It's a term that we hear so often in spiritual circles, but what is grounding? What do people mean when they talk about grounding? Does it have a benefit? Is it simply a metaphor? Or can we take it in a literal sense? Here we unpack this concept and discuss some practical tools.

Even as a small child (before I was fully aware of my gifts of perception) I could feel the profound effects of having my feet on the earth. My mother was always telling me to put shoes on, lest a snake bites me as I played in the long grass, yet I always felt clumsy, imprisoned, and disconnected with shoes on my feet. I always knew that the closer I was to the earth, the better I felt.

I also prefer to sleep closer to the earth as opposed to up high on a bed. After a night of sleeping on the hard earth, I may feel a bit stiff, but I always feel better rested, as if I have received healing energy all through the night. Yet the world I found myself in as a child, prescribed that I cut myself off by sleeping on high beds with all this air underneath me causing nightmares and restless sleep. I felt too floaty and unsafe up there.

Grounding is simply the act of becoming grounded. To be metaphorically grounded is to be sensible, practical, and calm. To be literally grounded is to be connected to the earth. On a very physiological level, contact with the earth corrects the electrical charge of your body. Electricity is a major component of our nervous system. Touching the earth, therefore, aids in regulating our nervous systems. Connecting with the earth regularly, with your bare feet or even your hands while gardening, is the easiest way to stay grounded. If you can integrate this into your life, it will benefit you not only in how you feel, or on a spiritual level, but it quite literally improves your health by supporting and aiding physical healing. There are plenty of studies in medical journals that are now catching up with ancient and intuited knowledge around earthing, here I will just reference one (Chevalier et al., 2012). If you had any doubts about the benefits of touching the earth I recommend reading some medical studies on the topic. Allow those doubts to dissolve. Did you ever notice how people who work with the earth are so calming, so peaceful, and never in a rush?

When I discovered the spiritual concept of grounding as a preteen, I was not surprised, since I had long felt this truth within me; it was the affirmation that I needed to trust my intuition on the matter. I began working with visualization as another way to ground. Many people are aware of the idea of sending energetic roots down into the earth by use of the imagination, during meditation, or in a trance-like state. The question is does it work? My opinion, as someone who perceives subtle energy, is that it works for some people and not for others. It requires you to believe in your ability to move energy with your imagination. It requires focused attention. It requires you to suspend disbelief and cast away any doubts. How many of us were told as a child: “it's only your imagination”? As if the imagination is not something very real… and it surely is; your imagination is a powerful tool that opens doorways of many kinds.

This form of grounding, by use of energy, takes effort. It can be used if you, for example, stay in a high-rise building, so it can be very useful to practice this technique and master it. While this does not come naturally to some people, I do believe that all people can learn to master it with some effort - if they want to, and if they don't, that is okay too. It can work just as well as touching the earth - touching the earth, however, requires no focus, nor consciousness of the activity of grounding, for it to happen. For those who don’t know, the technique is as follows:
Come to a comfortable seat or lie down flat on your back with your spine straight.

1. Track the flow of your breath in your body to become present within your body, present within the present moment, and also to allow the mind to become quiet.
2. Once you feel comfortable, calm, and present, begin to imagine that you have roots growing out the base of your spine and/or your feet and/or the parts of your body in contact with the ground.
3. You might imagine them being red if you like. If your imagination does not produce visual images that is fine, you can use your other senses. You can feel the roots, hear them, or even taste them growing out of you. Allow the imagination to expand. This gets easier with practice.
4. Imagine that they are growing deep into the core of the earth until they reach the center of the earth. Here you may find a giant crystal or a pool of swirling light, choose or imagine what you like as long as the invocation feels safe and healing for you.
5. Begin to draw healing, grounding energy up through your roots into your body. Stay here for as long as you like. Use your breath to move the energy into your body. Feel the energy in your body.
6. When you are done, slowly draw your roots back into your body and come back into the room. Drink water.

So grounding or earthing the body is literal, and that can happen consciously through energy work or meditation or unconsciously simply by touching the earth, but does the metaphorical layer apply too? I would say yes. The literal and metaphorical layers work together. Those who literally ground, tend to be grounded in the metaphorical sense too, though of course there are always exceptions. So what is being grounded metaphorically? With this we associate the energies of practicality, steady action steps, organized, calm, present, embodied, and nourished to name a few. So here are some grounding activities that one can do to metaphorically ground, which is best supported by also literally grounding:

• Consciously move slowly through your day and be present in your body. Feel every muscle as you walk or pick things up. Be truly present with your activities.
• Write a to-do list. Get things out of your busy mind and onto paper. Spend time journaling your thoughts and worries. Ground your experiences down onto paper to process them and let them go.
• Make an action plan and begin to execute some steps - one thing at a time and no rushing, or else this activity may become scattered and ungrounded.
• Prioritize. Check-in with what is most important to you. Remove unnecessary things from your schedule. Simplify your day. Simplify your schedule. Simplify your life.
• Tidy or clean a room. Declutter a space. Throw away things that you no longer need.
• Tend to your body by showering or massaging yourself, go and see a healer or massage therapist, and get acupuncture or reflexology. Exercise your body. Yoga is for me particularly beneficial, but something else may resonate with you. Follow what feels good.
• Feed yourself healthy food. Foods that are the most grounding are root vegetables of course, and for those of you who do eat meat, this is also very grounding, although the consciousness of where that meat comes from is vitally important, for it can also fill you with pain. The source of your vegetables is also important.

