When a practice becomes too much or the day has shaken you: open your eyes, look around, feel your feet. A calm, ninety-second way back.
Meditation and breathing practices usually calm us, but sometimes unexpected feelings, memories or dizziness come up. Safe Exit is designed for those moments: it asks you to open your eyes and brings your attention to what you can see and hear around you, to the ground under your feet and the seat beneath you. In SendenSana's deeper practices it can be opened at any moment with an "I feel overwhelmed" button.
Use it when you feel overwhelmed during a breathing or meditation practice, when anxiety rises, after bad news or a difficult conversation, or when you wake from sleep in fear.
Grounding and orienting techniques are widely used in trauma-informed care and somatic approaches such as Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing; the "5-4-3-2-1" senses exercise belongs to the same family. A review of 83 studies found that about 8 per cent of people who meditate report an unwanted experience such as increased anxiety or dissociation (Farias et al., 2020). That is why Safe Exit exists: a responsible companion to deeper practices.
Safe Exit is not a crisis intervention. If you have thoughts of harming yourself or are in danger, call your local emergency number now; you can find helplines around the world at findahelpline.com. If these feelings keep returning, talk to a mental health professional.