The Practice:
Take off your shoes or sit on the ground with no more than cloth under you.
Breathe deeply and bring awareness to your physical experience.
Stand or sit like this for 5 to 15 minutes.
Why Try This Practice?
In the last few decades, environmental medicine has addressed the negative impacts of environmental factors on human health (think: pollution), but less attention has been given to the positive and essential effects of our natural environment. Yet there is mounting scientific evidence for the benefits of making direct, physical contact with the earth.
We are earthlings, after all. It makes sense that our bodies benefit from direct contact with the natural environment. And, of course, we don’t need peer-reviewed studies to affirm what we can directly experience: connecting with nature feels good!
Walking barefoot on soft grass or standing in a forest is revitalizing. Being near a large body of water is cleansing and soothing. Lying against a smooth boulder or in a grassy meadow is relaxing and restful. Our bodies, our nervous systems positively respond to direct connection with nature…it brings us home.
This is the experience of being grounded.
Science suggests that Earth’s surface maintains health, prevents disease and provides clinical therapy. Earth freely gives us electrons that support the normal functioning of all our bodily systems—such as setting our internal “clock,” regulating rhythms like cortisol secretion, and perhaps reducing acute and chronic inflammation.
For nearly all of human history we enjoyed intimate contact with our natural world. Sleeping close to the ground, foraging and working the land for food, walking barefoot or wearing porous shoes all allow the earth’s free electrons to enter the body and stabilize the electrical environment of our organs, tissues, and cells. Modern lifestyles have dramatically separated us from the regulating properties of Earth. We are increasingly un-grounded, and some researchers correlate this separation to our dramatic increase in chronic illness, immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases.
It seems our bodies are literally aching to be grounded.
Meditation is another ancient practice that positively connects us. Harvard neuroscientist, Laura Lazar, who studies the science of mediation, found that it positively influences some of the same functions that have been linked to touching Earth’s surface. Meditation settles our nervous system. It grounds us. Like walking barefoot and sleeping under the stars, meditation helps us feel deeply connected to life—it too is a way to bring us home. Exemplifying the benefits of both these practices are villagers in the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau region. Reportedly, they still live close to the land, weave meditation into everyday life, and radiate the contentment of being deeply grounded.
While our lifestyles might be in stark contrast to the people of Tibetan highlands, we can still practice connecting to Earth. A daily visit to an urban park, to stand barefoot or sit on the grass, can nourish our connection. While there, we might gift ourselves 5 to 15 minutes of quiet meditation and enhance the effects.
Small acts like these can replenish our bodies and remind us that we are Earthlings. They might lead us to appreciate the generous nature of this home, and inspire us to better tend to the reciprocity that all life requires.
Explore with me through Creative Catalyst or The Gladstone Creative Community Lab, a community supported project to artfully co-create a New Earth culture.