Grounding
New beginnings are offered at the start of a new day, a new month, a new job, a new relationship...this also requires honouring endings for the wonder of newness to be felt and experienced.
In yoga, muladhara is our root chakra. This Sanskrit term translates to ‘Keeper of Beginnings.’
A useful entry point into Spring here in the Northern Hemisphere - to welcome new beginnings, we need to honour endings.
The chakras are a map to help us understand the organising principles of energy more effectively.
And that’s what life is - energy. Anything that helps us to move from discombobulation, discordance and anxiety into centring and grounding is a relief.
How to ground/earth oneself?
Some suggestions…see what pops out and suits you at the moment…
1. Eat root vegetables/prepare own food
Spring Equinox is a Celebration of Nature. We are nature. How we prepare, cook and eat our food is a prayer. A sacred nourishment. You might enjoy potatoes, beets, carrots, parsnips…food grown in the sanctum of the soils of Mother Earth - rooty! It’s all about balance. Imagine if we only ate root vegetables….we might become too low tone, despondent even. Everything is about balance, attunement and attention to energy….
2. Stand barefoot on Earth - be it sand, grass, soil..Every morning, no matter the weather, my Dad, still pyjama clad, steps out into their garden. Barefoot. I admire his commitment and consistency. That’s always where the magic happens and indeed the Muse appears - when we commit to something. Earth has a magnetic frequency. We were not borne to be shoe clad and many shoes are the cause of bunions, plantar fascia inflammation and misalignment. That said, shoes are a part of modern life so freeing up our lovely feet, to breathe and palpate into the earth - it’s like we are massaging her in thanks for all she offers to us.
3 Feel the pull of gravity at the feet to rise through the crown
The gravitational pull is a law of physics. We are bipeds, two leggeds, walking upon the Earth. We have proprioceptors in the body - these sense and feel where we are in space e.g are we lying down, are we upside down…standing with awareness of this pull, spreading across all four corners of each foot, whilst also reaching up through the vertical axis of our spine, into a golden arc of destiny about our crowns, creates this spacious feeling. Stand tall in who we are. Earthy…rooted….Rise Rooted.
4. Speak from your belly rather than throat
The power of our voice. Nervousness will often present as a constricted throaty parlance. Breathing lower into the belly and speaking from there, taps into a broader sense of grounding. Play around with this and your unique tone of voice. It’s also about having connection to our body. A great tool for presentations and performance or having those tougher one to one conversations. Stay grounded.
5. Listen to bassy/drumming music
I’m learning the hand drum at the moment. Drumming is excellent for our health. It’s a reverberation. We grew in utero to regular sound of the drumming of our mother’s heart beat. We are thus naturally in tune with rhythm. We just forget. Bassy, drumming music can awaken this. You might just listen…you might also end up dancing with it….let yourself be more free…
6. Breathe into your feet
There can be so much noise in the outside world, we lose our sense of inner quiet. Breathing into our feet is a tool to recruit anytime. On a busy train commute, in a meeting that seems to be going nowhere fast, whenever we feel the early warning signs of anxiety, or we notice we are rushing as a pattern rather than a necessity….locate your feet with inner awareness and let your breath settle there a while.
Play with these. o need ot do all at once. Trust the one or ones that sing to you and feel accessible or maybe you do already.
In wamrth,
Ciara
