9 Tips For Getting Grounded

When it comes down to returning to our center state, there are two important keys. One is perspective; the other is action. You must take an action to gain perspective. It’s that perspective that brings calm.

Triggers, like anything else that upsets the applecart of our life, embodies the energy of chaos. Now, whether that chaos is perceived, felt, or seen doesn’t matter; it’s still chaos to the person experiencing something other than their resting state.

As with all the posts in this series, I’ve had to go back and review all the things I’ve learned about getting to getting to the root of my triggers and how to navigate through dealing with people during one.

That last post definitely hit a nerve for me, but it forced me to take another layer of dead skin off; no regrets, it was healthy and my skin is softer now for speaking about it. I had to go through the motions of figuring out which of the many methods of getting myself centered hit the sweet spot this time around, though.

Now that this energy has passed for me; it’s a great time to share with all of you what I did and the new thing I learned while getting myself grounded again. Maybe something on this list can help you too.

1. Ask your higher self

Bust out your tarot , oracle, or preferred method of divination and ask your higher self. As someone who has had tarot as a part of their life since childhood; this is often my go-to for insight. It took a while to learn how to read myself though. Many tarot readers struggle with this too, no matter how long they’ve been working with the cards. The problem is, when reading for yourself, it can be difficult to remain objective. This is even more apparent if it is something that has you even slightly emotionally off center. Kind of like the whole forest-tree thing.

I run into this as well occasionally, even now, but I’ve learned a few tricks along the way to help prevent it.

First, I really think about the question that I have. The question is always the key to unlocking the guidance that tarot can provide.

Second, I don’t touch my cards right away. I wait and marinate in that one question so the energy of that question is stronger than anything else that might be flying through my head regarding the situation.

Third, I pull no more than two cards ( or after the first two cards that fly out the deck) and I always look at the bottom of the deck. In my opinion, looking at the bottom of the deck is a great way to highlight the theme of what it is that you’re NOT seeing.

Last, I stick to standard interpretations I have developed for each card and look at the facts of the cards only.

I’m very logical and literal when doing readings for myself, it works better for me to leave the intuition out of it to prevent the lack of objectivity that can sometimes creep in. Nearly every time the cards tell me what I would like to know too. I say nearly because sometimes getting an answer from the tarot may be what we want, but tuning into to ourselves for the answer is what is really needed. My decks and I have a routine, there’s even certain cards that will come out or physical symptoms that happen to let me know there’s no more information, so this approach works really well for me. I border on retentive sometimes so for type A folks, this method could work really well for you too, regardless of divination medium.

As a side note; The Psychic Tarot by John Holland is perhaps one of my favorite modern decks to work with for reading myself too. There’s no court cards in this deck, so I recommend this one as a good deck for those who primarily read themselves who run into issues interpreting the court cards when reading themselves.

2. Exercise

There’s this whole thing about exercise that seems incredibly daunting if it’s something that isn’t already a part of your routine. That said, even those of us who do as part of our routines, have days where you’re just REALLY not feeling it. Exercise, beyond it being a part of a healthy physical lifestyle, is also one that is part of a healthy mental one, too. Think about a runner’s high, or how deeply you can breathe after you’ve finished gaining elevation on a hike after an hour.

Those endorphins that flow through our body after a workout help to quiet the mind. There are plenty of studies on this, I won’t link any of them here, but if you are curious about this concept, I suggest a deep internet search to learn more. It goes without saying as well, look for credible resources.

3. Self-Care

Self-care is sometimes a misnomer in my mind because the term alludes to doing something to yourself. However, I think self-care goes beyond this. Taking the car through the carwash and cleaning it out at the end of the day doesn’t really seem like it’s doing much in the terms of self-care until you realize how having that clean car actually affects your mood, especially if you have to spend a large part of your day in it. The same could be said about cleaning off your work desk, kitchen table, or going through your clothes closet too. Of course, there are the usual paths for self care like taking your time doing makeup, grooming your beard, or even putting lotion on your skin after a carefully prepared bath. My point is doing something FOR yourself is healthy self-care just like doing something TO yourself.

The point of this is to create the calm externally that facilitates calmness internally. Outer order for inner calm. I just listened to this book by Gretchen Rubin and it was really insightful. This leads me to the next two on this list.

4. Spiritual Cleanse

So, back to that bath thing. A common way to clear your energy and get grounded is by taking a spiritual bath or shower. This consists of a few items you probably already have in your home.

• Non-iodized sea salt ( 1 lb)
• Epsom salt ( 1 cup)
• Essential oils( rosemary, lavender, cedar, or citrus are good ones) or an oil/water/powder curio of your choice ( uncrossing, blockbuster, or road opener, just to name a few)
• Add your ingredients to the bath or bucket( to pour over your head and body) and you’re good to go. Don’t forget to say a prayer, set an intention, or meditate over the water first.

You want to make sure that your physical body is clean before you spiritually cleanse. This is not a bath or shower meant to scrub your skin, you don’t even do it for more than maybe 15 minutes. It’s more to repair any holes that might be in your aura, evict attachments that might be hanging around, or ward off stray negative energy that thought your energy looked tasty. We all pick up these in one form or another at one time or another as we move about our days interacting with people and the more people we interact with, the more likely it is that someone’s stank energy will try to follow you home. Some places are notorious for this too; think abandoned buildings, cemeteries, and places where a lot of suffering has occurred.

