Relax into the feeling, while maintaining the ratio of small inbreath to longer out-breath for a few minutes. If your mind wanders, simply return to the practice when your awareness returns. You can adopt this exercise as a daily meditation, say 15 minutes twice a day (the optimal time, we find), or you can simply practice a few breaths at any time you feel the need to ‘re-connect’ or ground yourself…or, better yet, both. You can also do this ‘on the fly’, without interrupting whatever you’re doing to sit down and close your eyes. Simply put your attention where the palm of your hand was resting, then follow the instructions above, from 2 onwards. Those practitioners familiar with the core NLP technique of anchoring (discussed elsewhere in this book—see pages 147 to 152) may experiment with anchoring this subjective experience of coherence, remembering that the effect will be deepened with regular practice. Since the effect seems to spill over into the rest of your life from some time after even a few minutes of this practice, we also suggest you do it several times a day, whether you feel stressed or not. In time, this becomes a pre-emptive strike against autonomic overload. The next technique should be used wherever any strong emotion, such as anxiety, fear, anger, and even jealousy, threatens to engulf the individual. The Medical NLP model, which subscribes strongly to the belief that bodily feelings are somatic markers of cortical dynamics (another way of saying when you become mindful of the physical expression of your emotions, you are opening a doorway into the workings of the brain), has developed several simple techniques to resolve relatively complex ‘psychological’ experiences.