overview
Grounding brings with it a deep sense of presence. It allows us to center within ourselves, our body. We feel connected with the earth and feel a sense of calmness, rootedness and clarity. A peace coated in acceptance for ourselves and all that is happening around us. We feel nurtured, safe and able to respond. Grounding gives us comfort and confidence of the self, to who we are and where we are heading towards. And there lays the potential shadow of grounding. Depending from which position we ground ourselves, it may just keep us stagnant – circling in the comfort of the self itself.
In my experience, grounding is all about the spoken above, and is also about the ability to let new ways of being, new versions of our self, to come into fruition. To ground something greater into our mundane reality than what we are used to. And this has mostly little to do with comfort. After the destruction of the old, new confidence needs to be gained during the establishment of the new. After the roots got shattered, they need to spread anew.
For me, our duty to ourselves and the world lays in bringing “higher” frequencies and spiritual insights into awareness as much as into a worldly expression. To live and express our highest potential in our day-to-day reality. To actually change what is ready to be changed.
True grounding is a continuous dance of embodying one state of being, till it’s time to let it go once again. A marriage of the personal with the trans-personal. An embracing of a paradox throughout existence itself.
the concept of grounding and it’s benefits
The concept of grounding speaks around, that when we are not grounded, we lose our connection to reality, we lose ourselves. We become lightheaded and make rash choices that are not necessarily supporting us in our highest interests. Or we might fall into the opposite and overthink everything, fall into doubt and end up nowhere. We become floaty or even become anxious. We distract ourselves easily and behave clumsy. If we’re ungrounded we might feel tired, have no energy and our body starts to react malevolent. Ungroundedness effects our emotional state and we might even end up becoming depressive by all the worries and the emotional swing we suddenly experience.
As neither of the effects just mentioned seems to be desirable, we want to ground ourselves. Grounding brings with it a deep sense of presence within ourselves. It allows us to focus and to get on with our tasks and duties. Grounding and centering go hand in hand and so they support our sense of self. We know who we are and what we want. This strong self-confidence brings clarity on our purpose and goals as well as on how we actually get “there”. We have the will and bravery to actually choose and create what our heart most desires.
This strong connection to the earth brings a feeling of calmness, ease and rootedness. We gain peace and acceptance for our own journey, our state of being, as much as for everything else around us. A deep feeling of security and protection arises as we feel connected and held by earth and life itself. Energies start to flow freely, and we get nurtured. Our bodies functions increase, and we become healthier in body, mind, heart and soul. We feel energized and start to trust our ability to respond to any situation. That trust into ourselves and life itself will lift all worries and anxieties one by one.
While being grounded, our body functions improve. We become more resilient, as our respiration deepens, our blood flow increases in depth, our nerves calm, and so it has an impact on our metabolism, immune system and all the other body functions. Our overall health increases.
Sounds amazing?! It truly is. Yet like with everything, it sounds easier, than it is done. To reach any of these benefits on a lasting and sustainable level, we need to train ourselves to be grounded in any situation. And this is only possible with practice and persistence.
ways to ground ourselves
There are at least as many ways of grounding as there are people on this planet and not one is better than the other. Important is that it works for you and you yourself only. In the following I am going to list some of the most common ways to ground, I stumbled upon.
Feel the earth
If you walk barefoot, lay down on a grassy field, hug a tree, climb a rock, jump in the ocean, make a fire, stand in the wind or whatever else brings you a connection to the earth doesn’t matter. Important is that you connect with earth itself. Feel her, become her and allow her to live through you.
Physical labor & connection to the living
Go in the garden and plant some food or flowers, dig a hole or build a home, chop wood or cut the grass, give a massage and connect to other humans in a physical and intimate way, play with animals. Connect with the living beings walking upon earth is as much grounding, as we all are part of earth herself.
Visualizations & meditations
Visualize yourself being grounded, see your roots reaching far down into the earth and feel how you’re exchanging energy with Pachamama and all that is upon her. Allow her to take you entirely, to nurture each cell, each part of your body, your entire being. Let her love and care penetrate all your bodies (physical, emotional, mental, energetic), till it reaches the spiritual realms and beyond. Energy follows intentions. Just trust and feel it.
Physical body & food
Look after your physical body and do it some good with workouts, any type of sports, yoga, chi gong, walks in nature, swimming, dancing or anything else that feels good to you. Get a massage, do some wellness, take a bath, a cold shower, cuddle yourself and/or allow yourself to be cuddled. Nurture your body with healthy and lively foods, eat root vegetables and other fresh vegetables. Look after yourself as you were the most precious to yourself. Nurture yourself and love yourself.
Minerals & plants
Use crystals with grounding properties such as: Tourmaline, Obsidian, Red Jasper, Pyrite, Tigers Eye, Smoky Quartz, Garnet, Onyx. Wear them, place them next to your bed or infuse your drinking water with them. Use the healing properties of plants such as: Sage, Palo Santo, Damiana, Basil, Lavender, Tulsi, and many others. Plant them, drink teas, use essential oils or take baths with them. Find your own personal way to connect with either or both and make them your ally. But always, make your own research before you ingest something into your body. You’re your own master. That’s called self-responsibility, which is a big part of self-love.
