Grounding: The Earth Beneath Our Feet. {poetry}
{source}
During my childhood in Minnesota, almost every hour I wasn’t in school, I spent outdoors — climbing trees, playing with my dog Gypsy, helping my mother grow vegetables, swimming in the lake on my grandfather’s farm, digging in the dirt around our house for treasured stones, or in winter, sliding down snow hills on my sled.
My connection with nature extended to an early interest in natural modes of healing. In my twenties, I took metaphysical classes wherein I learned about affirmation, prayer, and visualization. Later, I became interested in acupuncture and herbal medicine, eating whole foods, using essential oils for healing, meditating, and even writing about healing.
A friend told me about The Earthing Movie and The Grounded, both documentaries about grounding. The principle of healing taking place through walking barefoot on the Earth made sense to me. “Simply stated, grounding means tapping into the Earth’s always accessible, powerful natural energy to rebalance our bodies and reclaim our health.”[i]
Although Earthing is a rather new movement started in the 1990s, the terms grounding and Earthing seemed to be used interchangeably to mean therapeutic activities that ground or electrically reconnect us to the earth.
Earthing is one of the most natural and safest things you can do to have better health, a missing variant in the healthcare equation. Our hearts, brains, muscles, nervous and immune system are electrical subsystems that can be charged by Earth.
It’s easy to incorporate Earthing into your day — just walk or sit with your feet on the grass, sand, or dirt. Water is also grounding, whether you swim in a lake or put your feet into the ocean or a river; even taking a shower or bath can be grounding.
20 to 30 minutes per day can do wonders, a remedy there for the taking, and a free one at that. If you get an opportunity, watch the documentaries. Then, try grounding, and let the Earth do its magic!
***
Hardly anyone walks barefoot anymore.
The direct connection
has been broken
between the earth and our feet.
There is a story
of an indigenous woman
telling a white child,
Take off your shoes;
they will make you sick.
He doesn’t understand why —
his feet too tender to roam
about without sneakers,
his generation separated
from sources of natural healing.
We are electrical beings
who need Mother Nature’s
energizing charge.
They say if we walk shoeless
on sand, grass, even bare dirt,
our blood flows easier,
our cells swim more freely.
Inflammation is released,
sicknesses cured —
from merely letting the Earth’s powers
pulse up through our bodies.
This kind of elation I have known
for a long, long time.
My soles belong to the wooded forest,
to the beaches, the waves,
to the powdery shore.
[i] Sharon Whitely and Ann Marie Chiasson. Barefoot Wisdom: Better Health Through Grounding. Atglen, PA: Red Feather Mind, Body, Spirit, 2018.
***
Carolyn Chilton Casas is a Reiki Master and teacher. Her stories and poems have appeared in Braided Way, Energy, A Network for Grateful Living, Reiki News Magazine, Touch, and in other publications. You can read more of Carolyn’s work on Instagram or in her first collection of poems titled Our Shared Breath.
***
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