Connecting to your life force: The importance of grounding for the modern person
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”.
-Simone Weill
Grounding is one of the most important and deeply helpful actions that we can do to take care of our nervous systems, our hearts, and our energy body as we navigate our modern world. Having a grounded connection with the Earth creates protection, stability and a sense of holding that has been proven to help ease inflammation and stress, increase blood flow and ease, and nourishes well-being in the body.
In my clinical work, it has become clear to me that if people are not grounded in their body, if they do not have a grounding cord or system of support and connection to the Earth in place, then they do not feel safe in their bodies. This lack of support and stability greatly limits how much healing work we can do. Without that grounded connection, people’s bodies and spirits are usually unable to open and therefore to heal fully, because they just don’t feel connected to healthy resource or safety enough to do so. It is as if the wisdom of the body knows that it cannot run the voltage of healing and change without having a way to ground out what is ready to release.
What is Grounding?
Just like larger electrical machinery needs a grounding connection so that it does not combust in an electrical surge, human beings also have their own electromagnetic current 1 that is greatly benefited and regulated by connecting into the Earth’s natural electric field. Our body functions optimally when we have a negative ionic charge coming from below us, and a positive ionic charge from above. When we are grounded in the Earth this energy flow naturally starts to happen.
I often teach my students to visualize their grounding cord, and then allow any and all energy that no longer serves or does not belong to them to release down and out, into the Earth. To continue to hold all of that energy is most likely going to fry us out, stress us out, and place our nervous systems in overdrive. The invitation is to let it go, and see what is possible next.
The most direct way I have found to ground, and that I teach to my students and patients, is to feel all the points of contact your body is making with the Earth, and then drop a grounding cord. There are many ways to feel/sense/know that this is happening and to visualize it. It can be helpful to visualize a hoop skirt that goes around your waist and drops wide and rooted into the core of the Earth, with your central grounding cord dropping down the middle of it. I also have them visualize that their two sit bones and tailbone are like a three-prong socket, connecting in and dropping down into the core of the Earth where there is a spot with their name on it in present time.
Other visualizations are to imagine you are sitting on a wide base pyramid, with its energetic tip coming up into your navel, or that a column of light is dropping down from your tailbone, or that you have a tail that wraps around the center of the earth. The list of options is long, and I encourage you to trust what your own wisdom shows to you and give it a try.
Unpacking the Importance of Grounding
Over the years I have found that the more I ground, the more connected I can stay to the higher, spiritual realms and to the light and wisdom of my own heart. The both/and reality and the paradox of life is that the more rooted we are, the freer we feel to open up and live fully and receive the powerful but essential voltage of our own spirit.
I ground before I start working with each of my patients, I ground before challenging phone calls and before community engagements, I ground when I am carrying agitation or stress and know that it needs to be released, and I ground when I am meditating and opening my system up to Divine guidance and support.
When Tibetan teachers came to the West and started to work with their Western students, they were shocked at the level of shame and self doubt that was common in these students. They started to realize that they first needed to build up a healthy form of self in their students, before the teachings of emptiness and selflessness could be offered to open them up to something larger than themselves. Why was this phenomenon so strikingly apparent in Western students, in a way not commonly found in the East? There are many dynamics to this, including the shame, perfectionism, and left brain dominant drive so prevalent in Western culture, as well as patriarchy, industrialization and materialism. All of these can lead to what one of my teachers called “Floating Head Syndrome”; a complete lack of a rooted and nourishing connection with the Earth in Western people.
The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” I have found this to be so true. To ground our energy is to be held by something wise, well, ever-present and nourishing. To be held exactly as we are in this moment, rooted in the present moment, gives us the capacity to heal and receive support at a profound level.
Building A Lifelong Practice
I have been teaching grounding practices to my patients and students for 15 years, as well as working with the grounding connection through my own meditation practice for decades. In my work as a medical intuitive, I can see that having a grounded connection to the Earth and to our bodies is imperative if we are going to be able to do deep healing work. I am still amazed at its benefits, and how easy it is to forget to utilize it.
I grew up in a highly religious extended family, as well as with a black sheep spiritual mother, and all of them taught me, both implicitly and explicitly, to avoid the density, sensuality and earthy base of the body. Something wise inside of me, although unconscious to me, knew that I needed to heal this broken connection. It is still amazing to me that I could spend so many years dancing at a semi-professional level and still not be in my body. Or that I could meditate intensively in India and Nepal for 2 years, and still not be in my body. I could utilize my body, and even develop a fairly high degree of mindfulness, and still not be very present in my soma. Looking back, I realize that I had internalized the “up and out” approach to spirituality, that the body was but a dense and lustful distraction from the higher realms of spirituality and realization.
