Getting Grounded
June 16th 2017
Whenever I feel overwhelmed with my to-do list or with emotions I usually allow myself to ground in these three ways. We need grounding when we feel overwhelmed with our to-do lists and sometimes just with life in general. We get into this state when there’s been too much “busy-ness” and not enough relaxation and stillness. In the video below I share with you three ways in which I ground myself. Basically, ways in which I get out of my head and into my body.
This week I wanted to share with you what I do to feel grounded. I was asked this morning, what do you do to keep yourself grounded. You talk to a lot of people every week and they’re sharing their darkest moments with you, heavy emotions… What do you do to keep grounded?
1. Get lost in joy and creativity
Something that grounds me back into a sense of stillness is finding something that gives me joy that has nothing to do with anyone else and it’s almost like I’ve given myself a gift, I’ve taken care of myself. So it’s something that really makes me feel wonderful, just for the pure sake of feeling wonderful, and it’s got nothing to do with anyone else, so it’s not plugged in to anyone else. I’m in complete control over when, where, and how.
There’s a couple of things that I do to get me into that space. It’s doing things that give you joy basically. So I love making cards, like ‘happy birthday’ cards or ‘I love you’ cards or whatever, and I was always that kid that would collect things and then stick them together. So that sense of childlike wonder I keep alive by making cards for people. It’s a bit of a creative outlet. I can just put on some music, light some candles, have my cup of tea, and then just spend a couple of hours doing that. So it just helps me build my energy back up again, just connect to myself and feel very… I guess creative and feel very in-tune with myself. It’s a beautiful gift. It feels like I’ve done something kind to myself.
2. Move your body
The other thing that I do is I found something that feels great… for me, moving my body. So I’m not a runner, I am not a kickboxer, although I did that when I was young. It doesn’t interest me anymore. I’m not a gym fanatic at all, but it’s important to move our body for so many different reasons, just to be healthy, just to be strong, just to be flexible, but also the body holds a lot of emotions and the less we move the more heavier it can get.
There’s certain types of movements and exercises that help release emotions from the body, and there are certain places in the body that hold certain emotions. So if you want to do more research on it the Chinese system of health takes into account emotions and the impact emotions have on our health, so that’s one place to explore.
Another place to explore is Louise Hay’s book, ‘You Can Heal Your Life’. She’s got this amazing index at the back of the book where over years and years and years she noticed that people that had certain ailments and conditions and body pains would complain about the same stories or emotions that were happening in their life, so she linked these up. And there’s an index that you can search, you can search A for Acne or B for Bones and look at the emotions associated with those parts of the body.
Moving our body is quite an important thing. For me it’s yoga and Pilates. They’re very gentle, very like… for me, joyful ways of moving, and it takes me out of my mind and it grounds me in my body. So when we say I need grounding or I’m feeling ungrounded or unsettled, it’s really because we’re just caught up in our mind and all the thinking and overwhelming to-do lists that we have and we’re just trying to go (exhaling) breathe and ground ourselves so that we actually can bring our full self to the task at hand, whatever it is we need to do.
Yoga, Pilates, for me helps me move out of my mind and into my body and really connect in and just be present, and also what it does is it feels like… it is self-love but it feels like self-love. It feels like when you walk away from a yoga session or a gym session whatever it is that you do and you’ve gone for a run, you walk away and you feel like I’ve done something really good for myself. It feels like… I do love myself. I’ve done that for me to take care of myself.
3. Use the elements and natural environment
The third tip for grounding yourself is to use your environment to clear your mind, your space, your energy. So there’s two ways that come to mind. The first is… it’s called earthing. It sounds very hippie but it totally works. If you’ve watched Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts does this in the movie. She takes off her shoes and her socks and whatever, and walks on grass and she makes Richard Gere do it too. So if Julia does it, it’s worth doing.
What that does is it just grounds you. It literally grounds you. You’ve got a physical body but you’ve also got an energetic body, and the Earth is Yin energy and it pulls out the negativity from your system. So going for a walk in nature is great, going for a walk in nature barefoot is even better, because you’re actually connecting to the Earth and you’re becoming one with that energy field. You don’t have anything in between.
So, you’ll go for a ten-minute walk or just even just standing on grass, and you’ll feel, whether you notice it or not, your body will feel relaxed. It’ll sink in, consciously allow your body… allow yourself to sink into your body so that your mind clears, and you can just do that daily, as a plug-in. So we all recharge our phones. We don’t expect them just to keep going without recharging them. Your body is the same. Your mind is the same. You need to reboot and recharge.
Another way to do that, to clear the energy, is when you’re having a shower just imagine you’re washing away all the stress, you’re washing away all the anger, the sadness, whatever it is that you feel is stuck or that you’re holding on to and you can just imagine it going down the drain. Just clean… cleaning from the inside. So water helps as well… So just using the environment to help clear your energy.
Those are my three tips for grounding. Grounding is when you feel completely unsettled, frazzled, overwhelmed, too many things to do, caught up in the ‘doing’ of life, and grounding is a practice to come back into being, come back into stillness, come back into spaciousness.
The first one was to do something that gives you joy that’s not plugged in to anyone else. And think about what you used to do as a kid, and if you can recreate that because you’ll just feel the sense of aliveness and curiosity and creativity.
The second thing was to move your body in a way that feels like self-love and not punishment. For me it’s yoga. For you it could be running, it could be a salsa-dancing class, whatever works for you.
And three, use the environment to clear your energy to help you get out of your head and into your body and present so that you can reboot and recharge just like we do with our phones, and then you can move back into doing an action with a renewed sense of energy and with your full self, so you’re not feeling drained and tired but you’re feeling like you can bring your whole self to the tasks at hand.
I hope those tips were useful. If you found them useful please share with me in the comments below what you do to ground, what works for you, what doesn’t. Everyone is different. You’ll find the thing that works for you. And so whenever you’re feeling just a sense of overwhelm coming or a sense of stress coming, you can just do these things to ground and to come back into the present moment and to release any kind of stress around living, around life. We don’t have to live in stress.
Sharanya
xx