How to Practice Grounding Your Energy to Reduce Anxiety & Find Balance ⋆ Earth and Water

Our ancestors didn’t have to learn how to regulate their nervous systems the way we do now. While they had different stressors, they weren’t constantly bombarded with them the way we are today. For the most part, everything in their day to day lives was very quiet and routine. They tended to the fields and the animals, baked the bread, made the butter and spent their days getting whatever work needed done in the slow paced yet consistent way that supported our biology in a calm way.

While our ancestors faced different challenges, the constant activation of our nervous system is a distinctly modern problem. When their stressors arose, such as predators, enemy threats, food security, illness or harsh weather, the fight or flight response served it’s functioning well. Turning on for a short period of time (sometimes days, weeks or months for sure), it had more opportunity to self regulate back to stability unassisted.

Now, our nervous system’s protective measures are becoming activated nearly constantly. No longer just by threats to our survival, but also by a bombardment of noises, screens and the endless influx of news stories around the world. With our ever increasingly reliance (and addiction) to tech, we’ve taken our brain’s natural tendency to look for threats and overloaded it with more than we can process.

This leaves us with more of an anxiety default setting these days rather than a calm one and so many of us are struggling with this. Always being in fight or flight isn’t just a strain on our mental health and feelings of overwhelm, it’s making us physically sick. The nervous system has two modes:

Sympathetic: “Fight, flight, fawn or freeze” – The mechanism that turns on for survival.
Parasympathetic: “Rest, digest and heal” – The control panel for bodily functioning and upkeep.

These 2 opposing sister modes don’t do their best work when they’re both active. If the sympathetic nervous system is alert and on, the parasympathetic slows and struggles because the body’s energy is being siphoned towards the survival instinct. Proper digestion, absorption and cell management doesn’t matter if we may not survive the next few moments. This is fine for a bit, but if this is constantly the case, you can see where continuously being in fight or flight can have some pretty detrimental effects on our overall wellbeing. Therefore, learning how to manage and gain a little control over these automatic systems becomes a matter of utmost importance.

Grounding techniques come in many forms and can do a lot for you in learning how to self regulate and manage your stress levels. Grounding is related to mindfulness, which is about focusing on the present moment and being intentional with your thoughts, words and actions. It’s about bringing your conscious awareness out of your head and into your body and physical surroundings. Most of the time, our stress and anxiety is being activated by our own untamed thoughts.

Again, our brains are there to always be looking for threats to respond to. The heightened awareness we now have of what could possibly go wrong (thanks to media) leaves us spending most of our time in the past or the future. Analyzing what did happen and worrying about what may.

Our brains and body can’t differentiate between what’s happening right now and what isn’t. It just responds to whatever is in our heads, be that a thing of the past or a fabrication that may never exist. Luckily, we can train our minds to spend more time in the present moment and most present moments are relatively easy going.

Grounding connects us to the solid, stable energy of the earth element. Tapping into this archetypical signature helps us to tune our own energies to it, helping us to embody the feelings associated with this element which means less air-y anxiety or fire-y instability and more control instead.

The elements are not isolated but interconnected. For example, water nourishes the earth, fire transforms earth into new forms (like pottery), and air carries the scent and ashes of fire. Understanding these connections can deepen your understanding of the elements and help you to find balance within yourself. Just as nature thrives on a balance of the elements, a balanced expression of these energies within ourselves is crucial for well-being. An excess of fire’s passion can lead to burnout, while a lack of water’s flow can lead to stagnation.

Again, there are tons of different grounding practices you can do to help gain control over your stress and anxiety levels, including but not limited to:

Spending time in nature.
Putting bare feet to the earth (also called ‘earthing’)
Forest bathing
Breathing techniques
Visualization meditations
Checking in with the senses
Body scanning
Intentional muscle relaxation
Engaging the conscious awareness of the experience of the senses
Spending quality time with loved ones
Practice gratitude
Engaging in enjoyable activities
Exercise
Stretching
Working with and consuming real whole foods
Anything that gets you into the physical moment

All of these practices have real, scientifically supported evidence of benefits both mentally and physically. Cultivating a long lasting default mode of calm takes practice and becomes an on going lifestyle, but once you’re use to the routines of it, contains very little upkeep and work to maintain.