I am so grateful that life has continued to show me otherwise.
Why Do We Avoid Grounding?
In order to be fully grounded, we have to be in connection with our whole body, especially with our lower body, our lower chakras, and the energy they manage for us. We have to be willing to flow and heal in these areas, and to honor and acknowledge what they contain.
For myself, my lower chakras and lower body were functioning at a high level to manage a lot of buried pain, trauma and confusion, and it worked quite well for that survival adaptation I took on to just rise above, float around, and spiritualize everything. To be human is to be messy and to feel, and parts of me wanted nothing to do with that. Things were already messy enough inside of me and in my family. I have deep compassion and understanding of why I was not grounded, and why others avoid it as well. But over time I became clear on what was being lost in my attempt to transcend, avoid and just keep trying to be perfect. I was not able to be real, supported, held or strong enough to be with my own experience fully.
I sometimes get the image that someone who is not grounded or embodied is sitting on top of their car, versus actually sitting inside their car, safe and held with their seat belt. When we “sit on top of the car” of our body, instead of taking up residence in it, the body tracks the ungrounded lack of support and stability, and our minds and hearts speed up to compensate, leading to inflammation, anxiety or stress. When we are not grounded we also tend to take on the energies and beliefs of others, because we are not home to tend to what does and does not get absorbed from others and from culture. This can be a very big deal when it comes to having energy and clarity.
I have seen many people with an aversion to grounding, especially empathic or spiritually oriented people, and their reasons make sense when you see the compensation behind it. I see that to be grounded would feel like they are stuck here, and that pervasive feeling that they may be lost here on Earth would come true. Or that there is so much buried or unfelt pain and trauma in their lower body that to allow the healing energy of the Earth to move through there could bring up too much for them. Or perhaps it is just that common spiritual belief that the body is bad, the Earth is too dense, and we need to float away as soon as possible to the only place true spirituality can abide: up and out.
I have come to understand, respect and have great compassion for the reasons why we don’t orient to grounding in this culture. To ground is to also open up our capacity to feel, which is not something we were taught to do in a healthy or supported way. We have been generally taught to avoid anything uncomfortable or any emotion that is not considered positive, and therefore we run from vast swaths of our experience. These often end up buried in the body.
Grounding & Being Present
The truth that has been shown to me again and again in my work is that to be here, on Earth, in a human body, ungrounded and not connected to the Earth, is a draining and painful way to live. It means living with an under-resourced, on-edge nervous system, and an overwhelming sense of aloneness and instability.
When we allow ourselves to fully arrive and to ground in the body, we are present. And as all the great sages say in their thousand different ways, to be present is the greatest agent for change and possibility. We only have power in the present moment, and when we are grounding and in the sensations of our body we are present. So isn’t that a great place to start?
When a piece of machinery receives a surge, it is immediately released out of the grounded connection that we use in electrical work. Humans can do the same by grounding their energy down when they receive the surges of emotions, stress and relational intensity that are part of being human and the path of emotional healing. When we are rooted into our body and the earth, it happily composts for us all that does not serve or need to stay in our bodies as we experience the fullness of our life.
What the Presence of Grounding Feels Like
To connect into something so much larger and loving and powerful than ourselves, the Earth’s biomagnetic resonance, that holds us and nourishes our life here, is one of the most healing things I have found. The nervous system starts to relax almost immediately when we ground and bring our awareness fully into our body, and then true healing and energetic rebalancing can really start. We can let go of who we were and who we wish we could be, and we arrive exactly as we are, held and supported. This practice builds that soul esteem that the Tibetan teachers were noticing profoundly lacking in their ungrounded, self-shaming Western students.
We all need healing and support. Life is hectic and full, relationships can be confusing and unsettling, and we are told by most systems and hierarchical religions that we must strive our whole life to get to enough.
Being held by the Earth and grounded in our center in this present moment of our life offers us so much possibility to actually experience the truth of our life, which is that we are enough, that it is safe to be present and well in our body, and that our guidance and life force can be most felt and utilized when we are present and resourced enough to hear it.
I invite you to ground once today, or a thousand times today, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are as you do it. Allow life to hold and love you as you go about your day and offer your work and kindness in the world, and see whether things flow more smoothly, you feel more energized, and more self-connected. You are enough, and you can stop right now and uplift yourself, by rooting down.
1. G.]. Washnis, & R. Z. Hricak, Discovery of Magnetic Health (Nova Publishing Company, Rockville, MD, 1993)
