After Sunday’s worship service, where we explored what “grounding” means in a spiritual sense, two different members of the community brought up the idea of electrical grounding.

We considered that taking time to ground ourselves might be about focusing our awareness on our connection to Earth, our values, our inner wisdom or the Divine, and to other people. The act of grounding might invite us to be aware of the trust that is possible within each of those connections.

Electrical grounding (also called earthing!) offers another facet of this wisdom. Electrical grounding creates a safe path for excess power to escape a system. It’s a safety mechanism for reducing the risk of shock, electrocution, and fires.

If you’ve ever shuffled across a carpet in warm, fluffy socks and then touched a metal doorknob (or an unsuspecting family member), you may have gotten a little shock from static electricity. You were carrying an excess charge, and that power didn’t have a safe place to go, so it got released in a sudden burst that probably was more surprising than painful. In some systems, more excess power can build up than what we experience from shuffling around in fluffy socks, and that excess power can be destructive.

We also can carry around a bit of an excess charge sometimes. We hold onto judgments, anger, indignation, resentment, false perceptions, imagined motivations, and all sorts of other things that can be destructive in our relationships and communities. If we don’t practice a bit of earthing, that excess charge can cause the emotional and psychological equivalent of electrocutions or fires.

So, maybe a piece of grounding as a spiritual practice is also giving some of that charge a safe place to escape our system. Maybe a piece of grounding is not only settling into the trust we have for gravity and the connection we have to the Divine or inner wisdom. Maybe grounding is also recognizing that our perceptions may be wrong. That the stories we are telling about other people may be incomplete. That our connections with other people are worth protecting from emotional electrocution.

Then, we can give some of that excess charge back to Earth. Or release it into the ether. Or however else we want to safely imagine it leaving our systems. And in letting that excess charge escape, maybe we open space for reconciliation and repair.

All of the earthy parts of us already know this. There may be other parts of us that feel like it’s really important to hold onto all of the excess charge. Maybe it gives us a sense of power or makes us feel protected. Grounding is a way of reminding those parts of us that we are safe, that we can choose to trust, and that there is a different sort of power in that choice—a power that’s less likely to destroy something we care about.

May all of your parts be nourished by your practice of grounding or earthing, however that takes shape for you. And may it be a place to recalibrate, release what isn’t needed, and restore a sense of being connected and upheld.      

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