Let us see what Meghan and myself had to say on the subject:

Beginning –

Food is a great way to ground yourself. Root vegetables help you get in touch with the element of earth, which carries the energy of stability, solidity and safety. Mushrooms and protein are also grounding foods.

You need more grounding in the vata, winter months as they naturally carry more air energy which can leave us less grounded. Root vegetables are more in season at this time of year. The Earth always provides what we need, when we need it.

We have to find balance by bringing in more of what we’re lacking. Most of us have an easier time being grounded in the spring and summer months and the garden helps us balance these days out with more leafy greens, watery fruits and edible flowers.

There are tons more from the ground food options than what’s available at your local grocery store which can be frustrating. Food desserts are a thing. Some people can have a really hard time finding whole foods where they live.

When you go to the grocery store, try and pick a new fruit of vegetable you’ve never had before. Take it home and Google up a recipe to try. You never know what you may discover you like. If you don’t like it cooked the way you decide, don’t give up on it or write it off as not for you. There are tons of ways to cook everything.

Add your intentions into your food as you prepare and/or eat it. Doing this is as simple as imagining the desired energy flowing into the food or speaking words over it. Much like blessing the food as seen in many cultures and religions.

10:30 –

Being out in nature can be very grounding. As cliche as it may sound, lean against a tree, hug it, put your heart chakra to it, give it all of your anxieties and tune yourself to it’s stable, calm energy.

Pulling your focus into the soles of your feet, into your knees, your hips. There’s a lot going on in the top half of our bodies because this is where most of our senses and organs lie. Bringing our attention down into the lower half of our body where there’s less going on can help to calm us.

The beauty about using your attention and focus to ground yourself is that you don’t have to carve out time and space to do it. It’s accessible at every moment, no matter what else is going on. All it takes it the thought to do so.

Sitting on the ground, touching grass, putting your bare feet onto the ground. This is called ‘earthing’ and has been scientifically shown to reduce not only anxiety but inflammation throughout the entire body.

Check in with your senses. Notice what you feel, hear, see, taste, touch. Generally speaking, we tend to be anxious when we’re spending too much time in our heads. This by far isn’t the only form of anxiety. Sometimes, bringing our focus to our physical body can cause more anxiety. You really have to analyze your own unique flavor of anxiety, try various things and find what works best for you.

Exercise is a great way to ground yourself. That can mean any form of movement be it walking, dancing, hard core exercise or something else you find joy in. Get the energy in your body moving so anything bothering you can be released.

You can absolutely take exercise too far, becoming addicted and using it to avoid other things in your life that need attention as well.

17:20 –

Every exercise is a whole body exercise. In the fitness community we have “leg day”, “arm day”, “ab day”, etc. Which is another example of us sectioning ourselves off into pieces and parts instead of acknowledging ourselves as a whole.

When you’re engaging one area of your body, the rest of your body is reacting to that whether you notice it or not. This is most notable in yoga and martial arts where we’re being directed by our instructor to engage all parts of our body in each stretch. Proper form focuses on posture, alignment, engagement of certain muscles, etc. It’s complex and touches all parts of us, integrating the entirety of our body.

Exercise and food can particularly help health related anxiety. Nothing calms health anxiety like working on your health. If you can build your strength through physical training, you prove to yourself that you are strong and healthy. If you can tame your eating habits to support your system, you worry less about what poor eating habits may be doing to you.

Think of yourself as a video game character. Feed yourself healthy foods for strength and stamina, put yourself to sleep when you need to recover, make yourself a green smoothie or a glass of orange juice and call it a health potion. Think of everything you do, ingest and interact with as either building your character or damaging it.

