What is Grounding and Do We Even Need It?

What is grounding and do you even need it? 

Have you been losing your keys? Double-booking appointments? Feeling anxious? 

These are all symptoms of being energetically ungrounded. Join me for this week's episode as I walk you through the process of grounding and how to remedy feeling scattered by sharing personal anecdotes and insights into how grounding has transformed my own life and guidance for integrating this practice into your daily routine.

Grounding, or earthing, is the simple act of connecting with the Earth's energy to realign our minds, bodies, and spirits. I explain that grounding is the process of connecting with the earth's energy and neutralizing our energetic system. I explore both physical grounding, such as walking barefoot on the earth, and spiritual grounding, which involves bringing presence into the body through visualization and energy connection. I guide you though my daily meditation to teach you how to ground to reduce anxiety, increase presence, and maintain a balanced energetic state.

Keywords: grounding, energy, well-being, physical grounding, spiritual grounding, presence, meditation, anxiety

 

Takeaways

• Grounding is the process of connecting with the earth's energy and neutralizing our energetic system.
• Physical grounding involves activities like walking barefoot on the earth, hugging trees, or spending time at the beach.
• Spiritual grounding is about bringing presence into the body through visualization and energy connection.
• Grounding can reduce anxiety, increase presence, and maintain a balanced energetic state.
• Practicing grounding regularly can have a positive impact on overall well-being and energy levels.

 

Chapters

(approx time stamps)

00:00Introduction and Overview

02:02The Importance of Grounding

06:12Physical Grounding

10:14Spiritual Grounding

22:48The Power of Grounding Practices

26:58Personal Stories and Insights

34:09Incorporating Grounding into Daily Life

36:47Conclusion and Call to Action

 

Links:

4:00- US Electric Grounding Article

5:30- GRACE Technique- https://youtu.be/02p-lzCg4V8?si=_lcj1PiERAlf2QKd

8:30- The Earthing Movie- The Earthing Movie: The Remarkable Science of Grounding (full documentary) (youtube.com)

9:30- Tibetan Buddhist Mandalas- https://youtu.be/WBrYUlOYK0U?si=YnNjwvg8gfa4lJvf

15:00- 1 to 1 Coaching with me! Coaching — Love. Heal. Thrive. TM (lovehealthrive.com)

Transcript

Erin (00:03)

 

Welcome to the Love Heal Thrive podcast where you learn to love yourself enough to heal and heal yourself enough to thrive so that you can live a life that feels whole and complete, untriggered and unaffected by the people, places and emotions that surround you.

 

I'm your host, Erin Gray. I'm a hypnotherapist, Reiki master, medium certified meditation and Enneagram coach, and simply someone who has experienced and seen energy and energy patterns her whole entire life. And it's been hard, but it doesn't have to be that way. I want to help you learn how to build an empowering life that turns your energy sensitivity into your superpower. I want you to learn how to own every room you walk into with magnetic amazing energy and experience the powerful satisfying life that comes with it. Each week I will offer you helpful tools and insight from my own journey as well as bring in amazing and experienced guests that will help you on your journey by sharing their story and insight. Together we will learn how to love ourselves enough to heal and heal ourselves enough to thrive. I'm so happy you're here. Let's get started.

 

I am so happy you are here. Happy Monday. I if you were listening on Mondays when I originally dropped, I hope so. I hope you are here and starting your week off with me. If not, come and join us on Mondays. But today we are talking about one of the most important topics, I think. Although maybe I think every week is important, but today we are talking about the importance of grounding. And we're going to talk about what is grounding and if we even need it. And I think this, if we even need it, might become a series for me because I did the energy screen, what is an energy screen and do we even need it? And now it is what is grounding and do we even need it? So we'll see what follows with the do we even need it series, but I am liking that. Anyway, today though, we are diving into energetic grounding and what that means, what that looks like, what it looks like when we're not grounded and how to ground. So have you been losing your keys? Have you been double booking your appointments? Have you been forgetting what you're saying mid -sentence? Do you walk into a room scattered? Hot mess, hot mess, whirlwind.

 

This is what it looks like when our energy is ungrounded.

