What is Grounding and Why is it So Important?

Grounding is a subject that is widely talked about in the self-help world. However, it’s also a technique that’s often confused with other methods, which are similar in nature and provide many of the same benefits. To clear any confusion, grounding means to rid yourself of foreign excess energy that no longer serves you. It is not any of the following:

• Taking in Earth energy
• Being ‘focused and centered’ within your body
• Eating root vegetables

These are all great and can bring you back to Earth, so to speak, but, while centering is a common result of grounding, these techniques are not the same as grounding. Making sure your definitions are correct can enable you to choose the right practice at the time you’re in need of it.

The importance of grounding is that carrying excess foreign energy can lead to several different symptoms or ailments. Let’s explore these in turn, starting with the effects on the body.

Physical

The first area affected is the nervous system, which becomes frayed, leaving your nerves feeling completely raw and exposed. This results in sensitivity to much or even all of the stimuli around you (i.e. you’re constantly in stress-mode) and can actually build up to the point of creating pain or illness in the body, as well as symptoms like fatigue or weight gain.

While not all stress, pain or disease is a result of carrying excess foreign energy around, it is a common cause for some people, particularly with empaths. Furthermore, when there is an issue with nervous system or auto-immune problems that are unexplainable or where the doctors can’t find anything wrong, more often than not, it points to an energetic imbalance, which can include hanging on to excess foreign energy that is no longer serving you.

Emotional

Human emotion ties intimately with the physical body, in that it can also affect the nervous system and cause pain. However, at this level, it can go even further to create a sense of losing yourself. This is especially important for emotional empaths to take note of because, by nature, they navigate and understand the world through emotion. When you carry around everyone else’s emotional energy, it’s all too easy to lose track of your own.

Feeling as though you’re crazy, depressed, bipolar or otherwise emotionally unstable is a common result of this sense of losing yourself and can exacerbate the situation. It’s important to note that this emotional roller coaster ride DOES NOT control you, DOES have a stop button and, yes, you can achieve it!

Mental

If jumbled emotions aren’t bad enough, excess foreign energy can also result in jumbled thoughts. In other words, you may be running long-done conversations in your head or feel clogged up with random, fractured thoughts that don’t really get you anywhere and seem to have no meaning. It’s safe to say that, if your emotions are on a roller coaster, your brain is on a runaway train to nowhere.

Not only is this uncomfortable, it inhibits your mental clarity and ability to take the actions you need to take…it can even affect your intuition. When there is so much in your head that is not of your own making, it chain reacts to your inner direction. The guiding voice that you may have come to rely on becomes drowned out in the noise.

Spiritual

When you hang on to the energy, beliefs and judgments of others, it can significantly block your path to spiritual growth and abundance. For example, many of us were told as children that we couldn’t have something because money doesn’t grow on trees. When you choose to hold onto this belief, it can become ‘stuck’ and you begin to create that belief in your life, creating a reality where there’s just not enough money.

Probably the biggest spiritual hurdle we face when dealing with foreign excess energy is that it holds us back from creating the life we truly want to live. One way to picture this is as a cup that is completely full of tea, to the brim. Even one more drop could spill it over, so the cup cannot hold anything else. When your body, mind and spirit are so full, it makes it so that you are unable to bring anything new or wonderful to your life…even if you are actively doing all of your manifesting processes.

The importance of grounding shows itself most in its ability to remove a ‘stuckness’ from your life and open you up to new experiences and realities, making it a crucial technique to take into practice.