This is where I sit for at least 10 minutes most days. First I walk for a couple of miles, and then stop here at my favorite bench, a few minutes from home. Although resting feels good after walking during these warm Florida days, the main reason I’m sitting on this bench is to ground and meditate. Notice my bare feet planted on the grass, on Mother Earth.
By connecting my feet directly to the earth I’m grounding, which is also called earthing or rooting. This connects my body to the natural electric charge of the earth, transferring electrons. That’s the scientific explanation, but the reason I earth, or ground, is because it intuitively feels healing and brings me joy. The effects for me are subtle, and deepen over time. Along with just feeling good, I believe it’s helped to lower inflammation, relax my nervous system, deepen meditation, and improve my sleep.
Since I'm sitting by a main walking path with many passersby, some people look over and stare at the palm trees I’m focused on, maybe trying to see what’s so interesting there. The reason I’m looking at the beautiful palms is because I’m practicing a meditation with eyes open while I ground. I practice this meditation because it helps me with my work as a medium and psychic. I need to go from a deep meditative state where I connect to higher consciousness to then communicating with my client. This is a great place to deepen my ability to shift back and forth from meditating to conversing with community walkers. Connecting with the divine and then connecting with other humans, back to the divine, and continuing this back and forth for a lovely ten minutes.
I haven’t seen anyone else in my small, elderly community ground in this same manner. Not yet, anyway. In this place where conformity is the norm, I like to envision myself as an inspiration to others, not just the weirdo on the bench with her bare feet. Most people walk by, look at my shoes on the ground next to me, and usually just say “hi.” I occasionally have a passerby that glares at me like I’m doing something ridiculous. Several people ask if I’m okay. I answer, “I’m great! How are you?” So far I’ve had two people say, “I know what you’re doing! I heard about it! That’s so good for you!” One fellow even cited a famous scientist from his country of origin (Russia?) that has done research on it, and is an advocate for grounding. So far no one has joined me, and I’m fine with that, but it would be fun to share the bench in a grounding meditation for a few minutes.
There’s a lot of research supporting the practice of grounding. Here are some of the articles, and you can also google away if you’re interested in learning more about it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378297/ (This article has a ton of information and research, but beware if you’re squeamish because it shows pictures of open wounds.)
https://www.webmd.com/balance/grounding-benefits (Easy to follow and cites some research. It also talks about grounding products that you can use if putting bare feet on the ground isn’t possible.)
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/earthing (Talks about the difference between Earthing and Grounding. I tend to use them interchangeably because of how I work with energy, so this is a great intro into how we can ground energetically, as well.)
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