In our chronically overstimulating and fast-paced world, it is challenging to stay grounded, fully present, and calm. The pace of life has us continually operating in the red zone, with our internal engine persistently running at high RPMs, thus overloading our nervous system and depleting our adrenals. In turn, our natural biorhythms get out of sync. We override our body’s instincts telling us to pause or rest. We feel out of sorts, ungrounded, irritable, exhausted.
Energetically, when we are stressed, overwhelmed, spinning, or anxious, our life force moves up higher in our body and our roots come unmoored from the earth.
We essentially unplug from our grounding. When our energetic circuit is “broken” with the earth, all that excess energy doesn’t have a place to discharge. It spins and builds in our upper chakras.
In electricity, grounding is a system that serves as a backup pathway, providing an alternative route for electrical current to follow back to the ground in case of a problem in the wiring system. In our human energy bodies, the principle is similar. Everything becomes more strained and contracted, and internal “pressure” increases when we are disconnected from our grounding. When our life force energy is essentially forced higher into the body through stressful deadlines, overworking, too many obligations, and not enough downtime, our system literally goes haywire (a term that alludes to the wire used for bundling hay, which is hard to handle and readily tangled).
It is an essential self-care practice to take time to slow down, re-establish your own innate biorhythms, decelerate the RPMs to idle and reconnect your grounding. Lowering your energetic center of gravity is a term I created that encompasses all these ideas. It means to drop more deeply into your body and allow the spinning chaotic energies that have risen into the upper chakras to release, unwind, come back down to their natural center of the body, and circulate life force evenly throughout your entire energy field. And, most critically, re-plug back into the earth.
Different cultures have different names for this human “energetic center of gravity.” It is called the dan tien in Chinese disciplines, Qosqo in Peruvian shamanic traditions, and hara in Japanese medicine and martial arts. All of these ancient cultures recognize that there is a natural “home” for the locus of our energy, roughly centered a couple of inches below the navel.
Accomplishing this re-seating is not a difficult task and you can create a significant change in your system in just a few moments. However, it does require awareness and discipline to maintain over time.
Depending on how “wound up” you are, it might take a number of minutes or even hours to unwind and return to your body’s natural tempo and biorhythms. If your life is unceasingly overstimulating, then keeping your energetic center of gravity seated in its natural home might require considerable lifestyle changes.
Follow these steps to lower your energetic center of gravity:
- Standing is the best way to accomplish this as it stacks your chakras and aligns your body vertically. Have both feet flat on the ground (without shoes is preferable and outside is even better).
- To begin…deep, slow breaths bring the focus of your consciousness inward and signal the body to relax and lower your heart rate, blood pressure and the harmful effects of the stress hormone cortisol. Close your eyes to remove external distractions.
- Focus next on your out-breath, consciously intending that you are clearing your energy field of disharmonious energies and releasing them to the earth. Do this several times.
- Allow the flow of energy between you and the earth to stream in both directions, releasing tension down your body and inviting your energetic roots to reconnect as well as receiving the beneficial life force and support up into your field.
- Bend your knees assuming a shallow “horse stance,” and wiggle your body a little bit. Shake, rotate, sway, articulate each joint…whatever movement your body naturally wants to offer.
- Connect with your spiritual team, higher guides, Creator, or animal helping spirits.
- Visualize your energetic center of gravity lowering. Tune into where it was when you began this exercise and use your intention to move it back down your body to its natural home in the lower abdomen. It is common to experience a comfortable sense of heaviness, calm and even a figurative “click” as it settles.
- Repeat multiple times a day as needed!
If you practice martial arts, yoga or other physical disciplines, you are probably familiar with “horse stance.” In Asian martial arts, horse stance is an important, fundamental pose. It consists of standing with legs bent deeply at the knees, feet wide, with the torso upright. It facilitates several valuable effects: it lowers your center of gravity (which makes it harder for an opponent to knock you down or destabilize you), it creates greater flexibility (because knees and hips are flexed instead of rigid and you can move more fluidly from a stable position), it develops strength in core, back and leg muscles (which increases vitality, improves posture and boosts confidence), and it promotes improved balance (allowing you to shift weight from one foot to the other and operated with more grace.)
Stability…flexibility…fluidity…strength…confidence…balance…grace. These are the effects of being embodied, present, grounded and having your energy center seated in its native home. In creating new habits, the psyche responds well to physical cues. As you develop this practice, consider dropping your body into a shallow horse stance as a signal for your energetic system to begin its recalibration. Over time, “muscle memory” will kick in and you will be able to achieve this grounding result more quickly and effortlessly.
