I once thought that cultivating my spirituality would solve all my problems. I just had to become all loving, joyful and angelic and then whoosh! Life would be eternally wonderful. Unfortunately it’s not this simple.
There’s certainly a strong appeal to wanting to escape from the world into an airier, more transcendent state. But what if we could expand our spiritual awareness without running away from the physical realities of this earth-bound life?
The most difficult part is knowing when we’re ungrounded and then realising the value in coming back down to earth. There are certainly times when we intend to leave the density behind as we meditate, pray, sing mantra, use a substance of some sort, or get all carried away with a new spiritual learning. But there are also times when we’re simply going about our daily lives and we realise that we’re completely away with the fairies.
Both of these situations can lead to an ungrounded state of being and if you have anything resembling a regular life such as a family, car, home, job, pet, friends and actually, even just a physical body, both are problematic.
So what do we mean by ‘ungrounded’? It means that our awareness is focused outside of our physicality and our earth connection. We’re lost in thoughts, ideas, worries, creative inspiration, philosophical meanderings or spiritual devotion. We may even be giving a large chunk of our awareness to another person such as a lover, guru, teacher or author, giving our power and sense of self to them.
Being ungrounded creates a scenario where we’re not able to be fully present and healthily engaged with life. Here’s seven nasty side-effects:
- We become accident prone, forgetful and vague
- We’re not able to communicate effectively or consider other people’s needs properly
- We make poor choices around money, caring for our health, substance use and who to trust
- Our intuition becomes faulty because mental chatter interferes
- We get carried away with newly formed beliefs, business schemes and creative projects and fail to take practical matters into consideration
- We distance ourselves from anyone who doesn’t support our new world view
- The general feel of life becomes stressful and frustrating and we become disconnected from the people we love
So that’s the downside of being ungrounded. Here’s some suggestions for how we might strike the right balance between inspired and functional:
- Get into your body with yoga, dancing, walking in nature bare-footed, beating a drum, swimming, sitting on the ground outdoors to meditate and leaning against and hugging trees
- Pay attention to your breathing. Each time you become aware of getting carried away with your thoughts, place your hand on your stomach and consciously breathe in and out a few times
- Use moments of eating and drinking to be fully present with what’s going into your mouth and give thanks for what you’re receiving
- Practice active listening when talking with the people in your life. Look at them, take note of their body language, be curious about how they’re feeling and ask questions to clarify what they’re saying and reflect your understanding of what they’ve said, maybe like this: “So it sounds like your saying….”
- Cultivate an awareness of having your feet on the earth at all times. Take your attention to your feet multiple times a day and notice how they’re making contact with the ground
- Start the day with a visualisation of beams of light or roots coming out of the bottom of your feet and travelling down into the earth beneath you. Consciously anchor yourself to the planet and know that you’re always supported by that earth energy
When we’re grounded we’re calm, wise and thoughtful. All of the qualities that I reckon might just bring us a better world. Don’t you agree?
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