Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about a grounding technique called the Butterfly Hug.

More to come on that in a moment, first let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so practicing human is a combination of episodes devoted to theory and also practices.

And sometimes I like to share really short practical practices that you can integrate into your life when you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed, caught in a trigger.

And that is what the Butterfly Hug is. This is a particular grounding technique that is often used in EMDR trauma therapy and during trauma therapy in general when there is a high activation and there's a need to settle the nervous system, convent nervous system.

But this can also be used for anyone who is just feeling overly activated. You might be having a long day, you're doing a lot of emails, there's a lot going on, a lot of Zoom calls, and you have a few minutes to just stop and re-ground.

This is something that you can do in those moments to help settle your nervous system and come back a little bit more refreshed and restored.

So what does the Butterfly Hug entail? Well, you start by crossing your arms over your chest and you can do this with me assuming you're not driving right now.

So you cross your arms over your chest so that the tip of your middle finger from each hand is placed just below the collarbone.

So it's almost like you're creating a cross across your chest. And you want your hands and fingers to be as vertical as possible so that the fingers point toward the neck and not toward the arms.

But they won't be totally vertical. So your eyes can be closed during this or partially closed or you can keep them open.

And the reason this is called a Butterfly Hug is because you're going to be flapping your hands kind of like a butterfly would flap their wings.

And you're going to do this in alternating motions. So you just start by tapping the fingers on each side near the collarbone, just right left, right left, and you can do this quickly.

And it's almost like a fluttering. There's something I find really settling about it and soft and gentle about it as well.

So you're not pounding into the chest. It's just this gentle fluttering of the fingers against the collarbone or below the collarbone, the chest region, just like wings of a butterfly.

So I'm pretending that you're doing this with me right now, which is why I'm going a little slow.

But as you're doing this, just aim to breathe slowly and deeply, deep abdominal breathing.

You can notice what's going on in your mind, where your thoughts are, and just anchoring your attention back to your breath.

Noticing any sounds around you, any other sensory experiences, smells, tastes, if the eyes are opening, open, notice any sights.

And as we do in meditation, just any judgments or ideas that arise, you just notice them like clouds passing through the sky.

And then whenever you start to feel grounded, you can let the hands come to rest.

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