Getting Grounded, Staying Grounded
Grounding refers to being energetically connected to the earth. Like a lightening rod, proper grounding helps to run excess energies into the earth, enabling you to handle the diversity and abundance of energies running through you.
If you are very sensitive and open to experiencing the force of Shakti, learning how to ground is an essential survival skill. Proper grounding helps integrate the energies that meditation, yoga, and other types of healing release.
As Kundalini Shakti starts moving and opening up energetic blocks, the experience can be very unbalancing. This process of purification can be intense and unpleasant, and staying grounded will help ease some of the discomfort.
Grounding helps to move and clear energy more easily, and it creates better flow and communication between your physical body and your electromagnetic field. When grounded, you feel more stable because you are anchored to the earth. (Try doing standing yoga poses when you aren't grounded and you'll see what I mean!)
Grounding brings you into present time, and helps increase focus and clarity. It helps gather and integrate the energy that is essential to empowerment and manifesting what you want in your life. If you aren't grounded and fully embodying your lower chakras, you may not be able to "hold" the positive effects of energy healing.
Being "ungrounded" contributes to disembodiment (not feeling the full aliveness of your body) and/or dissociation (being cut off from your emotions). You may also feel dizzy, spacey, or light-headed from lack of grounding. I suggest reading Anodea Judith's book Wheels of Life and her chapter on the first chakra for a more extensive look at the subject of grounding.
What is a good way to ground effectively? For years I used the metaphor of tree roots in the grounding exercises that I gave my clients. While this imagery works for many, the roots just can't conduct all that energy--particularly if there is a lot of Shakti running through you. Imagine a pipe that is too small to carry a large volume of water.
What works much better than tree roots is a bigger grounding pole. Here is a simple grounding exercise borrowed from Jill Leigh of the Energy Healing Institute.
- Sit with both feet on the floor, uncrossed, hands in your lap, uncrossed as well. Come into the experience of your body. Feel yourself sitting, feel your feet on the floor, and engage the breath. Relax.
- Bring your attention to your feet. Imagine the foot chakras in the arches of your feet opening up.
- Move your attention to your root chakra (base of spine).
- Imagine a bright green ball of light spinning in your root chakra, the width of your hips.
- Drop this ball from your root chakra, imagining the ball creating a grounding pole as it moves down into the center of the earth. Your legs and feet are part of this grounding pole.
- Allow your energy to drop down, through the grounding pole, and feel the connection to earth's energy.
- Then come into your first and second chakras, and inhabit and enliven this space.
If you have difficulty staying grounded, practice this as many times a day as you can. You are teaching your body to do something unfamiliar, so be patient.
You may have physical sensations and emotions that are new. This is part of the process that grounding awakens as you become more rooted in your body. If you are feeling a tingling sensation in your lower chakras, you have it! This is your body enlivened. In time you will feel more aligned, balanced, and present. So have fun and enjoy getting grounded and staying grounded!
Be Well,
Rebecca
"Fall Light" image by Jennifer Hopkins (http://jenhopkins.com/about/artwork-2/) with a Creative Commons license.