 

And I was thinking about that as I was thinking about putting together this episode. What does actual physical electricity look like when it's ungrounded? And I thought to myself, wow, electrical cords would look frazzled at the end, possibly one of many things that could happen, but it would look frazzled at the end of the cord.

 

And I would say that that's how we look when we are ungrounded as well. We look scattered, we look frazzled so we can have that image in our mind of what ungroundedness looks like. It looks like that end of the frayed electrical cord when your phone cord has been used too many times and it has now come apart. That frazzled look. However, when we are grounded,

 

We are connected, protected and safe, much like we are when we are energetically grounded within our home. So I decided to look up on US electric .com about ungrounded outlets. And I thought this was so fascinating because I think what we can say to the outlets, we can also say to ourselves when we are ungrounded. Ungrounded outlets. And I'll include this link down below if you want to get your electricity insight on. Ungrounded outlets will be unable to compensate for electricity overloads and cannot send current to the ground safely. What? Look at that in terms of when we have too much energy or emotion coming at us, we are not able to compensate for someone else's overload of energy or emotion and we don't know how to get rid of it safely.

 

So then we react or we blow up or we become depressed or exhausted. None of which help us attract the highest vibe life possible. Next. So the current will search for another way to find grounding by taking the shortest, easiest route possible, which could be through your hand at the plug, giving you an electric shock or through frazzled wiring or causing a fire.

 

But I thought that this was very interesting. It has to take the shortest and easiest route possible. So that looks like the energetic emotional explosion, or it looks like the distancing or the cutting off, all of which are low vibe. However, when we walk through life, energetically and spiritually grounded, we can remain connected. We can remain present with our own emotions as well as other people's emotions and know how to safely distribute that emotion and that energy by using the grace technique, which I'll include a link down below. But we have talked about grounding our energy, retracting our aura, attaching to the center of the earth covering with our energetic screen of choice and then emptying that bowl, allowing, not allowing someone else's content to affect us. We grace ourselves. But the first that G in grace is ground. We always begin by grounding. And when we walk through our life grounded and connected to the divine, we are present and we can safely manage emotional and energetic overloads by our surroundings. We are no longer triggered by the people around us.

 

We live in a world that ungrounds us every moment of every day. There is so much toxic news, toxic commercials, toxic people around us. And if you're finding that, think about your own toxic thoughts or emotions because like attracts like and what we pay attention to, we draw in.

So do you need to take a moment and not pay as close of attention to all those things?

But as a society, our children and ourselves, we are spending more time inside. Children are not playing in the dirt as much. They're not climbing trees as much. We're not playing in the dirt or climbing trees as much.

 

This is a physical way for our bodies to be grounded.

 

scientifically grounding is the exchange of electrons between the earth and our body. The sun releases electrons into the ionosphere, a layer of the atmosphere approximately 50 to 400 miles away. The sun's rays are so powerful that they split the molecules into a negative charge and a positive charge. The positive charge remains in the ionosphere while the negative charge

 

collects and then ultimately leaves the ionosphere and hits the earth and disperses that negative energy onto the earth's surface through lightning. Then the super magical thing happens. Those free electrons are absorbed into the body when we walk around on the earth and it neutralizes the free radicals in the body when we stand on the earth, when we...

 

play in the dirt, when we climb trees, when we sit up against a tree, when we hug a tree, when we walk along the beach, when we immerse ourselves in nature, this automatically happens and it can happen instantaneously.

 

the free radicals that have built up in the body pair with these negative electrons and allow your ultimate state to be neutralized and balanced.

 

This lowers the inflammation within the body. It improves your sleep and it shifts your autonomic nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance.

 

There is an incredible movie. I'll include a link down below. It's free. Bye.

 

called the Earthing Movie that details this process and shares perspectives from all of the industry's experts, including Clint Ober, who was the pioneer of this movement.

 

But how much time are you spending outside? How much time are your kids spending outside? Can you just sit out and enjoy your morning coffee with your feet on the ground? You know, when I was a little girl next to our house on the side of the house, there were these little cement rounds. Very 1970s. The little pebbles, right? That had like little.

