If you are feeling spacey, irritable, or out of sorts you could be ungrounded. Highly sensitive people and empaths can very easily become ungrounded because we take on the energy and the feelings of the people and the things around us.
Today, we’ll get into the most effective ways that you can ground yourself. These are things that I use myself and it will help you to become centered and balanced more quickly.
I’ve made a video about grounding yourself when you are feeling disconnected before, this was a few years ago and for some reason – I think there was a problem with my lights- this video just became more yellow and yellow and yellow as the timeline carried on!
So we’ll go into the topic a little bit deeper today.
Firstly we’ll talk about what grounding is how can you discover if you are ungrounded and then finally I’ll share with you my 5 best techniques that I use to ground myself and hopefully that can help you too.
Let’s get started!
What does it mean to ground yourself?
When we’re more sensitive to the energies of other people we don’t always know that it is someone else’s energy or experience that we are feeling.
A lot of the time it is because you are not grounded, you’re not anchored into yourself .
You want to cut the external imbalances that’s causing you to feel off-center and ground yourself again.
Grounding then means that you become present to the moment and that you connect to earth
When you are ungrounded you’ll find that your emotions are all over the place and you are struggling just to cope with normal day to day challenges and realities.
We spend a lot of time in our heads, right?
So you’re either thinking about the past and the things that happened, or you worry or you fantasize about the future.
The thing is that your brain doesn’t know the difference between whether something really happening right now or whether you’re just thinking about something. It doesn’t know if something is real or imagined.
What then happens, is when we spend our time thinking about what happened in the past and we feel sad about the things that didn’t work out the way that we wanted to, or we feel bad about something that someone said our body responds as if that bad thing is happening to us right now!
I say “bad thing” in quotes because it is really our interpretation of the thing which determines the way that we feel and how we respond.
The same thing goes for when we are worried about things that might happen in the future – we build these scary fear-based ideas about things possibly going wrong.
Your brain makes your body produce all of these chemicals and you end up experiencing these fear-based thoughts as if they are real as if they are happening to you, and what we then do is we remove ourselves from this experience because we don’t like how we are feeling.
So we disconnect but in the process of disconnecting we end up going deeper into our mind so you’re actually just making a bad situation worse.
We really want to get anchored into the present moment.
How do you know that you are not grounded?
When you spend a lot of time in your mind in your head and you will start to feel anxious. You’re going to feel irritable and you will also become exhausted.
When we carry a lot of pain inside of ourselves our instinctive reaction is to push away the pain.
We don’t want to feel the pain so we look for something that can numb or ease the pain. We lose ourselves in social media, or in the news coverage and even in our work or our computers.
When you do this for too long it distracts you from the truth of who you are.
When I am disconnected and I don’t feel grounded I literally feel like I’m floating.
I also end up feeling quite a lot of physical symptoms, such as dizziness, I’m very clumsy, I drop things and I bump myself.
Some other things that you might experience are that you can become very emotional, so you can cry a lot.
You can also feel like you’re in a bubble so when other people speak to you it’s almost as if they are speaking through a sheet of water. You really struggle to make that connection with someone.
Ways to ground yourself when you feel disconnected
1 Start with an intention
The first and most important thing, before you even choose any type of technique is to start with an intention.
There’s a lot of power in this because when you start with an intention you are already commanding your brain and instructing your mind. You are telling it what you’re going to do, even using a simple mantra or affirmation like I am grounded starts the process of you coming back and anchoring into your body.
Now you slowly start to create a new habit when you have this intention of being grounded throughout your day.
2 Use your body
We end up living in our minds a lot of the time but your body doesn’t live in the past or in the future. Your body is here in the present moment right now. When you intentionally put your attention on your body, you automatically pull yourself into the present moment you automatically anchor yourself.
So there are two ways in which you can use your body
- Through movement so either by consciously stretching yourself, doing yoga, or walking. Also vibrating where you just shake your whole body.
- You can also use your breath where you focus on how the air feels as you inhale and exhale. Do this a few times, but sit down because you might feel lightheaded!
3 Connect with nature
The third technique that you can do is to connect with nature.
Now I know that not everyone enjoys being in nature and that’s okay! You don’t have to be an outdoorsy type of person to still get the benefit of grounding with nature.
For those of you who like being outside, one of the best things that you can do is to go for a walk. Pay attention to your surroundings, look at the trees around you, feel the sun caressing your skin. Use all of your senses as you walk.
If you are someone who prefers to spend more time indoors that’s also alright. What you can do is if you stand near a window where the sun is shining through so you can feel the sun on your skin.
You can also use houseplants to connect with nature by touching the leaves or paying attention to the way that the stems are coming out of the soil. Really zone in and focus on that.
4 Use your imagination
As I already mentioned, your imagination is incredibly powerful your brain doesn’t care whether something is real or imagined, so you can really use imagination in its fullest power to support you.
Don’t let your imagination work against you, let it work with you!
The way that you can use your imagination is to literally visualize or imagine that you have a root growing out of the bottom of your feet. Imagine this root going down into the earth and anchoring you. Just as a big tree has strong roots that anchor it you can imagine that you have roots like that anchoring you into the earth.
5 Daily check-in
A daily check-in is such a valuable tool to have in your toolkit because you are really checking in with yourself here.
Often, because we’re so distracted by our jobs and by situations in our lives and by our children and by our families and by our bank accounts and our problems we forget to check in to see how we are doing on the inside.
That’s why a daily check-in can be such a powerful tool so do this when you wake up first thing in the morning:
Put your hand on your heart and then just ask: how am I feeling, how am I doing and then listen to the response. You can feel your way into the answer.
Learn to listen to your own inner wisdom because we know what it is that we need.
We don’t need to look to external saviours and rescuers to give us what we need or tell us what we have to do. You’ve got all the answers inside of you you just need to become quiet enough to hear what it is that you are saying.