Whatever way to ground yourself you choose or whit whatever approach you resonate the most, turn it in to a ritual. That doesn’t mean you need to wear a feathery crown and dance around a fire while doing your grounding practice. Yet when it’s fun to you and it helps you to do the grounding ritual, why not doing naked around a fire...?! The purpose of making it a ritual is to raise the awareness and intention while doing the grounding practice. I guess we don’t have to argue on the increase of any outcome, when we do it consciously and in full presence, compared to when we do something just by the side. Whatever you choose to do, do it consciously, wakefully and filled with intention. Own your way and own your grounded state. There is a lot of magic in it.
the shadow side of grounding
Now that you are getting yourself grounded and start to feel amazing, I would love to bring the conversation on to some potential pitfalls I encountered along my own personal journey, during healing sessions I gave or received and in other seekers during their journey of spiritual or personal development. Everything has at least two sides and so you might find for yourself some “hidden costs” in grounding as well.
The biggest question I had to ask myself is: “from which standpoint am I seeking grounding?”. This applies to almost everything, as the position from which we do or are something always impacts everything tremendously. But the question here is, “why or what am I grounding?”, “which part of myself feels ungrounded?” and “What is the true and honest intention behind?”. To ignore these questions might bring the cost of resting in stagnation or even retrogression in our evolution. And I have to admit, I paid this price already a few times.
As grounding brings with it a deep sense of comfort, self-confidence, stability and increases the sense of self, the question “am I resisting timely change?” becomes just fair to be asked. We might be feeling ungrounded, as we are just in the midst of a big shift in our life, and we simply did so far never experience any ground as the new self in that particular new situation. For some it might be a splitting hair, but too easily we can fall into a grounding of ourselves into our used and comfortable way of being - resisting the new and the signs ahead. It’s a subtle difference between being grounded on our journey into the new (expansion) or being grounded in our journey into the new (resistance). Where for me, the former implies a groundedness, yet openness to the journey ahead as we are on a journey, we yet don’t know vs. the ladder brings a self-assurance and grounding in my journey, assuming I know who I am, where the journey actually leads to and who I actually have to be or to become. The ego fulfilling its purpose as an identification giving factor of the self is a tricky trickster and does an amazing job. It gives us stability and courage to be our best as much as it doesn’t want us to change at all. We just need to be aware when to allow us to be and when it’s time for us not to be and to transform.
Another one, let’s call it ’’the lightening effect’’, is. Just like the lightning strikes the wire on the rooftop, all that voltage lights ups the resistance the copper supplies and gets carried and grounded into the earth. Grounding is not just about being connected to earth, to accept our being to its fullest and to life in our strength and clarity, as stable as possible. It is also about bringing positive change on to oneself and to the world. And by bringing the new into being, a lot that doesn’t serve any longer will be lit up and might need to burn away. Old perspectives and identifications will have to die off, so spacious, fertile soil is available to grow and prosper new more serving perspectives and identifications.
The idea of staying grounded as being realistic and down to earth in any matter, carries the danger to keep us in resistance to the new and to feed the ego-based identification and status quo on a personal and collective level. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with personal and collective identifications, structures, ways of living, ideologies, believes, ways of doing things, etc. As long we question them at times and become aware of the origins of these structures, reevaluate our personal and collective common ways. As long we keep ourselves open to new insights, allow the outdated to fall away and adapt with bravery to new ways of being and doing things. May this process be for the benefit of oneself or for the whole collective, important it is non the less.
my personal experience
Along my journey I encountered a healer that turned my view upside down. I was feeling ungrounded and many of my friends and other healers I worked at that time told me just the same. As I worked with that particular healer and I told him that I need to ground myself, he smiled and said, that he sees it all a bit reversed. He said: “let’s blow your 3rd eye and your crown open, so you will know how you get yourself grounded.”. And this is basically the summary of the whole shadow side section.
We might not have the slightest idea of what grounding actually truly means and what actually might be best for us, from our current perspective of being. Oneself is always aware of what he or she is aware of.
I mean, to truly contemplate and evaluate our state of being and its needed level of whatever “being grounded” means, we first would have to have a clear idea of who we actually are, not to mention all the factors of different realms that are influencing that particular self we seek, before we could even start to inquire the meaning of grounding itself and comprehend how it serve us the most in that particular time in space. Way too much for one simple mind trying to figure it out in a linear way. Yet, of course, we do our best in the best of our abilities, and yet we often stand in our own way more than we would like to admit to ourselves. At least I did.
I for myself know, that too often, throughout my personal journey, I used grounding to not lose my feet off the earth. And yet, in retrospection, I have to admit to myself, that I was often simply and gloriously resisting timely change I was then not ready to comprehend. Too often I tried to figure it out and couldn’t just allow life to guide the way.
last thoughts
To me, the deal of grounding is, that we actually bring spirit down to earth, while being in communion with earth itself. That we embrace our earthliness and human existence, yet allow spirit, our higher self, god (or however you choose to call it) to guide us. Grounding is, next to all the personal benefits and centeredness we might temporarily gain from it, an act of bringing in higher frequencies to the earthly plane. A rising up as an individual into the god we are within and as the collective to express heaven on earth for us all. An act of translation and building the bridge between the earthly and the spiritual.
To bring into fruition the full potential grounding may carry inherently, an allowance of embodied consciousness of the personal as much as the trans-personal needs to take place. Grounding turns into a constant dance between the poles, an integration of the paradox itself. It becomes an endless array of cycles of birthing and dying, of embodying and letting go. True grounding is a balance act of harmony itself, which the mind might never comprehend to its fullest.
That might sound like a lot to carry, yet it is easier than it might appear. Awareness once more offers the key. There is not much we can do wrong, when we keep on being aware of what we actually are and do. Life is a journey, and its destination is the journey itself. So, let’s lean back together and let us get grounded by life itself – all that’s about to be learned on that ride, won’t be missed when lived in awareness anyway.