Grounding and Learning Difficulties

Have you ever wondered where ADD, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and other learning difficulties stem from and how you could help yourself or someone who had any of them?

The root cause is a definitive lack of grounding.  And don’t confuse this with grounding a child for their behavior when you don’t let them go and see their friends!  Most people are familiar with being ungrounded.  It’s that terrible feeling of having thousands of thoughts and way too much going on in and above your head – often described as overload.  If we move our focus down to our stomach area, that busyness goes away.  If we move it down out of our body into the ground, that’ll give us even more relief.  Human beings operate best when connected to the earth.   Grounding is a very natural process.  For example, if we want to stand on one leg, we have to ground the other, or we’ll fall over.  People who do sports, such as wrestling, martial arts, yoga, gymnastics, horseriding etc. all find grounding essential, although they may use different words to describe it.

People with dyspraxia or ADHD are often very physically wobbly, disorganized, and overwhelmed.  Dyslexia and dyscalculia are also products of movement – of pictures, letters, words, and numbers, and movement as a  product of the brain is often connected with physical wobblyness, fidgetiness, inability to stay still for a few minutes or stay in one place for too long.  This movement in the brain is not only a product of applying fantastic visual skills overfantastically to seeing words and numbers, but also amplified by the lack of connectedness of the body with the earth = grounding.  Have you ever noticed children with learning difficulties sit on their legs, with legs crossed, or legs stretched but toes pointing upwards while only the heels touch the ground, or sitting fidgety when struggling at school?  Grounding is not a permanent state and we operate at our best when grounded, even if we’re not in contact with the floor.  And if we cross our legs and arms, we can lose the energy flow and be ungrounded again.

When we’re born, we’re not grounded.  We have been grounding through our mother.  After birth we’re carried around and can continue to ground through our mother for some time.   If you observe very young children, you’ll notice that they’re very bouncy, legs flying all over the place.  Around the age of 7 they start to get grounded.  It is part of their natural development and growth.  If a child is born to an ungrounded mother, the child may never experience what grounding is really like.  It may therefore be harder for this child to naturally develop grounding.  And this is why some children grow to adulthood without ever having experienced grounding.  Again, grounding is not a permanent state.  You can be grounded when relaxing, walking in the forest, etc. but when triggered by your thoughts [such as important work stuff or schoolwork] you can become instantly ungrounded and often feel very wobbly and psychologically insecure, uncertain, floaty, or confused.

The reasons for lack of grounding are:

• the frantic pace of our modern life
• traumas and pain
• not wanting to be in our body
• our busy thoughts running rapidly in the past, present, or future – with worry or frantic planning
• energy blocks caused by unhappiness, operations, injuries
• significant negative emotions that we’ll have metaphorically buried in our legs and/or feet
• picking up energy from our environment that disturbs our energy system
• other people’s energy
• recalling a previous negative emotion or limiting belief
• and even using electrical equipment

So how do we ground? Here’re a few suggestions:

• several therapies are available to assist, including any massage, reflexology, Reiki, meditation, energetic NLP = using the power of your thought to clear your energy channels anywhere at any time
• drinking water.  May sound insignificant, but it really helps!  Water a distributor of electricity in our bodies, an aid of clearing our bodies of toxins and waste products, and also a source of energy for our bodies and brains.
• try moving to a place away from electronic equipment.  Electronic equipment gives off invisible magnetic waves that can interfere with our energy system and result in headaches and other symptoms.
• practise focusing on the present moment = this very second.  Not what happened 5 minutes, 5 days, or  5 years ago.  Free yourself from planning into the future with “what happens if I do x or y” thoughts, because these thoughts race in your mind fast, day and night, especially before you fall asleep.
• you can imagine that you’re a tree.  Let energy come up into you through your feet while passing stuff that you don’t want down into the ground [and releasing it to the center of the earth].
• ground through your male and female reproductive organs where energy often gets clogged up by imagining there’s a tube connecting them with the earth where energy flows through.

People with learning difficulties often have fantastic visual skills.  But highly visual people are often very ungrounded as they struggle to keep up with their internal pictures.   They have so much activity going on in their heads, so many thoughts flying around at one time, that it’s difficult to stay grounded.  And remember: it is only a matter of choice whether you’re grounded or not at different times and in different contexts of your life.  And at different times of the day you may prefer different states.

Read more on NLP, grounding, and learning difficulties here.

And if you don’t know when you might be feeling ungrounded, read the signs here.

Contact me for more help with grounding and learning difficulties.