After the main coaching session, Joe teaches the client a grounding practice: close your eyes, notice the sensations moving through your body, and specifically notice the pleasure and expansiveness you feel. This isn’t an optional add-on — it’s essential infrastructure for someone whose sensitivity is reopening after years of suppression.
“As you start to not compose yourself, as you start to allow your sensitivity to feel everything, that’s what’s going to keep you grounded — is to feel that pleasure.”
The practice is deceptively simple: just notice bodily sensation with attention to what feels good. But for someone who has been locked down, the flood of feeling can be overwhelming. Pleasure acts as an anchor — it teaches the nervous system that feeling is safe, even enjoyable. Without this grounding, reopening sensitivity risks overwhelm and a retreat back into composure.
This is an important part of daily practice during the transition from composure to openness. The sensitive system needs to learn that it can be open and safe simultaneously, and pleasure is the evidence.
Related Concepts
- Extreme sensitivity gets locked down for safety
- Body awareness is just attention
- Attention alone reduces stress
- The expansiveness underneath resistance to love is overwhelming and amazing