Food is not like medicine, food is medicine. The cleaner your diet, the clearer and better you’ll feel.

Imagine there’s an energy field around you and each piece of fruit or vegetable you eat, it fortifies this protective shield, keeping you from harm.

24:15 –

Be a little delusional if that’s what you need to be/ believe in to get you by easier. The placebo and nocebo effects are things that prove the power of our minds. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s “real” or not. You can decide to tell your mind that it is and your body will follow suit as though it is.

Companies market all sorts of things to us as healthy that aren’t. Greenwashing is a thing to look out for because it’ll look like it’s healthy but when you read the ingredients it’s full of chemicals and things you can’t pronounce.

Reality is created in our heads, literally and figuratively. We can visualize things that help and they do. They can be whatever we want them to be and take from it whatever we need.

Where we focus is what we get. If we’re constantly focusing on “I don’t wanna get sick, don’t wanna get sick” the universe sees us focusing on getting sick and that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The universe and the law of attraction just copies and pastes anything that we’re putting our attention on. That’s why it’s best to not pay any attention to that which you don’t want, not to be confused with avoiding your problems.

Neale Donald Walsch books.

Words are spells. We’re casting them all day long so be sure you’re being careful, purposeful and intentional. Our language literally, in every way creates our world and many believe that the English language was created to keep us limited and small. So it’s really best to never complain.

Stonewall your own negative thoughts, find a neutral position and then flipping it into something you do want. The greyrock method is something aimed at dealing with narcissists generally but you can use it to help you with manifesting as well.

Our brains are designed to pick up and focus on things that could cause us problems or harm. That’s why it’s so much easier to notice and find the bad things in life and so difficult to focus on the good and happy.

34:15 –

Watching our words and thoughts, when we notice we say/think something that is in the opposite of the direction we want to go, we pause and find a neutral position to uphold. This brings us to the meditation direction of “silencing the mind,” Which we all agree is laughable.

“Silencing the mind” tell us to do nothing and how can we do nothing? It goes against our nature and causes the opposite. Instead, we actively try and tune ourselves to a neutral position, focusing on the spaces between thoughts and attempting to make them larger and longer.

We know what calm, ease and grace feels like. Visualize it. Try and find it right now in the moment. Create it in the now. It’s a muscle just like we move our hand or we don’t move our hand. Our minds are the same way.

Be attentive of your words so that you’re not postponing, subconsciously or otherwise, that which you actually want. Sometimes we use our words to unknowingly self sabotage ourselves in order to stay in sameness because there’s safety in the known and familiar. Feel the energy of the wording.

You are not your brain. Your brain will pop up all sorts of intrusive thoughts that you didn’t ask for or want. You are the conscious observer that notices these and doesn’t like them. You can then rework them as you see fit.

We call this little brain child that is not you, the ego. It’s trying it’s best to keep you safe based on the programming it’s received from the world up until this point. You can give it a name if you like so that you can better differentiate whether or not it’s actually you when it pops up.

The past is the past. It’s hard to accept it but accepting it is the only way of moving forward. Accepting it doesn’t mean it was okay. It just means that you’re not going to continue to let it effect things in your present. Now is all we have. Most often we’re living in the past or the future, but now is all there is and in this moment, we get to decide what reality is.

What is the purpose of this moment?

46:20 –

All the different types of anxieties. Anxiety isn’t always a result of over thinking or worry. Anxiety is our body’s alarm system that something is wrong and that could be anything from a physical threat, a thought to a toxin, allergen or even hunger. It’s all the same alarm. There are a tons of different types of anxieties.

Learning how to trust and talk to your body can help you with the clarity of knowing when you should probably go to the emergency room and knowing when you’re just having a panic attack. A heart attack can feel like an anxiety attack.

Having a tool kit to help you ground yourself in order to ride your anxiety out is there to intentionally distract you from the overwhelming feelings you’re getting during an attack. Things like stemming, EFT and smoothing out your aura with your hands all help a ton with getting through these moments.

Won’t hurt, might help.