A few brief thoughts on “grounding.”

If you’re energetically aware or sensitive, chances are the term “grounding,” isn’t new to you. It’s often instructed as sending your energy into the ground to find more calm, peace, trust that the earth can hold you and support you. There’s this misguided notion that one can just send their energy down into the earth, and Voila! They’re grounded. 

But do you ever feel like your body is a human pinball machine? You’ll attempt to bring your energy into your lower body and let it fall into the floor, only for it to spring right back up? “Grounding” is not always a given. There are tons of different reasons why anyone might feel ungrounded, but sometimes there are very real energetic blockages that keep our energy from even being able to get to the ground. It can make make us feel like we’re “bad” at grounding, when really it’s just not energetically possible at that moment. You can send your energy down, but if there’s any kind of barrier there, the only place it has to go is back up (this could feel like a chest tightened with anxiety or heightened mental energy with racing thoughts, for example.) Various forms of energetic work can tend to those blockages which keep us from allowing our energy flow fluidly towards the ground.

I have to say, for the record, that I don’t really love the term “grounding.” To make it a verb implies that it’s an action, when it’s very much a passive event. To really feel grounded, one must allow the ground to hold them, one must yield into it. When we say “the ground,” we could mean the earth, as in Mother Earth, or we could be thinking more metaphorically as just a sense of basic trust in life - “the ground” of existence from which all things emerge and that which carries us and supports us through life.

Needless to say, this sense of basic Trust in life isn't easy to come by these days. Much of life is a giant question mark surrounded by threatening violence from structures and systems which claim to be in place to support us. Many do not feel, sense, or trust that support. There is a sense of “groundlessness” and people are feeling upended and looking for somewhere to land. So to don’t be hard on yourself if you’re having trouble feeling grounded no matter what you do - there’s nothing wrong with you, you are not “bad” at grounding, and it is perfectly understandable to feel that way right now. You may just need to think about it a different way, or get some help with some energy work.

It is definitely important to have a personal tool belt with techniques we use to help self-regulate, but we can’t do everything alone. And often, our inability to yield into the ground comes from a very real rupture in our ability to trust life because our caregivers didn’t always take care of us. Allowing a skilled, trained, and compassionate practitioner to provide a container and an experience where one CAN yield into the ground, can reintroduce that type of experience and help your system remember what it is to feel grounded.