A Brief Note on Grounding Practice

As part of the ongoing quest for discernment in our work, (1) one of the first exercises that I give my students is a duo: centering and grounding. These exercises do a number of things and not only are they one of the first things I teach students, but they’re the focus of their practice (along, of course with prayer and shrine work) for at least the first two years of training. 

Usually, I start with two breathing exercises. They’re easy. They don’t require any particular sensitivity to one’s internal energies, nor do they require the ability to visualize. You breathe in the right patterns and you will automatically center and ground. Eventually I teach a more complicated, mindful way of doing things, and then over those first two years gradually expand on the practice until the student is fully confident in his or her abilities and has a solid level of skills. 

One of the things that came up recently with one of my current students (2) is that centering and grounding aren’t just exercises one does. The scaffolding that is brought to life through these practices is part of the soul-skin, the hame. Like a physical muscle, it has to be used to be strengthened but just like a physical muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. It’s not just breathing or sending internal energy or thought or whatever to a particular place, it’s feeding and nourishing part of the soul-skin, part of the energetic body that is already there. Just as we bring air into the lungs and they inflate, so we send energy down into the root-matrix of our ground to keep it strong and resilient.

It’s easy to neglect these essential exercises if one thinks of them AS exercises only. They’re so much more though and they infuse part of the soul-skin with life and vitality and that adds strength, discernment, and resiliency to our practice. I tell my students to center and ground (3) multiple times throughout the day. One literally cannot do it too much. I’ve even noticed that if my ground is occluded in any significant way, it may hurt to ground – then I know I really need to practice more! Also, sometimes if the ground becomes clogged, I will get headaches or back aches. When I ground, miraculously they disappear (4). Our bodies are conduits for the energies with which we work and even if one is laity, one has a soul skin and can benefit from these very basic practices. Just realize that it’s not just a thing one does, but part of one’s etheric body, part of one’s soul skin and what we are doing when we ground is energize that part, strengthen it, and bring it to life. 

Notes:

1. These exercises do a number of things, discernment is only the most important. For a spirit-worker, they lay the groundwork (no pun intended) for every single bit of magic or energy work or journey work one will do in one’s working life. They aid in gift-development, and in learning to control one’s sensitivities. You want to function well: fucking ground. 
2. These students are spiritual not academic – I’m only talking about students that come to me for religious or spiritwork training here.
3. Or ground and center – the order doesn’t really matter. Cognitively, I find centering first to make more sense but I’ve had students for whom the opposite order works better. Either is fine. 
4. I am NOT saying every headache or back ache is due to a clogged grounding channel. I get migraines fairly frequently from injuries sustained when I danced. Grounding doesn’t solve these. There is, however, a specific type of headache/back ache that can happen as a result of a blocked ground. This is a particular type of pain and it is cleared up by grounding properly.