Let’s be honest; leading a spiritually infused life can be challenging, especially when you are trying at the same time to navigate your everyday life.

Spiritually aside, each of us is affected by the modern way of living (especially in the western world) that comes with being subjected to stress, confusion, uncertainty and other calamities that plague our everyday reality.

This is where practicing grounding techniques comes in.

These practices can vary from simply turning your awareness towards your senses, to more elaborate ones like applying visualization to bring about a shift in your energy field, resulting in bringing balance to your system.

Let’s be honest; leading a spiritually infused life can be challenging, especially when you are trying at the same time to navigate your everyday life.

In this article, I am going to discuss the benefits of grounding and share some techniques that have been useful to me in my grounding endeavors.

Reconnecting with Calm and Presence

Grounding is one of the most important tasks that someone who is leading a spiritual life must undertake if they want to balance their inner lives with their day-to-day lives (which already present challenges on their own).

The effect of grounding is immediate. It changes how you perceive things by drawing your attention back to your senses, your breath or how your body feels.

It is most needed when your mind is racing; you feel emotionally overwhelmed, and physically uneasy, creating space for you to pause and return to being present.

Practicing grounding regularly can also create a sense of resilience towards the challenges that you face, by releasing unwanted tension and thus keeping your nervous system healthy.

The effect of grounding is immediate. It changes how you perceive things by drawing your attention back to your senses, your breath or how your body feels.

In time you will measure your success in getting grounded by noticing how quickly you can return to states of a peaceful mind, a calmer emotional weather, and a healthier body, reducing the stress hormones released in your bloodstream when we are in a constant state of tension which can cause myriads of stress related health issues.

3 Everyday Grounding Practices to Explore in Your Self-Care Routine

Before I share with you some of the grounding practices I regularly engage in, I would like to stress that grounding is a personal journey and each one of us needs to find what suits them in terms of their personal needs when it comes to bringing balance in our emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual bodies.

What follows are three groups of practices that can be applied separately or in combination and practices that use actions like the shift of attention towards the senses, or the breath, or the practice of embodied visualization.

1. Awakening the Senses through Gentle Observation

One of the grounding practices that has gained popularity to turn your awareness to your senses is the 5-4-3-2-1 technique where you simply focus on the five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two you can smell and one you can taste.

This practice might be deceptively easy, but has proven its effectiveness not only for people that are into practices of self-development, or are spiritually aligned, but also for mental health professions in their efforts to help their clients to ease anxiety, and help calm down racing thoughts when they become restless.

2. Breathing Patterns That Anchor and Restore Balance

Bringing your awareness to your breath, by engaging in conscious breathing, (breathing technique, for instance the technique of square breathing where you are breathing in for 4 counts, hold your breath for 4 counts, exhaling for 4 counts, and holding your breath for 4 counts and repeat as much as needed) triggers your parasympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic system handles every involuntary movement in your body and also for bringing calmness and relaxation, qualities that promote grounding in the way I have established above.

My favorite grounding practice when it comes to conscious breathing is being aware of my breath while meditating.

I like to bring my awareness to my breath and while counting from 1 to 10, (counting 1 count for the inhalation, and 1 count for the exhalation) which not only helps me to calm down, but trains as I gently bring my awareness back to my breathing when it drifts off while meditating on my breath and start over counting from 1.

My favorite grounding practice when it comes to conscious breathing is being aware of my breath while meditating.

A quicker and more immediate way to ground myself through conscious breathing is by bringing my awareness to my breath and naming each inhalation inwardly while saying inwardly something like “breathing in” and with its exhalation “breathing out.”

I have found that after one or two minutes of the above practice I can sense myself calming down significantly, which makes it a quick go-to practice when I’m really stressed and need to come back to my center.

3. Grounding Through the Body and Imagination

Using your body as a gateway to grounding is a powerful practice, which immediately brings your awareness back to the present.

Acts like doing a body scan by bringing your attention to each part of your body, pressing your feet gently into the floor, or holding a textured object are few ways a few of the ways you can use your physicality to release tension and realign your focus.

Another powerful way to get grounded is to use your energy field to help you through visualization.

Using your body as a gateway to grounding is a powerful practice, which immediately brings your awareness back to the present

While sitting on a chair I like to meditate on the image of roots coming out of the soles of my feet deep into the core of the earth and imagining a gray cloud (that represents tension, stress and other negative energies) flowing down from my body and through those roots into the core of the earth to be transformed into something positive.

After that, when I feel completely calm and clear, I imagine the warm energy of the earth coming back through the roots into the soles of my feet and letting it flood my body’s energy field. This energy has the quality of vibrating at a slow frequency, which can entrain not only my brain but also my whole body into a slower pace that promotes calmness, peace, and a clear mental space.

Conclusion

I would like to close this article by noting once again that grounding (as any energetic or spiritual practice) doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective.

It is also important when you come across a new technique to set aside time for practice, in order to grow a habit that will pay it forward in time as grounding will become second nature to you and will be an automatic response to anything that in the past might have thrown you off center.

Till next time, take care.