Grounding

When everything feels scattered and overwhelming, grounding offers a way back to yourself. Whether you're navigating life changes like career shifts, parenthood, loss, or simply the daily chaos of modern life, grounding gives you something solid when everything else feels uncertain.

Grounding, also called earthing, involves connecting with the present moment through physical and sensory experiences. While some research suggests potential health benefits from direct contact with the earth, the broader concept extends to any practice that helps you feel anchored and present.

The concept of grounding extends well back into history, wherein many ancient cultures believed that all living creatures were connected to the energies of the earth and that those energies kept all that were connected to it in balance.

Why Grounding Is Important

Grounding is so important for all humans, whether one is going through life changes like adolescence, pregnancy, parenthood, career shifts, menopause, loss, caring for others, or identity transitions, because it offers a stable centre in the midst of inner and outer challenges, everyday life challenges, and transformation.

Every day life may bring about:

• Emotional ups and downs

• Anxiety or restlessness

• Loss of identity or direction

• Hormonal and physical shifts

• Feelings of overwhelm

• Being in so many different places physically and in our heads all at once

  
  

For some, these shifts are often layered with societal expectations, caregiving roles, and personal transformation happening all at once.

Grounding gives us something solid when everything else feels uncertain. When we pause and connect, we stop outsourcing validation and start trusting our own intuition, voice, and learning to say no.

Grounding in Practice

Where we make contact with the world, such as the feeling of your feet on the ground, your body settling into the couch or chair, the weight of your body, warmth from a heat pack, or secure pressure such as a massage, bringing awareness to gravity and the sense of belonging to the earth.

Resources around us that anchor us, like touching a neutral or comforting object (a stone, a piece of fabric, a tree trunk, a leaf), placing a hand on your heart or belly, or visually taking in the environment around us, helping to bring presence, comfort, and calm.

Why does this matter? In moments of stress, busyness, fear, reactivity, or dissociation/disconnection, grounding offers a refuge, a place to rest our attention and reset into a more present state.

The Power of Rootedness

Connected to grounding is the concept of rootedness is an extension of grounding where we imagine ourselves like a tree with deep roots, having survived through all sorts of weather and change, and meditate on what it would feel like to have our own personal roots, deeply connected to the earth where we stand.

Rooting ourselves like a tree opens a portal to feeling calmer and more present. It helps us become aware of our living body—always working, breathing, and responding, even when we're not conscious of it. When we notice our body internally and how it feels in relation to the world around us, we start to feel more in control and awake in any given moment.

Rootedness helps cultivate inner stability, clarity, and self-trust in a world that often pulls us away from ourselves through roles, expectations, emotional labour, and constant change.

For those conditioned to put others' needs first, rootedness can help us come home to our values, intuition, and inner wisdom, so we can live from our own truth rather than external expectations. It helps us remember who we are beneath the roles we play, providing an internal anchor through all the changes.

Rootedness is both psychological and spiritual. It reconnects us to the earth, the cycles of life, and the natural rhythms of being rather than doing. This can help us feel held by something greater than ourselves, honoring our body as wise and living from intuition, not just intellect.

Try This

Grounding and rootedness are interconnected. Grounding involves being in the here and now, physical and sensory experiences, calming the nervous system bit by bit, and putting our feet on the ground.

Rootedness involves remembering who we are, connecting with our emotional and spiritual parts, encouraging long-term stability, and recognising the body/soul connection. In time, practicing both of these will bring us greater inner peace, a deeper understanding of our emotions, and better ways to react and respond in stressful situations.

Some ideas for every day grounding and rootedness opportunities: Breathing, body scan, meditation, imaginative journalling, holding a stone and doing a mindfulness exercise, putting feet and hands on the earth or on a tree, watching the clouds, spending time in nature, music, dancing and exercise.

Some reflections to consider that may surface whilst practicing grounding and rootedness:

How much do I allow outside noise to impact my decisions and actions?

Can I still be myself even as things around me change?

Will grounding and rootedness support me in becoming more assertive as I quiet my mind and understand my needs better?

What small things can I try a little each day to practice connecting more to myself?

Xxo Kathleen