Grounding

Have you ever wondered where ADD, ADHD, dyspraxia, or even dyslexia, dyscalculia, and  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 ghastly 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 the area around our belly button, that busyness goes away.  If we move it down out of our body into the ground, that’ll give us even more relief.  As human beings we 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 just 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 2 minutes” or “stay in one place for too long”.  I firmly believe that this movement in the brain is not only a product of applying fantastic visual skills overfantastically in the context of 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 sitting 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 like this for some time.   If you observe very young children, you’ll notice that they’re very bouncy, legs flying all over the place.  Somewhere around the age of 7 they start to get grounded.  It is all part of their natural development and growth.  If a child is born to an ungrounded mother, s/he 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.  As I said before, 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.

There many reasons for being ungrounded:

• 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, but especially reflexology, Reiki, meditation, energetic NLP = using the power of your thought to clear your energy channels anywhere at any time
• drinking water.  Sound too simple, but it can really help!  Water is not only a distributor of electricity in our bodies and an aide of clearing our bodies of toxins and waste products, but also a source of energy and electricity for our bodies and brains.
• try moving to a place away from electronic equipment.  Electronic equipment sends invisible, but definitely present 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 even 5 years ago.  Free yourself from planning into the future with “what happens if I do this or that” thoughts, because these racing thoughts race faster and faster day and night, especially before you fall asleep.
• you can just imagine 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 let’s remember: it is only a matter of choice whether you’re grounded or not at different times and in different contexts in and of your life.  And at different times of the day you may prefer different states.