Early Years – Becoming Grounded and Secure – Part Two

1st December 2018

In part two, we look more in depth at why becoming grounded and secure is vital to both our early years and life development.

In part one, we highlighted several key factors:

To Become Grounded and Secure – we need to ensure that our survival needs are met. We develop trust through learning to live in a body that is well-fed, loved and cared for.
The Right to Be – a confidence to express our needs. Ignore this, and we revert back into a survival consciousness.
Early Years can last a Lifetime – unreconciled experiences can create familiar patterns of fear and perceived threats to our survival – even in the absence of any threat.

To read more about these aspects – click here

Let’s now introduce four further principles that will help empower young people to develop a sense of becoming grounded and secure.

Limitation

If we didn’t recognise and accept a limit on our activities, we would never achieve anything at all. Hence, limitation becomes a container – a crucible – of bringing intention and energy into being. Limitation is vital in all its potential forms – from an act of physical creation to a feeling of contentment. An intrinsic part of feeling grounded and secure is therefore a willing acceptance of limitation.

Being in the Here and Now

Our bodies can only exist in the present moment – but our everyday consciousness constantly takes flight. This tends to create fristration rather than fulfillment. Feeling grounded will prevent emotional, mental and physical overload through creating a solid “anchor-point” from which to create a more balanced perspective.

Release

Stress frequently builds through an inability to locate or create the safety of feeling grounded. Becoming grounded and secure provides a still centre to discharge accumulating stress arising from both internal and external sources

Clarity through Stillness

Every feeling, thought and action creates a biochemical response. This in turn can further escalate tension or have a calming effect on the journey of that feeling and related thought(s).

We can react to a stimulus or situation – or we can break a reactionary spiral from a point of stillness. It’s as if part of the process of becoming grounded and secure is waiting for sediment to settle in clouded water: it gradually becomes clear. Decisions begin to become conscious choices – not defensive reactions.

In effect, feeling grounded is a developing ability to consciously exercise choice – to work with the biochemistry that is our feelings.

Early Years development forms an intrinsic part of the CoolFire holistic approach to Emotional Literacy, positive mental health and wellbeing – featuring workshops, classwork and fun activities for three to five year olds.

The Adventures of Tommy the Tree

Becoming grounded and secure in Early Years is at the heart of the CoolFire Approach – and you can follow the Adventures of Tommy the Tree in a 1-hour workshop packed full of colourful characters who guide their audience through a mix of easy-to-follow exercises and routines that are an integral part of the story.

Tommy the Tree is far too young and active to be a “boring old tree” – so we see him having fun in an unfolding adventure with his friends, Moxey Mouse, Fergus Frog, Doodledog and Holly Hen. But this gets Tommy into all sorts of problems. Eventually, Tommy wants to learn to be a tree again – to put his roots down and feel happy and secure.

The Adventures of Tommy the Tree features exercises, activities and an approach that will encourage and develop a grounding process as a solid base for future emotional, mental and physical wellbeing at a crucial time in a young person’s personal development.