Not the sort of grounding you give out for bad behavior, though Aero's shredding of the screen door might deserve that. I'm talking about grounding as in being connected to the Earth and centered in your body, which most cats are pretty good at. Here's Aero connecting with some Earth in a bag :-)
I've known techniques for grounding for years, one of the simplest being thinking of yourself as a tree, sending your roots down, pulling Earth energy up through your body, then going up through your branches and pulling energy down from the sky and meeting in the center. There are lots of others; we got a good sampling in my health coaching classes. And now I'm getting a review in the women's group I've joined.
Grounding every morning is part of our homework. Many of the other first year people in this group are new to the practice. For the rest of us, it's just good to have reminders and support to do it since it's not really part of mainstream American culture. I am hoping this group will help my meditation practice and while it is a spiritual group, not a diet & exercise one, I think it is holistic enough that it will support all kinds of healthy choices. But on to what I've actually done in the past 2 weeks besides go on a lovely retreat in the woods with these women.
Now that the big distraction of conventions is over, I've been meditating more regularly. I still need to work on stretching the amount of time, it's probably only 5 min. and one night it wasn't even that because I was so tired I kept tipping over!
I've seen a cat tip over once but she wasn't meditating :-), just lounging on the edge of the sofa. They generally do have a more stable position for meditation. Sara is likely in a catnip induced meditative state here:
Stepping away from the Internet in time to go to bed has been better but I've still been on past 11 on some weeknights.
And despite raging PMS this past week, I resisted Snickers bars and only had small amounts of dark chocolate. I had more trouble staying out of salty things, and it did seem worse than usual, so time to re-evaluate my herbal strategy. My favorite resource for this is Susun Weed's Menopausal Years
I may be getting some unexpected help in healthier eating from my son. He's going to have knee surgery for ACL and meniscus tears that he's been limping around with since a fall off a bike in July. He was trying to be all macho about it so we didn't know how bad it was until he couldn't perform at football practice. For some reason this has made him think about losing weight though he is not so fat that I think that caused the fall. That was more about being a risk-taking teenage boy going around a corner too fast. So he's thinking about drinking more water and less juice and pop which will add up to alot of calories for him. Since he will be forced to be less active for a while, it's probably not a bad time for him to think about what he's eating.
One more pootie picture: my sister's cat, Hearts, in such a deep meditation it looks like she turned into a pillow!