You probably love that feeling of expansion that comes with personal development. Meditation, contemplation, giving or receiving healing or any way of working on becoming your best self will have your energies expanding up to the skies. It feels great doesn’t it? You feel pumped and as though you can take on the world.
What you probably don’t enjoy so much is the returning contraction to coming back to earth and shrinking down to size. This is otherwise known as ‘grounding’. This means that your energy system gets tighter and contracts back to you.
Over the years I’ve heard people mention that grounding was important when doing energy work, but never really paid any attention to it not realising the importance of it. What I’ve found recently from Rose Rosetree’s book, Empowered by Empathy is that if you don’t choose consciously a way to ground yourself, then life will find a way to do it for you! This explains how ‘bad things happen to good people.’ There are pleasant ways and not so pleasant ways to do ground your energies – so make sure you get there first with a pleasant way!
Positive ways of grounding.
Connect with the earth. Simply standing barefoot on the earth – and focusing your energy into your body and down into the earth. So simple – and yet very enjoyable.
Cleaning. Now I’m normally fairly housework-shy! But every now and then I get a cleaning bug. I didn’t realise it, but this is my soul asking to be grounded after all the spiritual and personal development I have been doing. On Saturday I got the urge to scrub my kitchen clean, taking everything out of the cupboard, washing everything by hand. It took all day and was a real labour of love. By the end of the day I felt exhausted and yet exhilarated.
After all the cleaning, I went for a relaxing walk out in nature (again very grounding). I’m very lucky to live close to a beautiful river. I took this photo of a swan just as the sun was setting and everything around me was black and gold. I felt totally at peace and full of hope and joy. Which showed me that grounding your energies actually enhances your spirit.
Sex is a wonderful way to ground your energies- so long as it is with someone you are totally into. It won’t help if you don’t wholeheartedly enjoy the experience.
Exercise can help you ground yourself, so long as you maintain awareness with your body. I find that I get a bit spacey when I run – I feel myself tuning out of the experience (mainly because it hurts!). The way to use exercise to ground yourself is to be fully conscious and involved in the experience. I prefer dancing as a grounding exercise because that makes me feel very physically connected to my body which is grounding, as opposed to running which leaves me spaced out.
Giving and receiving massage. This will help you connect with your body. If you can’t find a willing partner to trade with, using self-massage techniques will help ground your energies.
Negative ways of grounding.
Weight-gain. When I read this is Rose Rosetree’s book, suddenly my ongoing struggle with my weight made sense! I was actively working on losing weight, but could feel a huge resistance in me to losing any! Rose explains that when you expand your energies, if you aren’t doing other grounding techniques your physical body will expand to pull you back to earth! I’m going to take this new knowledge and build it into my weight loss programme and make sure I am doing lots of positive grounding techniques every day. I’ll report back with my progress.
Smoking. Smoking will contract your aura. I know several people who aren’t at peace with their psychic or empathetic abilities who use smoking either consciously or unconsciously to dampen down their abilities. This is a temporary effect, so giving up smoking allows the aura to expand again.
Life bumps. You know that feeling when you are riding high, then life brings you back to earth with a bump! That’s grounding. If you can, make sure you bring yourself back to earth before life crash lands for you.
If you want to find out more ways to ground yourself, then I recommend chapter 13 in Rose Rose-tree’s book Empowered by Empathy. I heartily recommend Rose’s book if you think you are an empath and would like to find out more about how to use your gift. She estimates that 1 in 20 Americans are Empaths, and about 1 in 5 Japenese are. So it’s not for everyone.
Grounding techniques need to be done every day, particularly if you are working on your self improvement. They needn’t take a long time. Even just bringing your attention to your body and connecting in your imagination to the earth for a few seconds is beneficial.
If you haven’t been getting the results you want, or life has been a bit bumpy. Try adding some simply grounding techniques to your day and let me know how you get on.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent article, thankyou! I really got some good value out of it. Grounding is something that I really need to learn, and yea, I think this was why I got so fat before (and also why I’ve been losing weight in these last years as I’ve got better and better at dealing with reality).
I love sex and dancing, only I tend to get a bit shy when dancing. I wonder why… it’s not like I’m naked
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Glad you liked the article.
Maybe you should try dancing naked and see where that gets you!
The thing about grounding is that it isn’t a one-time only thing. We can’t say, ‘Oh I’ve done my grounding exercise, that’s it, all done’. We have to remember to do it several times EVERY day! Otherwise we’ll get grounded unpleasantly with a bump back to earth.
If you’re working with energy and healing others I think it is even more important to find ways of grounding we enjoy.