 

circles with the little cemented pebbles inside of them. But I every day would make pizza pies with my little pizza pie station. So I would collect rocks and leaves and grass that was my cheese and appropriate rocks that were the perfect round size to be my pepperoni. And all of nature I would gather to be my ingredients to create these pizza pies every single day.

 

I made lots of different designs and then ultimately it would teach me non -attachment because each one of my ingredients would be either scooped up by birds throughout the night or the wind would blow it away. So by morning all of my pizza pies had disappeared.

 

Have you ever seen those beautiful sand mandalas? I'll include a link down below to one that they are created by the Tibetan Buddhist monks and they create these beautiful, intricate sand masterpieces that are so detailed, so beautiful on their own pizza pie, on their own cement, maybe they're wood or cement, but it is these incredible.

 

incredibly intricate sand masterpieces. And then when it is complete, they ceremoniously dismantle them to depict and symbolize our impermanence here and that we can practice non -attachment to, we can create beautiful things, but they don't need to stay that we ourselves grow and change because we have created.

 

that masterpiece, not because that masterpiece has to stick around or stay, but we ourselves have changed because of it. What in your life have you changed exponentially because you created, but maybe exists, maybe doesn't. But when we cling to it's non -existence that can lower our energetic vibration, when we recognize that we ourselves have grown and changed.

 

we can know it has served its purpose in the sole fact that you have shifted and changed non -attachment. And we'll probably come back to that on another podcast episode. But today we are diving into grounding as I took my pause on the beautiful Tibetan monk, Tibetan Buddhist monk sand masterpiece. Okay. So back to free radicals.

 

Back to neutralizing the body, back to the earthy movie. Have you ever noticed how relaxed you are after spending a day at the beach? You're calm and peaceful. This is because you are so grounded. You are energetically grounded physically. Your body physically does this without you even trying. That is how beautiful and amazing nature is. We, we actually had a hail storm this past week.

 

And I went out and caught some hail just to eat it. And I was so amazed. Every single one of those pieces of hail were these perfect spheres. It was incredible to me. And I just was in true awe of just how incredible nature is. And this is just one more way that nature is so incredible. When we work in conjunction with nature and mama earth.

 

She wants to neutralize your free radicals. She wants to reduce your inflammation. She wants to make you grounded, present, and healthy. You can do this through grounding.

 

So we can use this technique energetically and spiritually. So we can physically ground by walking through mud, putting our feet on the grass, leaning up against a tree, hugging a tree, spending time at the beach, allowing the physical earth to actually touch our body. But we can also do this spiritually. And it has a...

 

a very similar energetic effect. In fact,

 

I came to know this. I came to know that I didn't need ground to ground in the most frightening way. Actually. We were in Hawaii and my daughters were out snorkeling and they're like, Oh, there's a turtle. There's a turtle. So I grabbed my snorkel and I ran through the water, jumped out, swam out just so I could see the turtles are last day of vacation. And.

 

I hadn't seen the turtle yet and I really wanted to see him. But when I got out there...

 

I had realized that there was a hole in my snorkel and I couldn't breathe and I panicked and I was hundreds of feet away from.

 

shoreline and I panicked and my, my daughter said to me, mama, why you look like you have ants in your pants? And so I waved to my husband who grabbed the boogie board and headed his way out to me.

 

And I have trained my mindset so much so that here I was.

 

100 feet from the bottom of the ocean.

 

floating in the water and I grounded my energy. And in that moment, my panic stopped. My anxiety stopped. I certainly got out of the water as soon as my husband got to me with the boogie board, but I didn't.

 

but I didn't drown. I didn't even go underwater. I calmed myself immediately in that moment by grounding my energy, by not even touching the water, by not even touching the ground.

 

I mean, a case could be made possibly that there was sea water and there's sea and sand in the water. So that could ultimately be a little more grounding as well.

 

but my feet were not on the ground. So here is the message, but I do this in airplanes too. And certainly I am so far from the ground in that moment too. I want you to begin to incorporate this energetic grounding into your life every single day and watch how much your anxiety decreases. Watch how much more present you are in your life.

