One Word Can Call Your Whole Self Home

The Art and Science of Anchoring

The other morning, I was on my way to the barn. Truth be told, I was feeling slightly irritated.

Nothing dramatic. Just… a little out of sorts.

And since I know animals feel that — they read coherence, or the lack of it, instantly — I realized that before I entered their domain, I should probably get myself together.

So I stopped.

Hand on my heart. Three slow breaths. One word — silently.

And as I knew it would, something in me gathered.

First my breath. Then my shoulders. Then something deeper — a remembering in my bones:

Here I am.

The word I used was return. It’s one of my main anchor words.

Anchor words and/or gestures are powerful allies. With one action, my breath changed. My shoulders released. My digestion, which had been quietly clenched all morning, softened. Even the way I was oriented toward the animals shifted — from distracted to fully present.

This is the experience of Multidimensional Coherence — the felt experience of alignment and balance across all five Vital Resonance Systems: nervous system, hormonal landscape, structural and fascial body, digestive and metabolic rhythms, and relational and energetic field. And I called it up with a simple quick micro-practice. Presence. Clarity. A grounded sense of agency.

What Anchoring Actually Is

Anchoring is an embodied practice that pairs a cue, whether a word, a gesture, a touch, or even a combination— with an embodied or lived state of coherence. The idea being that as you practice the pairing your system can find its way back to that state more and more reliably over time.

One of my favorite examples of anchoring, is in fact, an example of both a personal anchor and a cultural anchor.

The Wizard of Oz.

Yep, remember how Dorothy gets ripped out of the world she knows and lands smack dab into a very strange and colorful landscape, filled with all kinds of discomfort and danger. She spends the whole journey focused on one thing. Getting back home. Then after all of the rigmarole and adventuring, at the end of the show, Dorothy is told she’s always had the power to go home. All she had to do was click her heels three times (gesture) and say the words: There’s no place like home.

That’s anchoring. We have a felt sense of something, in Dorothy’s case ‘home’ but in our case we will say Multidimensional Coherence, or just coherence if it’s easier. We use the word/gesture as a shortcut back ‘home’. The important thing here is, the slippers and the words didn’t create ‘home’. They were just the avenue back.

That’s what anchoring does. It doesn’t create coherence. It creates a pathway back to coherence your body has already experienced.

Now you might be tempted to say that you don’t have an experience of Multidimensional Coherence to pull from or to ‘get back to’, but I can assure you that you do. We all do. It’s part of our innate cellular structure. As an organism we know the feeling of balance and we strive for the feeling/experience of balance. Unfortunately, modern life has a way of getting in the way.

The Science That Supports This

Here’s a simple example you can feel right now: smile. Hold it for about seventeen seconds. What happens? Research on the facial feedback hypothesis has shown that the act of smiling — just the musculature itself — triggers the release of dopamine and serotonin while lowering cortisol. Your face sends a signal to your brain that danger has passed, and your whole system begins to settle.

The smile is a structural cue. The musculature is the anchor.

A few blogs/podcasts back, I discussed the phenomenon, aka micro practice, of smiling for 17 seconds. Take it as biophysiological “proof “that your systems know the experience of multidimensional coherence, even if your mind wants to tell you otherwise.

To help it land, here’s a little interesting science for your inner science geek.

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson has spent years studying the interesting conundrum of why our brains and nervous systems seem to be wired to learn quickly from bad experiences and slowly from good ones. He calls it the negativity bias — and it means that your moments of stress, threat, and overwhelm encode almost automatically, while your moments of ease, connection, and coherence tend to wash through without leaving much of a trace.

My hypothesis is this happens because, for our system, coherence feels normal, no reason to hold onto it. But stressors feel abnormal, dangerous, out of balance, so we subconsciously remember them as a mechanism of safety.

Unfortunately, modern living is built in such a way that it is virtually impossible to avoid them, in fact, we are immersed in destructive micro-practices that reinforce chronic ‘danger’ signaling.  

The beauty of Hanson’s research is that it shows us that when we deliberately stay with positive experiences, and by “stay with” I mean really let them land and anchor in our systems. Or when we deliberately generate them, such as the micro-practice of smiling or other anchoring practices, we experience significantly less anxiety and other systemic disruption and measurably greater well-being (and coherence).

So, when you pair a word like return with a genuine state of coherence, you are anchoring and when you engage in micro-practices that include that pairing you are creating a reliable doorway to the immediate experience of coherence. All five systems begin to synchronize.

The Power of the Word

There’s a reason return is my anchor word. For me, it carries with it the knowledge that I have a home inside myself. That coherence already exists within my systems — and that I’m simply finding my way back.

That’s worth spending time with. The word you choose for your anchor matters, because it becomes the invitation your systems hear. Return. Home. Here. Each of these recognizes something already present rather than asking you to become something you’re not.

Why is this important? Because when multidimensional coherence becomes something you can shift back to quickly, and reliably, across systems in your own life, it changes more than how you feel. A coherent human makes different decisions. A coherent leader creates different structures. A coherent culture becomes possible when enough individuals cultivate internal alignment.

Coherence is a personal practice and a systems practice. It ripples. This is why I’m so passionate about it.

How to Practice This

If you want to try anchoring within the Five Vital Resonance Systems framework, here’s a simple way in:

Arrive. Feel gravity. Notice the contact between your body and the surface beneath you.

Recall a real moment of positivity. Not perfection — a felt sense of contentment, satisfaction, happiness. A time your body felt internally organized. Let your nervous system, breath, and posture respond to the memory. If a memory isn’t available, then start with the smile exercise.

Introduce your cue. Place your hand somewhere meaningful — chest, belly, collarbone. Say your word silently: Return. Home. Here. Choose recognition, not correction.

Hold the pairing. Take three long, slow breaths while holding the word and the embodied state together. This is the anchoring moment — the association is being encoded now across systems.

Repeat over time. Each genuine repetition strengthens reliability across all five resonance systems. You’re not manufacturing coherence. You’re restoring multidimensional communication.

The Bigger Picture

Coherence isn’t something you outsource. It’s something you cultivate and become— in your own body, in your own life, in the way you meet the world each morning.

In my mind, when enough people become coherent, something remarkable happens. Systems reorganize. Families shift. Workplaces shift. Institutions shift.

So choose your word. Choose your touch. And micro-practice anchoring coherence because it’s a powerful tool for change.

Return.