Grounded Yoga®: A Path for Spiritual Awakening
I was drawn to practice yoga outdoors for as long as I have had an independent practice, circa 2012. I had been practicing while guided in fitness gyms and yoga studios for roughly 5 years prior, and the first thing I did when I began practicing on my own was take it outside. I didn’t consider any reason for this; I was generally an outdoorsy person and felt liberated at the ability to care for my body’s physical exercise without the need for anything more than my body and some space. I wanted the experience to be as natural as possible, I even did away with my rubber yoga mat in exchange for a handwoven cotton mat, something unheard of in sticky-mat addicted western yoga culture.
Soon after my personal park yoga practice had become a regular staple of my active lifestyle, I learned in passing from a wholistic physician that there is actual physiological benefit to connecting directly barefoot on the grass. The concept breezed through my awareness without much care, as I already had been developing a barefoot lifestyle as a means of healing running injury. With this plus my outdoor yoga practice, I was barefoot outside very regularly and knew I was receiving the benefits of grounding.
I had no idea the journey I was beginning to embark upon with this simple outdoor practice!
A year or so later, the concept of grounding was reintroduced to me in the form of a birthday gift- a set of indoor grounding sheets for my bed. It did not quite make sense to me how putting a cord into a wall meant I was grounded the same as when I was barefoot outside, so I began learning more by reading Clint Ober’s Earthing book and learned that the connection we are looking to make is electrical. The book had me sold through and through- between the studies that had already shown various physiological benefits to the understanding of how the earth receives its negative charge, I knew grounding was something that somehow was filling a gap in our understanding of health and wellness, because there’s clearly more to our wellbeing than simply diet and exercise.
I put the sheets on my bed and noticed no differences initially, probably since I was already grounding daily due to my lifestyle- so my story is not one of nearly instant miraculous healing as many others can share about grounding. I do, however, find it rather interesting that I conceived my first son the very same month I put the sheets on my bed!
The grounding sheets remained on my bed throughout my pregnancy, plus I kept my regular outdoor yoga routine, so I was grounded very often. I gave no other thought to it for quite some time.
My mindset then was still very conventional western. I was a front-line health care worker for many years, and concepts of ‘mindfulness’ or ‘meditation’ were much less the science-validated buzzwords they have become today. Nonetheless, I was striving to remove myself from the need for western medical intervention in my life and looking for more natural ways of living and thriving. With this, I wanted to deliver my baby naturally and free from medication. I used this desire as an opportunity to develop my yoga practice and ability to manage pain and discomfort from the inside out.
I bought a 108-bead mala and began developing a meditation practice with it, simply sliding the beads between my fingers on every exhale until the circle was complete. This simple practice allowed me to successfully reach my goal, my son was born free of medication or medical intervention, even within a hospital setting which, while it is still a challenge for many mothers today, was nearly unheard of at the time. During the birthing process I had a tremendous spiritual experience, which when combined with the reality-bending experience of new motherhood left me feeling not just like a new mother, but rather a completely new person from the inside out. I was no longer able to satisfy my mind on concepts of atheism as I had rested in for years. I was left with a new awareness and understanding that there is much more to this existence than meets our human senses.
I settled into motherhood, my yoga practice continued to deepen, and of course, I kept grounding all the while. My pregnancy had been planned and with it the expectation to stay home with my son while his father earned our family’s income. Soon after my son’s first birthday, however, something changed in me. I began to feel stir-crazy as a full-time mother. I have always been a helper, a teacher, and a healer, from my earliest years offering service to the community in high school as a lifeguard and peer tutor, to my pre-motherhood, 11-year tenure in direct patient care for medical laboratory.
