Grounding

Grounding has many benefits for the nervous system and the physiology, and gives a pleasant heaviness to life, a delicious resistance, like holding a stone in your hand. Grounding helps us feel held onto, in contact with the bigger body of the earth and all her natural materials.

Invitation for you: Explore the following EXA process, as a way to secure, expand, weight, and deepen your grounding.

Materials and Supplies: A large paper grocery bag you can cut up, or any paper you have that’s larger than your foot, + some mark making supplies - crayons, paint, pastels, sharpies, or whatever you have on hand.

Part 1: Set an intention related to grounding. Perhaps this is something you want to make realer, heavier, more settled, fleshy, or more palpable in your life, as in, I would like to ground my joy. Alternatively, you can set an intention about what you may like to ground into, sink deeper into, really get down into, as in, I want to dig into a drumming practice or I want to root deeper into my haunches’ body sensations.

I would like to ground my sense of…

I would like to root deeper into…

I would like to dig into…

I would like to hunker down into…

I would like to settle down into…

Part 2: Three to five minutes of standing and sensing. Take a standing position. Throughout this process, allow your body to move gently without making it, just allowing any swaying or rocking, as though she is a slender tree being stirred by the breeze. Unless your body wants to be still, that is fine too!

Sense into your feet. Notice any sensations there. To activate the feet further, experiment with shifting weight to the front of your feet, coming up onto the ball of your foot, lifting the heels up, and letting the heels drop. Do this a few times. Now lift your toes, rocking gently back to your heels, and let your toes drop down. Shift weight slowly all the way into your left foot, so that you could lift your right foot, then reverse. These do not need to be big movements, just notice whatever is there. Come back to center, and notice any sensations in your feet.

You may or may not notice any of the following sensations:

The temperature of the ground under your feet

Texture of the ground, the areas where your feet are pressing into the ground, the type of contact

A sense of space, the distance between your feet, or the weight of your body held up by your feet, some directionality

Inner sensations in the feet - areas that feel buzzy, pulsy, cloudy, achy, active, or areas that don’t have sensation

A sense of the bones, muscles, structure of your feet

Images that seem to go with sensing into your feet, eg of grass, sand, soil, rock

Whatever did or did not float into your awareness, you did it perfectly.

Part 3: Trace your Feet onto Paper

Using your cut up paper bag or another kind of paper, trace your feet. This doesn’t need to be perfect, a loose outline will do.

Part 4: Draw Roots coming out from your Feet

Imagine now the idea of roots sprouting from your feet and growing into the ground. Draw some roots or root-inspired lines coming from the tracings of your feet. There is no wrong way to do it. Allow this image to work with you however it comes.

Part 5: Fill the space inside your feet with marks, colors, lines, shapes or symbols that loosely represent the inner sensations you detect in your feet

Having drawn the roots from your feet, you may want to fill the insides of your feet tracings with color or other marks to indicate what your feet feel like to you, from the inside. These were the sensations you may have noticed while standing.

Part 6: Fill out the rest of the paper however you like

As feels right for you, following your own process, spend around 12 minutes filling out the rest of the work, doing anything that feels like it needs to be done. You can add a word or phrase, perhaps reflecting your original intention. Or if there is a title to the piece, you may want to record it.

Tip: It is natural to pause and reflect many times, to see what the work seems to want. Do not feel like you have to be continuously working. If you get stuck, on the other hand, go back to standing and sensing your feet, to get more information to record. Don’t overthink it, and don’t worry about the part that doesn’t get it while you’re in the flow, the harvest of meaning will come later on.

Part 7: Stand on the piece and sense what you have created

Finally, stand on your piece, placing your feet in the original outlines and look down at what you have created in response to your grounding intention. If you are feeling satisfied and happy with this place, feel free to end the process at this point.
If you are intrigued or perturbed, however, you may want to do a further step of writing a dialogue with your piece (Part 8).

Part 8: Have a conversation with your Artwork

Write down a dialogue between yourself and this piece you have created. You can do this as if you are an interviewer, and the artwork is being interviewed for a magazine, like so:

Me: I am so excited to be talking to you, thank you so much. I can’t tell you how long I have been waiting to ask you some of these questions.

Foot Drawing: Sure, go ahead. I’m happy to talk, too.

Me: Ok, well, first off, I noticed that there seemed to be quite a difference between the left foot and the right foot, just in terms of the choice of colors. Can you tell me any more about that?

Foot Drawing: Oh, yes. Well the right foot is full of this kind of solar sunshine plasma energy, you see it’s radiating energy into the earth, like sunlight seeping into the soil. The left foot is more like drawing water up from deep underground. That’s why while you were working on the left side, you kept hearing that Talking Heads line “under the rocks and stones, there is water flowing…”

Me: Yes, that’s right, thank you so much. Well that brings me to another question. I found that while I was working on this, a Part of my mind was kind of anxious, noting that the left side was almost visualizing standing on rocks in a stream, and it didn’t seem so stable…I was wondering if you have any thoughts about that…

Foot Drawing: Oh, yes, well you do have a tendency to question everything, you know. You were worried what might show up in the drawing, and didn’t want it to be ugly. You were kind of worrying about feelings of purity, hence wanting this kind of pristine, cold mountain stream feeling there, that always makes you feel so fresh and pure, like to put your feet into the rainbow-flecked water at the bottom of a waterfall, you like that kind of thing.

Me: Yes, I do. You’re right. Do you have any advice…

Foot Drawing: We would just say, first of all, it’s ok that you want to be pristine and clean, it’s not a bad thing, it’s all right. And maybe it helps you to imagine that your left foot is standing on white volcanic rock, but very smooth, with a lot of water just flushing through it, but it’s still firm and strong.

Me: Yes, as you say that, I’m feeling very soothed by that. Like I need something strong and steady to stand on, to receive from, but I also want it to be pure and safe, like, nothing bad for me.

Foot Drawing: Yes. You have had trouble with filtering before, right? Like taking in things that aren’t actually good for you, feeling sort of like slimed or sludged by what you can’t help but take in. This is like, making sure the clean clear waters that you drink in through the left side, receptive Part of you, can be filtered. Like clean, pure, alpine spring water, from the Source (winks significantly).

Me: Thank you so much. (smiling).