Grounding: An exercise in visualization

[open_space]

It is common among people of our industrial societies these days to feel uprooted given the unhealthy habits they promote due to excessive visual stimuli and information overload. In particular, but not exclusively, the mindless scrolling of the web. It is part of some teachings that a tree cannot grow any taller than its roots for it is the foundation the allows you to reach new heights safely. Balance is essential for human beings as it is for trees and it is also for the same reason that an arrow that is too head heavy won't hit the target if it manages to fly at all or the shaft doesn't break given the inertia of a heavy head meeting the sudden acceleration before that, crushing it in between them.

In today's world we have a tendency to empower people more than what they can handle to meet the fast paced demands of our frenetic culture, or to make you gullible enough to make use of you, and one consequence of that is that our minds tip over as easy as a broom does when it's upside down. We are lacking a proper foundation and strong roots that can give us the stability needed to endure speeding winds. I've felt this many times in my life, in fact it is probably the thing that I need the most. Earth. Earth as in a strong contact with the planet and the elemental energy it represents.

There are some symptoms that I consider to be telling of someone needing some grounding of which some of them are:

• Lack of attention to your surroundings and the present moment
• Clumsiness caused by lack of attention (not motor skill!)
• Irritability and swaying emotions
• Fast switching between tasks
• Head in the clouds
• Headaches due to overthinking or other mishandlings of the mind
• Feeling of being uprooted, disconnected or floating
• Disorganized thoughts
• Vertigo and anxiety

For this reason I started developing a grounding visualization that has helped me to deal with the above successfully. If you are interested read below:

You can do this inside or outside. It is best if you do this barefooted but it can also be done with shoes. If you are Christian you can start with a prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe or to the Blessed Virgin Mary to help you and bless you in this work of grounding. If you are a Druid you can pray to the Welsh Cêd the Earth Mother or the Irish Danu; if a Heathen you can try Frigga or Erce or if you prefer the Theoi you can pray to Demeter. Any other Earth and soil god or goddess will do.

Stretch a little bit or massage yourself if you need to as to release muscular tension.

Sit about halfway from the edge of a chair so that your back doesn't touch the backrest and you can place your feet solidly on the ground and the weight of your legs doesn't hang from the chair. Afterwards, put your feet together, hands facing downwards on the middle of your lap, arms should be allowed to hang like a rope, and your back is comfortably erect. Head tilted slightly downwards, eyes closed. Take a few moments to bring your mind, body and energies into stability. When you are ready take a few deep breaths and feel your mental preoccupations and bodily tensions draining down deep into the earth away from you where they will decompose and reintegrate into the energetic cycles of the soil. Pause for a moment.

Now, dedicate a few minutes to the sensations on your feet. Then extend that awareness to the floor or the soil beneath them and bit by bit all the way to recognizing the whole planet that holds you in place, from its surface to its core and the gravity thereof. When you feel you are ready or the focus starts to weaken release the imagery.

Next, imagine that from your lower legs and feet two strong and big roots start growing downwards, sinking and branching deeper and deeper into the earth. Imagine the roots sinking first into the soft soil and reaching downwards until they eventually hold firmly into solid bedrock. As you do this feel all the sensations and try to engage all your senses --from the sound of growing, sinking roots, to the warmth of the soil and the unmovable solidity of bedrock. Holding this image feel yourself as stable, unshakable and grounded and concentrate on what that represents.

Depending on how you feel either take the roots back into yourself or leave them there firmly in the ground. The latter will leave you solidly grounded and rooted, if you feel chronically uprooted you might want to try this a few times while the former will leave you balanced and rested having touched ground to recharge if this is a sporadic issue. Depending on your spiritual path, needs and intuitions is what you should do. The same goes for when to practice this exercise. I didn't design this as a daily practice but rather as a method for grounding as needed. Your mileage may very.

When you are done thank the earth and the powers that have helped you.

Comments

[jprussell]

Very interesting! I have a few questions:

1) Have you practiced this with any other visualization techniques? It doesn't seem to explicitly involve moving energy about, but I could see how it might.

2) I'm a bit confused on the first step. When you say "you can lay your feet and legs solidly on the ground", I'm not sure what that looks like from sitting in a chair - how do you get your legs (and not just your feet) on the ground? To clarify, I'm interpreting "sit about halfway back on a chair, without touching the backrest" as roughly equivalent to the "Egyptian Statue" style pose for the legs. Am I misunderstanding?

3) Did you know there are similar "grounding" exercises out in the neo-pagan community? Galina Krasskova and Raven Kaldera describe one (where the root comes out of your perineum and there is explicit movement of energy) in Neolithic Shamanism, I think, but when I asked about it on MM, JMG said it was Wiccan/neo-pagan thing he had heard of but didn't know much else about. I'm mostly curious if this is a case of convergent evolution or if you were inspired by others.

Cheers,
Jeff

[open_space]

Hi Jeff! Thanks for checking it out.