I had enjoyed my former career as a medical lab assistant, but I didn’t want to return to it because with my newfound holistic approach to living I believed that the western medical system was no longer a place I belonged. I also knew that while the opportunity to stay home raising my son was a tremendous gift, the intensity of the role was a fleeting one and I wanted to have an outward purpose to focus on while simultaneously raising him. I wanted to contribute to my community’s healing and thriving in both a meaningful and unconventional way. As I was sitting with these ideas, and in very synchronistic and nearly simultaneous fashion, I received both my first job offer to instruct yoga at a gym, as well as a work from home position (a rare offering in a pre-pandemic world) with the same company that created and sold the grounding sheets I had been gifted a couple years before. I gladly accepted both opportunities, and as I hadn’t yet completed my formal yoga teacher training, I enrolled in that, too.
Along with the grounding job came a deep dive into learning everything I could about earth grounding and how it affects the human body. I was reading studies that showed things like better sleep, reduced inflammation and pain, improved balance, strength and coordination, mood, reduced delayed onset muscle soreness, sped wound healing, there was even a study done specifically on yoga practitioners to show improved blood viscosity when practicing while grounded. The list continues to grow with every published study, and I stayed (and continue to stay) in the loop with the latest information- more out of my own fascination than direct need for the clerical role I was serving.
While this understanding of grounding was unfolding, so was my yoga journey. Through my formal teacher training, I spent 6 months deep diving into traditional yogic texts and practices in the lineages of hatha, vinyasa, Iyengar, anusara, and kundalini. The knowledge and experiences intuitively felt wonderful, and I felt were expanding my life, but my skeptical western mind was still unable to fully accept their validity. Despite several deeply transformative experiences during meditation and training, they would quickly get brushed aside my realm of consciousness and my yoga practice remained very physical- which also suited the athletic gym-going personnel attending my yoga classes.
I was content to keep my practice and teaching at this seemingly superficial level, it was authentic as I too consider myself an athlete and at the time the mere act of leading a group was a tremendous step outside of my then- introverted comfort zone. It took several years to decide whether the profession was something I wanted to continue with due to the extreme bouts of anxiety I would have prior to every class I lead. I persisted despite this, using my teaching as my practice of leaning into discomfort. My students continued to offer words of encouragement and, inspiring above all, transformative experiences of their own that left me knowing this was a deeper calling I needed to continue to explore. I stayed in this rhythm of casually teaching yoga, working from home, and raising my son (and eventually daughter) for quite some time.
While I was practicing and studying in the realms of yoga and spirituality, these concepts were still very farfetched for my practical western mind. To this day, I do not incorporate or teach practices unless or until I have learned of some sort of scientific validation. I stayed up to date on emerging grounding studies thanks to my work with the grounding company, and in 2017 a new study was published that changed my understanding of reality completely.
This study was completed by grounding premature infants in the NICU and showed improved vagal tone. The term ‘vagal tone’ was foreign to me as was ‘vagus nerve’. As I researched, I learned that the vagus nerve is our nervous system’s superhighway- it basically dictates what state our nervous systems are in, controls what triggers and what calms us, and quite often gets stuck in one state or another. I also learned the meanings of terms like ‘heart rate variability’ (HRV), which is a marker to how well your nervous system responds to stress, and ‘trauma’, which is what causes our autonomic response to stress triggers based on our past experiences. I began to understand more about the human nervous system and how it uses electrical impulses to communicate back and forth between brain and body.
Once I learned what heart rate variability was, I realized I had overlooked some grounding studies published years prior simply because I didn’t speak the language. Multiple grounding studies had already shown indications of things like improved HRV and autonomic tone, pulse rate, respiratory rate… all markers for nervous system health and adaptability! I began focusing my learning less on yoga asana and more on the nervous system aspects of human physiology because to me this was mind blowing- if something so subtle as touching the earth could affect our mood and body’s ability to support homeostasis, doesn’t that give credibility to, well, ALL energy healing modalities? If grounding involves an electrical connection, and our nervous system uses electric impulses to function, doesn’t this explain the mechanism for exactly HOW grounding helps with things like sleep and inflammation? What about bio electrophysiology and how electrical frequencies affect our nervous system states? If science can show the energy of the earth affecting our bodies on levels we don’t necessarily feel, what’s to say any other ‘woo- woo’ energy healing practices aren’t?
