. So first of all, the invitation is to look at anxiety in a compassionate way, and we can do that by taking a mindful moment. So if you want to close your eyes or soften your gaze, whichever is most comfortable for you. And we do this in three parts. So the invitation is to find your feet. Our feet are quite far away from our heads. Anxiety doesn't tend to reside in our feet, so it's a good place to start. So what do you notice here? Can you get a sense of your feet touching the floor? You may notice sensations in your toes. You may notice contact points, perhaps the balls of your feet on the floor. We're just noticing. And then the second part, find your seat. Notice the posture that you've chosen for this session. Noticing how it feels to have the backs of your leg or your bum on a chair. Your body upright. Pattern. So noticing any tension that you may be holding and see if you can let that soften. Simply allowing yourself to notice your seated position. And then finally finding your hands. You might want to rub your fingers and thumbs together. Noticing the softness of your skin. Our fingers have thousands of nerve endings. What do you notice? Are your fingers warm or cool? And does it feel just to have contact between your finger and thumb. And then the invitation is to take a big deep in breath, breathing in from your stomach and then letting that go. Now you might ask yourself the question, what is my emotional landscape today? It's a really good question. Just to drop in and ask yourself at any point in the day, what's here with me in this moment? And you can use weather as an analogy here. Are you feeling sunny? Are you feeling a bit stormy or grey? Perhaps a bit foggy. Fresh. What is the emotional overtone that's with you today? It could be really helpful for us to have an awareness of what we bring with this, that we may not necessarily have an awareness of. It's nothing for you to do with this information right now, but just simply notice. And perhaps if it's not as optimistic or as positive as you might like it to be, then what can you do with a supportive practise that just acknowledges that that's where you are with a kindly non-judgemental approach? And then when you're ready, open your eyes and bring yourself back into this session.