1) What do you mean with other visualization techniques? If you mean a magical system I do practice it along my CGD practices but not as a regular daily practice, only when I need to and also how I recommend doing it. I should state that. It did come out from my practice in a way. In CGD we don't use the telluric energy, we just recognize it and use it as a balancing force instead of getting rid of it like the HOGD, so as such there is not explicit use of it. There is not and explicit moving of energy around the human energy system nor working with energy centers involved either to my understanding and personal experience. It does have an energy component and use of the centers at the soles of the feet but in a natural implicit way. Say, it's one thing to implicitly breathe consciously by becoming aware of the breath and doing it with intention, even though you always do so and quite another to do elaborate breathing techniques. The energy of the earth is always flowing and in contact with your soles, we are just doing it consciously but we are not working with the telluric energy in a concentrated way (like you do in the opening of the SoP where you bring it into yourself and fuse it with the solar current) nor with the centers explicitly (we are not concentrating energy in them, nor opening them) but rather using the visualization technique in the same way that a stretch does to the muscles. You are not exercising them, just massaging them and moving them a little. That said however, I do encourage divination to figure out if it is something that would go well with you since I don't have field data of how it interacts with other people other than myself, but it is not something I am particularly worried about.

2) You are understanding it correctly even though my instruction were not clear! It is indeed classic western meditation posture as in the egyptian statues. What I attempted to explain was that not only should the feet be on the ground but the weight of the legs should not hang from the chair but rather the weight of them be mostly carried by the feet so that your buttocks carry the weight of the torso and the feet carry the legs. The thighs of course, since they are in contact with the chair resting in it. This is important so that the posture is very stable and grounded, the chair only being a platform for you to hold the position. This reinforces the purpose of the exercise which is to be solidly placed upon the Earth. English is only but my second language. I am aware sometimes it is weird. How would you put it?

3) I was not aware of that. This was an original organic development from my practices but I am not surprised it converged, it is a common imagery to see trees and their roots as a symbol of grounding. That said, from the perspective of western magical systems it seems more sensible to me to include the legs and the centers at the feet in classic meditation posture rather than the Mulhadhara chakra, which is of course the one at the perineum. It seems a little odd to me, because in the yoga practices I know the energy is meant to go upwards into the higher chakras, not reinforcing the lower chakras. Yogis usually imagine the telluric current flowing into the perineum upwards, not out of it downwards. But then again, I've not read the book nor know their system.

Many thanks for the thought provoking questions,
Augusto

[jprussell]

Thanks for your responses!

1) D'oh! I left out the key word in my question. I was asking about any other energy visualization techniques, specifically visualization of energy movement, wince that's the area JMG has cautioned the most about mixing and matching. Despite my indadequately-worded question, you got to my concerns in your explanation, so thank you!

2) Ah, okay, that makes more sense to me, thank you. I think your explanation given here makes it much clearer. I would likely say something like "put your feet solidly on the ground and let them carry the weight of your legs more than the chair. Your legs should not feel like they are 'hanging', but like they are firmly planted."

3) To be fair, I'm not that familiar with the practice. Shortly after I started looking through the book, I did a divination about whether it was the right stuff for me to be working on right now and got a very emphatic "no!" So, I haven't looked at it in a while, but doing so now, here's what I find:

a. They pair "grounding" with "centering" as a daily practice that they stress about as much as JMG does banishing rituals.
b. "Centering" is the four-fold breath paired with visualization of focusing your body's energy at either the womb center (for women) or the solar plexus (for men or especially busty women)
c. After you gather the energy by centering, you visualize pushing it down through your root chakra if seated, or your feet if standing or walking, and into the ground, branching out into deep roots, possibly all the way down to the heart of the world
d. You then visualize moving energy up and down these roots, pushing out any negative/excess energy, and drawing in any needed healing energy

So, fairly different from your description, and something that sounds riskier to mix with any other energy-moving techniques than what you've come up with.

[open_space]

Seems to me we are in sync ;-)

1) Yup. No energy involved in here by itself. No light visualized or such. To my understanding it's like a stretch and reaffirmation of our already existent connection to the earth, which helps it reestablish given the uprooting behaviors of the mishandling of the mind, which tends to move you upwards and hence the vertigo, floating sensation and becoming unaware of what is happening here on Earth. The energies go upwards in the body in such cases. That is why the meditation posture, or at least some of the reasons for it is the way it is for western meditation since thinking tends to pull you up while having your feet on the ground helps you stabilize that. Massage, exercise and such helps the energies root themselves in the body, but visualization can do so as well, since the body is a piece of the planet after all! And that's what you are holding into and reminding yourself and you body of it once in a while really makes a difference for people like me.

2) I've made the corrections here and to whom I've shared it with. Thanks for pointing it out!

3) Hmm that's interesting. I don't know how I feel about roots coming out from my bum! But if it works, it works... It seems a little mixed to me. In my understanding astral energy comes down from the Sun (think middle Pillar exercise bringing the energy from top to bottom) and etheric energy (chakras) go up from the earth back into the Sun. But my understanding is fairly limited on the ascending and descending currents. Perhaps both have astral and etheric components? Now that's my question for next Monday.

[jprussell]

1) Makes sense to me.

2) Glad to help!

3) To be clear, I was not sharing those exercises as something to strive for, necessarily. I've found some of Krasskova and Kaldera's books helpful (especially Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner), but I know very little about the value or lack thereof of their recommended practical magic. Now that I have a gone from zero to novice, reading those descriptions strikes me as somewaht reductionist compared to either of JMG's main strands (GD-derived and John Gilbert-derived). "Centering" seems like a one-step banishing ritual, and "grounding" as a one-step middle pillar or grail working exercise. The lack of nuance doesn't impress me as it once would have, but to be fair, I haven't tried either!

[youngelephant]

Thank you.

[open_space]

You are very welcome