This same year Stephen Porges’ now famed Polyvagal Theory was also published, which served tremendously to help me understand these things more clearly. With this new information available to me I began to learn exactly how deeply the state of our nervous systems affects not only our ability to operate in homeostasis physically, but how our subconscious neuroception- or your body’s autonomic sense of safety- affects the way we think, make decisions, and relate with others. When we are stuck in triggered, stress states we build inflammation and pain and lose sleep. When we sense safety in our surroundings and are shifting in and out of various states as a properly functioning system is designed to, we can heal, thrive, and create. I started learning about self and co- regulation techniques and found that there are practices we can do to help us become consciously aware of our autonomic state as well as shift ourselves out of stuck states and into desired states. I continue to learn and experiment with these self-regulation practices- typically different types of breathwork and meditation, tapping, also cold exposure, eye contact and smiles with friendly faces, play, movement, and balance work… something that stands out to me about grounding amid these many nervous system regulation techniques is that it’s the only one I found where there is no DO-ing required. Yes, of course you need to make sure your body is grounded… but that’s it. No mindfulness attention work, no breath focus, no pushing out of your comfort zone… if you’re grounded, you’re grounded, and your system is receiving benefit.
This independent study combined with my work with the grounding company shaped my spiritual journey. I was gifted the opportunity to work closely with such grounding pioneers as Clint Ober, Dr. Gaetan Chevalier, and the late Martin Zucker who all proved to be fantastic mentors. My yoga practice combined with my job began to deepen further during this same time around 2016-2017 when I began attending shows and conferences to help educate and sell the indoor grounding products. There was a particularly transformative segment of time when for several months in a row I was privileged to work weekend retreats at Deepak Chopra’s Retreat Center. We were not permitted to sell our products during the speaker’s presentations and guided meditations, so when I wasn’t serving to educate and ground the attendants I happily sat quietly in the back of the room for many fantastic lessons and deep meditations from such transformational teachers as Eckart Tolle, Byron Katie, Shefali Tsabury, Marianne Williamson, and of course Deepak himself. The insights received were life changing in and of themselves, and I was even able to attend one weekend retreat just for myself, a deeply transformational experience.
The Vedic knowledge I gained during this time allowed my mind to surrender to the meditative practices I had begun embodying. It is my belief that obtaining a balance of mental understanding of energy/ nervous system work, earth grounding on a near constant basis, and frequent meditative practice (and of course yoga asana all the while) created a magic potion that come late 2017 lead me to experience a spontaneous kundalini awakening- something I wouldn’t have believed to be real had I not experienced for myself.
I cannot find much science on this topic even still, and detail of the experience is its own story. For this writing, it is important to know that following my kundalini rising I was left with a fresh experience in my human body. It is my belief that through my ongoing wholistic practices, my nervous system found a space where it felt safe enough to release subtle, unconscious traumas and physical misalignments and shift to a level of homeostasis it had not been able to achieve previously. The way my skin felt to touch became much more sensitive, the way my body moved through space was much softer and more fluid, and… for the first time I began to be able to consciously sense whether I was grounded or not. After several years of physically grounding, studying grounding, and teaching about it, I could now feel it!
The first time I noticed the sensation, I was wandering my home whilst talking on the phone- a very ungrounded situation. As I chatted, I reached out intuitively and touched one of the many grounding mats I kept lying around (indoors or out, I keep grounded as much as I can!). Tension I didn’t even know I was keeping dissipated in a strong wave of tingles across my neck and shoulders. I felt my body take an autonomic sigh (a deep breath your nervous system initiates to regulate itself), then my whole body softened into a calmer state. To this day, this is the sensation I notice when I become grounded. I’ve also had so many experiences with grounding immediately calming panic and anxiety attacks (remember 2020?) that my body now intuitively seeks the grass outside at the first hint of racing thoughts.
