Mindful Monday: The Technique of Grounding for Personal Presence

This week I’m at the Winter 340B Coalition Conference in San Diego. It turned out to be a grey (Pittsburgh grey) day and it was raining, so no outdoor California fun for me.  I typically don’t do well with hurtling my body across the US. This time is no different. My challenge this week, is to be present in the Pacific Time zone. I typically start grounding myself part of the way to the new destination the night before I fly. It helps me sleep and gets rid of jet lag—try it, it works like a charm. 

Friday night, it felt like I could only ground to Kissimmee and Phoenix, the first leg of the trip. I went with it. I grounded into Phoenix, and while waiting for the flight to San Diego, I remembered that I needed to ground into San Diego. This morning it occurred to me that I was still grounded into Phoenix and San Diego. Mountain time and Pacific time.

I have a tool where I extend a connection to the center of the earth by imagining a beam of light, or a waterfall, or a set of tree roots that extend downward to the center of the earth. I want to give a shout out to the great teachers at Psychic Horizons in Boulder and to Jeffrey Allen who introduced me to the technique. Lately, my grounding has been tree roots—maybe because I’m much more grounded than I was in the past 4 years.

For a while my grounding was a steel braided cable, like you see on bridges, that extended down to the center of the earth and used a carabiner clip at the end to anchor myself. I was being whipped around by the vicissitudes of life and I was clipped in solidly, no matter what was happening at the surface.

When I had surgery two weeks ago, I grounded the room, the building, the chair I was sitting in and all-in-all, I had a relatively easy time of it. Grounding is not just for people. One time, I grounded a beach house in a hurricane and it came through unscathed, while the houses across the street were demolished.

Grounding does help me be present. Our team is meeting today, and it will be good to see all my colleagues face-to-face, even though we work together every single day. I’ve started an experiment to ground the room that we are meeting in, just to see if it makes a difference in the way we interact today.

Maybe I’ll ground the convention hotel tomorrow, just to see if it makes a difference in the general interactions around me. Stay tuned, I’ll let you know.

By the way, “Staying Grounded in the Middle of Chaos” my book describing my mindful journey from depression to joy, is at the editors. I’m getting great feedback from the editorial team. I can’t wait to share my book with you.

Try Grounding. It’s a superpower, like mindfulness.