A Meditation Expert Offers Tips on Forming New Routines for the “New Normal”

With the nation’s vaccination rates continuing to increase, more people are feeling the cloud of pandemic life begin to lift. But for many, there’s a great deal of anxiety about returning to work, social functions, films, concerts, live sports and more. 

That anxiety can lead to a sense of disconnection with ourselves, or as meditation specialist and energy healer Amelia Vogler says, become ungrounded from our feelings, thoughts, and even our bodies.

“As individuals, as a collective, we’re all having to choose this new normal, and our mental resilience is waning.” –Amelia Vogler 

Vogler says everything in the world is energy, from plants to our homes to us. “There’s this energetic template that holds us to ourselves … but we’re really working with the building block of who we are, how we are, and how it is that we come to make choices in the world.”

The choices that we’ve had to make over the past year — whether we wanted to make those choices or were forced to — put a huge strain on us, she says.

As we head into “the new normal,” the uncertainty is compounding the overwhelming feelings of returning to the busy pace of our pre-pandemic lives. Not knowing how to move forward can also be ungrounding, she says.

“As individuals, as a collective, we’re all having to choose this new normal, and our mental resilience is waning,” she says. “A lot of us are feeling mentally unmoored. We don’t really know what the next step is or what the right direction is. We know that going back to what was isn’t sustainable, but we also don’t really know exactly how to bring ourselves forward into whatever’s new, and that can be ungrounding, this sense of not really being able to find our place.”

But we are also in a cycle of “restoration and renewal,” she says.

“We’re trying to create new fixtures, new grounding practices for ourselves.”

Gauging Your Grounded State

One of the first barometers of checking how grounded she is feeling is to check in with how quickly thoughts are passing through her mind. If her mind is racing 1,000 miles a minute, “that’s one of my mental keys of an ungrounded mental state,” she says.

As for our physical bodies, she says “being kind of aware of space and place, and how our bodies are operating in a space or a place can be an interesting barometer of our grounding.”

And how your mind and body are working together is another way to think about how grounded you are.

“Another [barometer] is how organized you are in your thoughts, and how those thoughts manifest in your body. Do you feel like you’re in control? Mentally and physically do you feel like you’re connected to your body, such that you know where you’re going, you know what your next steps are throughout the day [so] you’re not just floating mindlessly through moment to moment. You have a deeper connection to [your] body, space and time.”

Finding what inspires us especially during this moment of uncertainty will help us feel grounded, she says.

“That inspiration is what carries us to more light, more life, more aliveness to our next moment into our new normal.”

Listen: Grounding techniques to navigate “the new normal.”