With this tremendous new shift, my yoga teaching began to turn as well. Until this point, I was leading strength focused vinyasa classes indoors, and on grounded mats that nobody seemed to really understand what they were doing, though most willingly obliged simply because I said it was good for them. This wasn’t enough. Like me, most of my students could not feel the effect of being grounded with their conscious minds, certainly not within the confines of an hour focused on big, busy sun salutations! It simply wasn’t possible to squeeze in enough education or awareness while leading a movement class to entice them to seek a grounded lifestyle outside the walls of the studio.
How do I help people get it? To really understand how important it is to be grounded, whether it is felt or not?
In early 2018 the question started keeping me up at night. Well, it could have been pregnancy induced insomnia as I was with my second child, but either way I began waking up during wee hours of the morning, jotting down ideas and developing not just ways to promote the act of practicing yoga while grounded, but detailing a program to help practitioners understand logically the reasons it’s so important for our nervous systems to be grounded, while also developing conscious awareness of what our nervous system states are in so we can better respond to life’s situations accordingly. The development of this program began to shift the way my yoga asana practice looked and felt. I quit teaching in the beginning of 2018 to focus on welcoming my daughter earthside.
During the early months of my daughter’s life my study became less learned/scientific in favor of the felt/spiritual side of my practice. Of course, I continued my asana self-exploration. I spent some time dabbling in shamanic and sound healing. Through these journeys I learned to better trust my own intuition and to let my imagination wander and play. It was liberating! My ongoing felt experiences with kundalini lead to exploration into tantra yoga and some Hinduism. In many ways, the world felt brand new yet again. I was able to sense my surroundings in subtle new ways. When out on the trail, I could feel tapped into the energy of my environment. Animals stopped skittering in fear as my bare feet approached, instead meandering away with nonchalance. Unleashed dogs began joyfully approaching me, knowing they found a new friend. I could sense unspoken, unifying conversation with every living thing in my surroundings. After learning about and believing in source consciousness from many readings, I had come to a visceral understanding of the interconnected reality of existence.
My personal Grounded Yoga practice continued and in 2019 I began teaching again- but this time I went rogue, teaching exclusively outdoors as opposed to in studio (a very rare offering in a pre-pandemic world) in effort to get my grounding point across more efficiently. I started teaching in my local park touting, ‘no rubber mats’ to ensure a conversation and focus on electrical earth grounding would be had. At the end of 2019 I began hosting ‘Barefoot Walk + Yoga’ events encouraging not just earth grounding but the many other physiological benefits of barefooting, nervous system health, and of course yoga. My clients were having a great time playing in nature, ‘rewilding’ their systems, and learning about grounding. I’ve heard tales of rapid healing from injury, better sleep, faster recovery after hard exercise, better sense of wellbeing, and even child conception after years of trying to no avail.
As I’m sure can be guessed, this work was halted hard and firm in early 2020. While the rest of the world began to slow down from lockdowns, I found myself speeding up dramatically; continuing to work for the grounding company from home as ever, but now teaching my then kindergartener Zoom school, and potty training my newly turned 2-year-old. My Grounded Yoga practice, barefoot walking, and several other nervous system healing practices I had adopted served tremendously to help me cope with the demands of working, parenting small children, and homemaking in lockdown. My kids adjusted beautifully, my marriage remained peaceful, my home remained in order, I was making progress at work… but I was exhausted. My sleep was short, I was becoming emotionally reactive, and panic attacks were becoming a weekly routine. I knew something needed to give, and the only thing possible to let go of was my job, something my ego offered far too many reasons to keep doing. Eventually, my burnout left me susceptible to the virus, and I contracted it while quarantined in January, 2021. Of course, I stayed grounded constantly along with several other wholistic practices, and physically the virus had very little effect on me. My brain, however, experienced it differently. My burnout made my anxiety attacks unstoppable and recovering from brain fog and lost senses was impossible. I needed more rest and recovery than I could fathom. I reluctantly threw in the towel and resigned from my position in February 2021.