 

So we can probably agree that we need physical grounding based off of all of this. As we reflect on our question before we move on, what is grounding and do we even need it?

 

but we can understand grounding as a means to neutralize our energetic system and bring presence into the body.

 

And do we even need it? That is for you to determine and discern for yourself as we move through the episode.

 

We will dive more into spiritual grounding in just a moment, right after that turtle. Now that we've shared that turtle story, we will come back to spiritual grounding in just a moment, right after this message.

 

One -to -one coaching is a fantastic way to understand where your energetic patterns might be stagnant around health, relationships, or money. Once you clear the stagnant energy, life begins to become abundant, satisfying, and rich in every sense of the word. I would love to dive into your life patterns with you. If you'd like to learn more, click the link down below. Now, back to our show.

 

What is grounding and do we even need it? Part two, we have covered physical grounding. Now let's move on to spiritual grounding. Spiritual grounding is bringing presence into the body. It is energetically drawing mama earth's energy up through visualization and subtle body energy connection.

 

It is at the core of mindfulness and allows us to be present with ourselves first.

 

This is such a revealing grounding story on the importance of grounding and why we need to do this. So it was about 10 years ago and I had just started my speaking career and a friend of mine connected me to the head person at her company that I really wanted to speak at. So I was super excited and we had a great first conversation and he said, great, awesome. We have an author coming on Wednesday.

 

Why don't you come and watch the speaker and then we can meet for lunch afterwards. It'll be amazing. I said, great. That sounds awesome. Let me write down the title of the book so I can get it and read it. And I wrote it down on Thursday on my calendar. So I went through my days. I went through reading and cramming this book, which if you've been listening, you know, I'm an audible girl, but this was.

 

predated when audible was a really big thing and so I had to actually read with my eyeballs really fast I read through the whole entire book I was all prepared Thursday morning and sent an email to confirm Thursday morning And if you're listening closely to my story you will have heard When was that actual meeting? Yep So the meeting had been on Wednesday, but I had written it down on my calendar on Thursday and so

 

Thursday morning, I sent an email so excited. I've read the book. I can't wait to meet with you. And he wrote back and said, you were a no show. He wrote back and said, I wondered why you were a no show.

 

No show. If you know me, I am so full of integrity and being there for people and to be called a no show was just gutting to me. And I was, I was actually a no show, but it was more because at that point in time, my energy was completely ungrounded. I was so excited. I had so much energy. I could not handle the emotional and energetic outpouring from the outside because my insides were not grounded just like we discussed at the beginning.

 

My ungrounded system was unable to compensate for the emotional and electrical overload that I received by being invited into this dream meeting because I was ungrounded.

 

So he was so kind and so nice to still meet with me and we got to have a wonderful conversation and connect. But it was in that moment that I realized how important it was. And I was teaching this. I was teaching this at the time. However, we're going to cover off on a few things of what I do differently now that has.

 

upleveled my grounding practice compared to what it was before. So often you will hear teachers talk about grounding from the feet. You ground your energy and this does make a difference. This does shift your energy and it helps connect you to the earth, into the center of the earth. However, what I have found through

 

my love affair with the chakra system is that our root chakra located within our pelvic floor, their perineum. Here, this energy is the energy that grounds us. This is the energy that brings presence into our life. And in fact, as you will hear in a couple episodes, our organ of action of the

 

As you will find out, as you will learn in a few episodes, as we dive into our organs of action, the feet are actually connected to the solar plexus, to our ego, as opposed to our root chakra that grounds us and brings us into our physical body. So bringing attention first to the pelvic floor, the base of our spine, our perineum.

 

And then drawing energy from there down into the center of the earth allows your energetic body to become so powerfully grounded and connected. I once had a client who came in so frazzled. Her electrical cords were so frazzled and just all over the place. And I, I then asked, I said, well, are you...

 

following your grounding practice? Cause I saw her regularly. And so she knew to practice her grounding. And she said, yes, every single morning I'm grounding. And I had just the intuitive hit to ask, where are you grounding from? And she said, from my feet, of course. And so then I taught her about grounding from her pelvic floor instead, and drawing that route down into the center of the earth. And I am telling you, you cannot make this up.

