The Inner Ground Practice

Most of us spend our lives relating to our emotions from a distance — managing them, avoiding them, or being swept away by them. The Inner Ground Practice offers something different: a way to turn toward your inner world with curiosity, at your own pace, with a structure that keeps you safe.

Each exercise takes 8–15 minutes. You can do them in any order, on any day. Nothing you write or notice is stored or shared — this is entirely private.

The practice draws on three areas of established psychological research: parts-based psychology, which understands the inner world as made up of different parts or inner states, each with their own history and role; somatic awareness, which uses the body as a ground and anchor for inner work; and attachment theory, which understands how our earliest relationships shape the way we relate — to others, and to ourselves.

This tool is for self-reflection and education. It is not therapy and not a clinical treatment. If you are working with significant trauma or mental health difficulties, please do this work alongside a trained therapist rather than instead of one.

A reparenting practice for the parts of you that needed more

At its heart, this is a reparenting tool. Reparenting is the gentle work of offering — from your steady adult centre, or through a safe and comforting figure you bring in — the attuned presence a younger part of you didn’t reliably get at the time. It’s sometimes called self-parenting, or inner child work.

The principle is simple: when a younger part of you finally meets, in a new context, exactly what they needed back then — to feel safe, to be seen, to be soothed, to be loved exactly as they are — the nervous system slowly learns something it never had a chance to learn the first time. This isn’t positive thinking. It’s the steady, repeatable felt experience of being held.

Exercises 1–3 help you start noticing your inner parts. Exercises 4 and 5 deepen the contact. Exercise 6 — Reparenting a Younger Part — is a full guided reparenting meditation: bringing in a safe figure (a wise older self, a grandparent, a mentor, or a figure that feels divine and true to you), offering a younger part exactly what they needed, and checking — gently — that nothing is still missing.

If you’d like to read more about reparenting before you begin, the reparenting meditation guide gives you the wider context.

Inspired by, not affiliated with

The Inner Ground Practice is inspired by parts-based therapeutic approaches including Internal Family Systems therapy developed by Richard Schwartz, and by secure figure visualisation work developed by attachment researchers Daniel P. Brown and David Elliott. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the IFS Institute or any clinical training organisation. It is an independent educational tool created by The Secure Path.