Grounding

OVERVIEW

Grounding is a technique used to connect with the earth. When you feel scattered, lack focus, feel emotionally overwhelmed, or just spaced out grounding is an easy method to center yourself. The technique of grounding described below helps us to connect with the earth and makes us stable and strong within. This method can be used anytime, anywhere to soothe, strengthen, and nourish us. Grounding is also used at the beginning of a meditation session and helps place you in the here and now.

CORD METHOD

Before beginning the meditation practice it is very important to center and ground ourselves deep within the earth. Imagine a cord or root system extending downward from the base of your spine and sinking deep within the earth. The roots extend downward as well as spreading outward. This anchors us to the planet, acts as a center of strength within us, and creates a solid foundation to work from. Grounding provides us a channel through which energies flow. Excess energies build up during the meditation may be safely channeled downwards through this pathway to provide healing energies to the earth. You may also draw upon earth's vitality by raising energy upward from the center of the earth through the cord/root system to nourish and replenish yourself.

TREE METHOD

Remain in your relaxed position and imagine that you are a tree. Your head is the top of the tree with its branches and leaves. Your torso is the tree trunk. Feel how stable and sturdy it is, how it supports your head - the branches and leaves. Now imagine at the base of your spine roots extending downward into the earth. They are mighty roots, thick and very long. They grow deep into the ground to seek nourishment from Mother Earth. The earth is warm and moist and full of minerals and other life giving properties. Your roots keep growing downward - deeper and deeper - past underground rivers and various layers of rock, mud, and clay. Deep into the womb of the earth…

For it is here in the depths of the earth that your roots find nourishment. Absorb these nourishing healing energies into your root system - feed yourself - then feel these energies rise up through your roots, higher and higher - past the various layers of rock, mud, and clay, past the underground rivers - higher and higher. Your roots are taking the nourishing energies up to your trunk, your torso, and continuing upward to your branches and leaves - feeding you, nourishing you, calming and soothing you….

FIRST NATIONS

First Nations people have a wonderful relationship with Mother Earth - when they are very sad, drained, or disillusioned, they go off into the forrest and dig a shallow hole in the ground, the length of their body. They lie face down in the shallow hole with their back to the sky and they weep. They give all their pain and sorrow to the earth, knowing that she can absorb it all into her body. When they have emptied their sorrow they then draw upward energies from deep within the earth and absorb these positive energies into their body . They feed from the Mother and they are nourished.