 

She came back the next month and her energy was so grounded, so present, so calm, so unfrazzled. It was incredible. It was absolutely incredible. So if you have a moment, I invite you to join me in this quick visualization. If you're driving or doing something unsafe, please don't do this. Come back, hit pause and come back. But if you were able to take...

 

a few quick minutes with me, I invite you to close your eyes, bringing your attention down to your pelvic floor, the base of your spine, your perineum. And when I say that, I mean the inner, inner deepest, most inner part of the cavity of your body. Bringing your attention down to your pelvic floor, the base of your spine, your perineum.

 

Just allowing your focus to focus here in this space.

 

inviting any thoughts that might be lingering around to float down to your pelvic floor at the base of your spine, your perineum like glitter or snow in a snow globe down into this space.

 

You can remain here for as long as you like gathering and collecting those thoughts. When you're ready, you can see this beautiful tree root push down through the crust of the earth, the mantle of the earth, the outer core, the inner core, 90 % of the way to the center of the earth.

 

And then I invite mama earth to meet that cord. The other 10 % when she is ready, she will intertwine with that cord and draw your cord all the way down into the center of the earth, connecting in pulling taught. And we give mama earth so much gratitude. Thank you mama earth for the sun and the moon and the stars and for taking what no longer serves us and grounding us and bringing us.

 

presence into our life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So grateful.

 

And you can remain here for as long as you like. When you're ready, you can then draw that beautiful earth energy up that root filling in your pelvic floor, the base of your spine, your perineum.

 

inviting this beautiful earth energy to nourish and fill in this pelvic floor until you create a little soil of garden, a garden soil here in this space, creating this beautiful garden with soil three inches high here in this space, not too heavy and not too light. You decide for you what feels right, but enough earth energy here that it feels a little weighted, but not too much.

 

allowing that beautiful mineral rich, water rich soil to just nourish your pelvic floor, the base of your spine, your perineum. And then we thank Mama Earth for this grounding. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

And you'll be able to return to the space at any time. And when you're ready, you can begin to rub your fingers, coming back to the space, rubbing whatever might have fallen asleep, taking a great big deep breath and stretching, coming back awake alert and refreshed back to this moment now.

 

You can do this in one second. I know I talked to you through this in multiple minutes, but you can do this in one quick second. That allows you to become grounded, connected. If you are snorkeling in the ocean and you need a quick ground, you can do this anywhere. I do it in the airplane. I do it whenever I feel anxious, nervous. This is how I begin my day. This is how I end my day. I do this before every meditation. I cannot encourage you enough.

 

to incorporate this into your life as your grounding practice. This will change the world. This will change your world by offering this powerful, satisfying way to create presence in your life so that

 

you are able to compensate for the electrical and emotional overloads that surround you so that you can offload that energy safely and with presence, kindness, and love.

 

How can you incorporate grounding into your life? Can you find a moment to ground physically? Can you find a moment to ground spiritually?

 

And can you decide what grounding feels like and if you even need it? I can't wait to hear in the comments down below. Do you need this? I would love to hear what your thoughts were on this meditation and how you are going to ground this week. I want to hold you accountable. Are you going to go walk on the beach? Are you going to go walking apart? Are you just going to go?

 

sit in the grass out front or lean up against your favorite tree. How can you ground this week? Let me know down below in the comments. Good luck this week. I hope you experiment with your grounding techniques and decide what works best for you. I challenge you just simply don't put your head down on the pillow. If you were deciding to ground before you go to sleep, simply just don't put your head down on the pillow.

 

Thank you so much for spending this time with me and sharing this practice with me. Everyone can benefit from this. So thank you so much for sharing and liking and subscribing. And Hey, before you go, can you hit the like button and add a quick comment? Tell me where are you going to ground this week? And if you really love this, thank you for sharing on social media and tagging me. It makes such a huge difference in spreading the healing and making this world.

 

a better place. Thank you so much. I will see you next week. Love yourself enough to heal, heal yourself enough to thrive. Take care.