Grounding

They come for the readings, the spirit contact, the abilities they can feel waking up, and I hand them a running hose and tell them to paddle their feet in it. I have watched the look on a lot of faces over the years. Then the same people come back a few weeks later and tell me they are sleeping properly for the first time in years.

Why it comes first

Your house has an electrical earth. There is a wire running from your switchboard to a stake in the ground so that any dangerous current has somewhere safe to go instead of through you. Nobody thinks about it. It sits there doing its job.

Your body runs on the same principle. Everything you pick up in a day, the mood of the person at the checkout, the argument in the next office, the sheer noise of a shopping centre, builds up in you like a charge. If you have nowhere to send it, it stays. It accumulates. By Friday you are wrung out and cannot say why, and the people around you are wondering why you are so short with them.

Ground it and it drains away. That is the whole of it.

The more you open up, and you will open up if you meditate daily, the more you pick up. A sensitive person who has never learned to ground is a house with no earth wire and the current rising. The abilities arrive sooner than people expect, and without grounding they arrive as headaches, broken sleep and a feeling of floating a few centimetres above your own life.

The balance

We are spiritual beings choosing to be here to have a human experience. Part of the agreement you made with yourself before you came was to have the experience, in a body, on the ground, with the dishes still needing doing.

So there is a balance to find. If you put all of your attention on your higher self and none on grounding, your growth stalls. You get the floaty, spacey, slightly unwell feeling that spiritual people are famous for, and nothing you learn sticks because there is nothing to stick it to. If you put all of it on grounding and none on the higher self, you get the opposite problem, a very steady person who never goes anywhere.

Hold both and you are in the moment, present in your body, and centred whatever is going on around you. That is the best set of tools you can have when life throws something at you, and it will.

Water

The most effective method I have found is water. Being in it or near it.

For most of us that is limited by where we live. Few people have a river or an ocean within walking distance of the front door. So the next best thing is a running hose, or a shower.

The hose version is the one that makes people laugh, and I recommend it anyway. Stand on the lawn, turn the hose on, and paddle your bare feet through the running water for a few minutes. Feel it running off your feet and into the ground, and let anything heavy in you run off with it. It is also, and I say this as a grown man, a lot of fun.

The shower is the one you can do every day without anyone seeing you. Here is how I do it.

1. Let the water run from the top of your head down to your feet. The crown first, then the shoulders, then all the way down.
2. Close your eyes and put your attention in the water as it moves over your skin.
3. See everything you have picked up during the day loosening and running down with it. Off your head, down your back, down your legs, out through your feet and away down the drain.
4. Stay there a minute or two longer than you need to. The last minute is where most of the work happens.
5. Step out and notice how you feel. Lighter is the usual answer.

Do this every evening for a week and you will not need me to tell you it works.

Without water

You can ground very well without water, and some days there is no time for a shower.

Walk barefoot on grass. Walk barefoot on the sand at the beach. Walk in the bush, with one note of caution from someone who has done a lot of it: if the track is known for snakes, keep your shoes on. Grounding is meant to make you feel better.

Lie flat on the ground on your back, arms out, and let your whole weight rest into the earth for ten minutes. If you have the privacy, wear as little as you can get away with. Skin on earth is the strongest version there is.

Students of mine have found their own. One grounds by gardening with bare hands. One sits with her back against the same tree every morning before work. One swears by washing the dishes slowly by hand, which I suspect is partly an excuse, but it works for her and that is the only test that matters.

Daily

Find one that works for you and use it daily.

I said that in almost those words years ago and have not found a better way to say it. The method matters far less than the habit. Grounding once, after a terrible week, is like earthing a house once. It needs to be wired in.

Tie it to something you already do. The shower you already take. The walk to the letterbox, with your shoes off. Ten minutes on the grass while the kettle boils. Put it beside your thirty minutes of meditation, before or after, and the two hold each other up. The Thirty Minutes a Day page is where I set that up.

After a lifetime of learning and teaching I still practise the basics, and grounding is the most basic of them. It keeps you steady, and it cements everything else you build on top of it.

How you know it is working

You sleep. You stop needing two days to recover from a family gathering. Crowds wear you less. Your meditation goes deeper and gets there faster, because you are starting from a body instead of from a storm, and the Going Deeper page assumes you have this in place.

The real skill is noticing when you are not grounded. A buzz in the head. A feeling of being slightly behind your own eyes. Snapping at someone over nothing. Once you can catch that in the moment, you know what to do about it, and that knowing is worth more than any one method.

Where this leads

Grounding empties out what is not yours. The Earth Energy page in the Energy Work area is the other half of the same lesson, the earth giving back, and the same bare feet on the same grass do both at once.

Try the hose. Try the shower. Try the grass. Keep whichever one your body answers to, because it will answer, and it has always known how. All I am doing is reminding you.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.