The rest of that year was spent receiving as much recovery as I could possibly muster for a full-time mother of a 3- and 7-year-old. I spent my days sleeping, eating nourishing food, playing (usually grounded and outside), and resting. While I was not able to offer any education for the community as I once intensely desired to do, at no point did I stop sleeping grounded, barefoot walking and practicing Grounded Yoga.
Grounding was the lifeline that tethered me to planet earth during the darkest night of my soul, when I was so exhausted that I longed to leave it.
Exactly one year after hitting my breaking point, after employing many natural healing and recovery modalities, I started to feel like a fresh version of myself again. I continued to study neuroscience and how the nervous system works. I started to apply newly learned breath work and other modalities to help my brain recover from burnout and bring my old energy levels back. It worked.
Social distancing mandates in my area had largely been lifted, especially on the outdoor services I planned to offer, and I started hosting barefoot walk + yoga events again, just once per month. As my healing continued, I developed an organized container for the Grounded Yoga training program that had come to mind what now seems like a lifetime ago- before the birth of my second child and pre-pandemic. I tracked down my old notes, many with time stamps like 2:22 or 3:33 am, from the moments my pregnancy discomfort and grounding questions would wake me at night. I began offering and refining the container while teaching weekly yoga classes in the park. This is the space I am in still at the time of this writing, and I am delighted to say our weekly Grounded Yoga in the park sessions are happily growing. I have been able to see many new and experienced yogis alike start to think about their bodies a bit differently, electrically, the way I began to so many years ago. I have been delighted to bear witness of countless ‘aha’ moments as practitioners begin to relate to themselves in new ways, and experienced yogis are finding their practice reinformed and reinvigorated. To my delight, I’ve even seen Grounded Yoga practitioners begin to share grounding education on their own social media pages! My plan to help more people get grounded and tap into their nervous system states is working.
In grounding, I have found not only my own healing and awakening, but I have found my life’s work.
It is my intention to develop a training program that helps other teachers and practitioners add this unique perspective of grounding, nervous system healing, and an understanding of bio electrophysiology in service to the conscious evolution of our society. It is my belief that a regulated nervous system is one that makes decisions based on connection and for the development of the collective. A stuck, protective system will choose based on self-preservation and to the detriment of the collective. A regulated nervous system can not only sense the presence of a dysregulated system, but also offer that system compassion and a sense of safety so it can shift toward healing.
If we want to shift the collective of our society toward a state of healing for both planet and humanity, start by taking one barefoot step on the earth.
- Research References
- Classification of EEG Signal for Body Earthing Application 2018
https://earthinginstitute.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/RahmanAl.EEG_
for_Body-Earthing_Application-2018-1.pdf - One-Hour Contact with the Earth’s Surface (Grounding) Improves Inflammation and Blood Flow -A Randomized, Double-Blind, Pilot Study 2015
www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=58836
15The Effect of Grounding the Human Body on Mood 2015
prx.sagepub.com/content/116/2/534.full.pdf+html - Grounding the Human Body during Yoga Exercise with a Grounded Yoga Mat Reduces Blood Viscosity 2015
http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=55445#,
VSa19_nF_7A - Emotional Stress, Heart Rate Variability, Grounding, and Improved Autonomic Tone: Clinical Applications 2011
https://earthinginstitute.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Emotional-stress-study.pdf - The Biologic Effects of Grounding the Human Body During Sleep as Measured by Cortisol Levels and Subjective Reporting of Sleep, Pain, and Stress 2004
https://earthinginstitute.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Cortisol-Study.pdf - Earthing: health implications of reconnecting the human body to the Earth’s
surface electrons.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22291721/ - The effect of grounding the human body on mood.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25748085/ - The biologic effects of grounding the human body during sleep as measured by cortisol levels and subjective reporting of sleep, pain, and stress.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15650465/
Connect | Move | Rewild 
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