What is grounding?
Grounding is connecting your energy to the natural energy field of the Earth. When you don’t feel grounded, you can feel spacey, dizzy, off-balance, shaky, dazed. Things may have a quality of being unreal. When you’re grounded, you live in the present moment, connected in with your physical body and the energy around you.
We intuitively can tell if someone is grounded or not. When they’re not, we call might them ditzy, head-in-the-clouds or air-headed. Grounded people are connected with reality.
Why grounding is important
Grounding anchors us in the physical world in which we live, while allowing us to safely travel and experience the spiritual and astral worlds. It also helps us get rid of energy that isn’t ours and that can be harmful to us if we take it in as our own energy.
So, when you feel like your energy is off-kilter and you feel out of sorts, ground yourself. Here are some specific grounding exercises you can do and some general ways you can become more grounded in day-to-day life.
Grounding exercises
Any of these three exercises can help you feel more grounded and experience an easy flow of energy through your body.
- Place your feet on the ground and either stand or sit tall in your seat, with your back straight and your sitz bones making contact with the seat. Visualize your crown extending to the sky, like branches of a tree, and roots coming out from the soles of your feet and penetrating deep into the earth.
- While standing or seated, position your feet at a 45-degree angle outward, with your knees and legs opening outward from your hips. Visualize a key or knob on the soles of your feet. (I think of bicycle shoes that lock into the bike pedals.)Now swivel your feet so they’re parallel to each other while imagining they’re locking into the Earth, connecting and grounding you.
You can do this with or without shoes, it doesn’t matter. You can even do it just with the intent that you are grounding down, but the small motion can help make it seem more real. - Visualize white light entering the crown of your head and traveling down your chakras, lighting and energizing each one in turn.First your third eye becoming a brilliant purple, then your throat becoming bright blue, your heart turning and emerald green, your solar plexus radiating bright yellow, your navel glowing orange and your root chakra burning a deep red. From your root chakra, see a golden rope of light connecting you to the Earth.
How to be more grounded on a daily basis
Breathe. Spend a few minutes a day (even 2-3 minutes makes a difference) breathing deeply, all the way deep into your belly. Inhale. Exhale. Slow and easy.
Spend time in nature. Whatever element of nature you most connect with – the woods, the ocean, the dessert, the mountains – spend time there. I often recommend people go for walks in the woods and connect with the energy of the trees. Trees are deeply rooted in the earth and reach up toward the sky, affording them an excellent flow of energy and grounding.
Take Epsom salt baths. Or use sea salt, Hawaiian salt or Himalayan salt. Add about a cup to your bath water and relax, letting the water soothe away your flighty energy and connect you to the present. If you can’t take a bath, or don’t like them, use a salt scrub in the shower.
Exercise. Connecting with your physical body through whatever exercise you choose is grounding. It makes you pay attention to what’s going on in the here and now, plus it has all sorts of emotional, physiological and mental benefits. It doesn’t matter what the exercise is, as long as it uses your body – walking, yoga, running, kayaking, bicycling, whatever you like.
Eat well. Eat real foods that come from ingredients you can recognize (whole foods). Remove processed foods from your diet. Nourishing your body is extremely important in living a grounded, well-balanced life. Some people advise eating root vegetables, as they come from the Earth. Other says that meat is very grounding (but you shouldn’t eat it before meditation, mediumship or healing work). I say: figure out what works for you and do that. I happen to need a fair amount of protein in my diet, which I’m not good at getting from a vegetarian diet. However, I don’t like to eat a lot of meat. And I try not to eat too many carbs. Which means I get to eat a lot of veggies, plus some meat or fish, plus some carbs. And occasionally desert. For me, it’s about eating real, whole foods, cooked from scratch and finding balance. Figure out what works for you.
Use crystals and stones. Dense, hard minerals help to ground and transmit energy. Hematite is an excellent grounding stone. It’s made of iron oxide and used to provide protection, to stimulate the mind and to ground out energy. Varieties of hematite include magnetite, specularite and iron rose. Other grounding stones are blue or black kyanite, black tourmaline and obsidian.