As a psychic, I am easily able to sense when people are ungrounded and I can often get their energy to shift, with their cooperation of course, through a few sentences and some breathing. People who are grounded are calm and easy to be around. People who are grounded are not highly anxious or lost in delusion. It is important to note that being grounded is not something that you are or are not, as a set-in-stone thing. We all move through moments of being grounded or not grounded. It is an ebb and flow that requires maintenance, as with all things in life. I mean you are not going to breathe all of the air right now, that you need for the rest of your life, are you? Likewise grounding yourself now, does not ground you for life.

For some people it is a lot more challenging to be or to stay grounded because of past traumas - if their bodies simply do not feel like a safe place to be then grounding into the body (and the earth also represents our bodies) does not feel safe. In these cases, a combination of spending time outdoors, therapy and embodied practice may help. If being grounded is more challenging for you, there is even more reason to practice it by finding your favorite methods that feel safe for you. Be patient with yourself in that process, it is enough that you are showing up for yourself.

How can we spot ungrounded energy? For me, it shows up as a fast vibrating or electrically charged feeling which immediately makes me feel anxious. It looks gray to gray-blue, sometimes with flecks of maroon, yellow, orange, black, or navy, and it does not have a specific shape or outline, rather it blurs like the edge of a gray undefined cloud. It may even move around like an electrical charge. The energy may also be away from the body as if the person is not in their body energetically but laying somewhere off to the side. When a person touches the earth, immediately you can see the charges moving towards the earth and the energy beginning to stabilize and calm. This is all on the subtle level, but on the surface, you may observe in yourself or others some of the following:

• Scattered thought processes or speech.
• Chaos or clutter in the personal environment.
• High-pitched fast speaking.
• Delusional utterances or paranoia.
• Fast, chaotic movements or often bumping into things.
• Confusion about what to do or what emotions are present.
• Avoidance of important tasks or procrastination.
• Denial of what is clearly present.

What are things or activities that make us feel ungrounded?

• Being in a car (rubber tires) or wearing shoes with rubber soles.
• Screen time - being on the computer, tablet, or cellphone and by extension too much social media.
• Wifi signals, cell phone signals, radio waves, etc. This is one of the reasons why some time away from the city is so nourishing.
• Being in high-rise buildings.
• Overthinking.
• Being around ungrounded people.
• Living in fantasy worlds (games, books, etc.).

It is important to note that we cannot always avoid these things and nor should we and that there is no need to obsess over them. We have tools for grounding. We are strong beings that can transmute so much. Obsession is also an ungrounded activity. Balance and moderation are key. If you enjoy fantasy novels, that's great, as long as you also spend time here on earth; the same goes for gaming. Social media can also be used positively and powerfully, as long as we don't obsess over it.

Let’s take the metaphor conversation deeper with mythology. Most of us will be familiar with the idea of man being made from the dust or clay of the earth - the earth as the body. This shows up not only in the Judeo-Christian stories but across many other cultures in their creation myths (Leeming & Leeming, 1995). So we can see the act of grounding and coming back to our bodies and the earth, as a return to our origins (creation story) of our physicality and our inception as a being in this form. It invokes an innate or embodied memory of that moment of deep connection to our creator, our mother (through birth), our bloodlines, and our spirit at the moment before we came into the illusion of being a separate being or the moment of first breath when animation enters the body. Ironically, it is through deep embodiment and presence with our very physicality that we can reconnect and dissolve the illusion of separation, caused by that very physicality, to begin with. It is a circle.

If we are spiritual, then we know a great truth, that we are all one; that we are all things, all places, and all times, right now. Yet here we are having this experience of being in these bodies which for the most part feels separate. Here you are reading an article written by another you, experiencing yourself as other than me. Here I am communicating with myself through you. Yet the power of being present within this experience now, being grounded in this experience now, in our bodies now, allows us access to fully be with all that is. The earth, as a metaphor for our bodies, is a physical portal to connect with the divine that is us. When we can see the earth as an extension of our bodies, and see both as sacred and one, then we can better treat ourselves and others. Our reconnection with our own bodies and the body of our mother earth soothes us into an innate remembrance that we are connected to all that is. It's a felt-knowing, not a cognitive one. Just like the crying child lends the nervous system of their mother, we too borrow the calm nervous system of our great mother. When the nervous system is regulated and a state of calm is upon a person, then they are more easily able to make practical decisions and move more consciously. And so she grounds us metaphorically and heals us physically.

Grounding is a practical and physical activity that brings real-world benefits, even if you are not coming from a spiritual perspective. It exists on the metaphoric or ethereal plane overlaying and connected with the physical plane. It provides benefits from all directions and can be seen in multiple ways. Some techniques will work better for some people over others; you must find your resonance. It would be impossible for this article to be comprehensive, there are so many other ways of seeing and doing. May you forever allow yourself to expand and may this be but a small contribution. Happy grounding earth beings.

References:
Chevalier, G. et al. (2012) “Earthing: Health implications of reconnecting the human body to the Earth's surface electrons,” Journal of Environmental and Public Health, 2012, pp. 1–8. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/291541.
Leeming, D.A. and Leeming, M.A. (1995) A dictionary of creation myths. New York: Oxford University Press.