Feeling not grounded, out of your body, or not connected? Here are some quick ways to help you ground yourself and be in the present. These can be used whenever dissociation shows up in your life.

1. Count the number of objects in the room you are in.
2. Have favorite CD or song available, on an MP3 player or phone.
3. Have a favorite smell available to sniff to ground you.
4. Take your shoes off and run them into the floor, as if they were roots in the ground.
5. Have a favorite comforting object with you all the time, to hold if you need to.
6. Take a tennis ball and rub it under your feet, pressing it into your arches as you do.
7. Hold ice.
8. Remember, now is not then. Have a phrase that you use to remind you of TODAY.

The theme of our “attachments” to things, people, experiences, and not being able to “let them go” has been coming up with many of clients lately. Yet, it seems that it is our attachment to having that experience, that relationship, that purchase “we just can’t live without” that causes pain. We are constantly seeking something. Then, as if in a karmic house of cards tumbling down, someone or something else becomes that next thing we want. It is never-ending, for the something just changes form, all to maintain the idea that we are not enough, in and of ourselves, without it, whatever it is.

But we can live without it, for our relationship with what we seek will have to change for us to reduce our pain. It is, ironically, when we release the want for something that we remember how to live, and enjoy knowing that we already are enough. By not hoarding and accumulating that which, truly, does not serve our highest good and that which is our true nature, we obtain freedom.

Furthermore, even our attachment to things “staying as they are” causes us great pain, for it is in the attachment, the desire, the focus on that which we seek to possess, that creates the struggle. Our true self is not found in that item, relationship, next experience, substance, they are, instead, found inside ourselves, now.