Browning is this idea that we're just coming back into our body. So often, on. We’re in our head when we're an autopilot. We’re not really in our body, but we are either lost in the past, or we are thinking about the future. So grounding is any activity that brings us back into the body. In this moment, the way to do that is just by starting to feel your feet so you can feel the contact that your feet are having with the floor. 

You can do that when you're sitting. You can do that when you're walking, very simple, you can also look, you can just orient yourself really in the room instead of being lost in thought—really saying like what am I seeing right now. You. You focus on the sound. You can use all of your senses if you want to do a little bit more of a formal grounding practice. You would feel your feet on the floor, and then you would feel where else your body has contact with,  the chair that you're sitting on so the legs the back. 

Then you can focus on some breath and maybe also what your hands are doing at that moment, and you can do that without anybody noticing,  so it's very simple and very effective. Another tool that we can teach to veterans and we can use ourselves as stop. The s means stop, T take a breath, O means observe your experience checking in with your sensations in the body. Your thoughts and your emotions and the P proceed, proceed in a way that feels right to you. You might use stop in a situation that it's difficult and challenging or where you notice really strong thoughts or emotions coming in and it's just a way to check in with yourself and give yourself a little bit of space to proceed in a way that feels right. 

So another thing you can do at any moment during the day when you feel tense or you feel you need a little bit more support and you would choose a word or a sentence that has a meaning for you that helps you feel supported or helps you feel being more compassionate mostly to yourself. So it can be something like may I be safe or this too shall pass or it will be okay it is like having a best friend with you saying that to you so to get you through a hard moment.

Every doorway is a moment for a clinician to pause become present fully in this situation and then proceed so for a clinician that is in a busy clinic where you're going from room to room to room seeing lots of patients. This is an opportunity just to bring all of yourself into the room and fully attend to the paycheck, so as you can see mindfulness is not complicated and you can do that whenever you remember doing something so while on the one hand, we're emphasizing that you really take the time for like 5 minutes 10 minutes every day where you focus. For example, on the breath, these are tools that you can do throughout your day that won't take any more time but will make a really huge difference in how you feel.

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