Coming Home is an emergency practice for grounding yourself and recovering your resilience when you’re overwhelmed. Over time, you may find it helps to adapt it to suit your specific needs.
Like the Settling Phase itself, the Coming Home practice has two parts:
- Settling the nervous system; and
- Investigating experience (to see your patterns of confusion and habits clearly)
The coming home practice starts with a “basic template” and you gradually customize it with additional pieces that support your personal process. By engaging in this practice, you can reconnect with your inner advisor, and with curiosity and compassion, you can approach your feelings of being overwhelmed . This allows you to inquire, ask questions, and investigate your experience, ultimately disrupting the sense of being overwhelmed.
Part 1: Settling the Nervous System
- First, take a moment to relax; acknowledging you made it back. You made it “home” to your grounded awareness. To reward yourself, take 15 seconds (just a quarter of a minute) to relax and breathe. Feel the earth below you, the sky above you, and the limitless openness around you. place your hand on your chest and feel the sensations of just breathing deeply.
- Do you need to use Emergency Rescue Music right now?
- Have you practiced meditation today? Should you stop to sit for 5 minutes? Longer? (Optional: this could be done with eyes closed. It can sometimes create a sharper contrast with the state of experiential fusion you just exited)
- Check in with your body. What's your posture right now? How might your body be influencing your mind? Can you synchronize mind and body? Can you uplift your posture? (because that helps)
- Do you need to eat? Do you need to drink? If you have not drunk enough water today, have a quick drink at this point. This will keep you hydrated throughout the day, which is good for you.
- Check in with your environment. Are you where you need to be? Do you need to leave? If the space you’re in has become messy/confused, can you fix/address/uplift it? If not, how can you proceed? Is the place where you are conducive to your best work? to doing what you need to do?
- Consider keeping a “breadcrumb trail” note. Just jotting down what you’re doing, like a simple log, to keep some kind of focus and meta-awareness.
- Consider 5 minutes of journaling.
Part 2: Investigating Experience
The next part is to begin to turn your attention toward any current emotional issue that's causing you to get overwhelmed, distracted, and start falling into experiential fusion. What is happening right now?
Questions to ask yourself include:
- What do you notice in your body right now at the level of feelings and physical sensations
- Can you practice the RAIN method? The RAIN method is a mindfulness practice designed to handle difficult emotions and experiences. It stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. First, you recognize what is happening; then, allow the experience to be there without pushing it away. Next, investigate with interest and care to understand the underlying issues. Finally, nurture yourself with self-compassion and kindness, creating a space for healing and growth.
- Is there something you're avoiding?
- What are you avoiding feeling (think beyond the immediate thing you’re avoiding)?
- Can you do something to address this issue? If so, consider doing it now. (This could be alone, this could be with others, this could be at home, this could be not at home. Doing this might free up emotional space and help undo avoidance).
- Have you spent time just being with this issue, not trying to do anything to fix it or make it go away? There is a practice for this called Handshake.