Smudging with sage works well, same with Palo Santo, frankincense, Benzoin, copal, cedar, etc.; but, water is the source of life and the universal solvent, literally. So, to give yourself a recharge if life is feeling chaotic or dissolve negative energies and entities, I recommend to all my clients to begin implementing a spiritual bath or shower at least once a month, twice is better, and if you can time it with the moon cycle it will be an even more potent method of cleansing and protection because all that ick goes down the drain leaving you with squeaky clean energy heading into the next cycle. If you work with the public in any capacity, but especially in a metaphysical or magickal capacity as a reader or healer, it may be worth looking at doing this once a week, especially when collective tensions are high like they are this fall and people are seriously on edge.

5. Clean Your Space

I touched on this one a little bit when I spoke about self-care, but I separated it because the intentional act of physically cleaning your space is a mirror reflection of you intentionally clearing your mind. When we have too much clutter around us, it can seriously stagnate our energy. I won’t pretend like I have mastered this one. In fact, it wasn’t until someone pointed this out to me several years ago that I even made the connection, but I am a lot more conscious of how my space makes me feel and what it looks like when my energy feels off. Even when I was an baby, I wouldn’t sleep if I was around a lot of clutter. My mom is a Virgo, so I imagine that this wasn’t an issue that happened a lot, but it must have happened enough to show her that it was a pattern. The way she describes it; we’re talking one or 2 toys on the floor with a blanket across the room and my ass was keeping her up all night.

Not much has changed. I didn’t realize this as an adult until I consciously looked at my surroundings and listened to what my body was telling me while I was doing so that I knew how that manifested in my mood and behavior. What I have found for myself is that the first sign that I need to address my space, outside of a nasty case of insomnia, is that I get agitated. When I’m around a lot of clutter, physical energy feels like it’s a myth, and my fuse tends to be shorter. Not sure why that’s how I tend to react, but I do, so these have become indicators that something isn’t being addressed in my space.

There is a saying I read, or maybe I heard it from one of the readers that I used to watch frequently on YouTube ( I think it was House of Oshun), and I’m paraphrasing here, that, “before you reach for the sage and holy water, reach for the mop and broom”. #truthdotcom

6. Reflection

Reflecting on what has been going on is always a good way to get into a state of presence. This can be a truly enlightening experience for perspective when done correctly. In the version of this I practice, the correct way to utilize reflection is with mental detachment. It’s that detachment that allows you to feel your body and when you can feel your body you get a deeper lesson about how you’ve been impacted by previous and current events. I have a lot of mutable energy in my chart, so I really do have to shut it all off sometimes to get to the nitty gritty.

For example, in that last post I did, I realized I was still really angry about everything that went down when I was in college, but I was able to get a lot deeper to the core reasons of why that anger was still present and take accountability for the decisions I made that got me there in the first place. This allowed me to take responsibility for my own actions without chastising myself for them. Instead, I was able to learn another valuable lesson in the hindsight of that experience. Ultimately, that’s the outcome you want from reflection because the goal is to help you grow as a person.

6. Meditate

I’ve said this a few times and even despite my current inability to get beyond 7 minutes of meditation I still urge this practice to anyone who is seeking a state of internal balance. Meditation helps to clear the mind. Period. It can be difficult to suss-out a laundry list of current challenges when you’re thinking about them all at once. The trick is really to not think about them at all and the solutions will come to you. This is where meditation is the most potent. When you get to a certain state in meditation, you stop thinking your thoughts and you begin to observe them.

There is no set amount of time or frequency that meditation needs to be done; I feel it’s the practice itself that is more important than meeting an arbitrary amount of time doing it. Amazing benefits can result, even from a mere 7 minutes.

7. Go for a walk

There are studies out there that talk about the connection that humans intricately have to nature and how we move through it, again, not linking them here but I encourage you to do your own research. The studies i’ve read say It lowers our blood pressure, contributes to positive mental and emotional health, and it’s been shown statistically that cities and towns with greenspaces have better rates in everything. Now, I could go into a whole spiel about the barriers that some communities experience with this but I’ll save that for another time. There is an energetic signature when it comes to inequality and that definitely deserves it’s own blog post. Heads up, it will probably be a long one.

Anyhoodle, going for a short hike, or even just walking in a park can go a long way to help ground your energy because movement helps to release pent up energy; think kinetics. I did opt for this with this last trigger cycle, and I did feel great; but the affects I’ve come to love about this activity didn’t seem to linger very long this time around, so after a few days I found myself in the same agro energy again. I have a hypothesis about why this happened though, so I’ll have to experiment a bit to see if what I suspect is correct in why this didn’t work as well as it has in the past.

8. Bring nature to you

For those of you out there that are allergic to going out in nature, literally or metaphorically speaking, you can always bring nature to you. Get some fresh cut flowers ( if that literal allergy will allow it), get a houseplant or a few, grow some herbs in your windowsill. Having nature in your space also brings good energy into it.

I personally love to garden! I ended up with a very large community garden plot this year and after getting a routine going, it was easy to tell when I couldn’t get out there because my energy would feel weird. For me, gardening is like having a glass of wine after work is for some people. I always feel relaxed and am able to decompress, even if I’m just weeding or watering the plant family. I find it meditative to watch the pollinators go to work turning a flower into something that can sustain my body in a healthy way. There really is nothing like it I’ve found that strips all of the off-kilter energy that can sometimes enter my life through external challenges.

It was gardening and engaging with nature that helped me get through my Dark Night of the Soul. While overall the whole process of the Dark Night really sucks ass, somehow; working with plants made it all a little easier to bare and helped me become even more self aware by tuning into caring for them. It’s still strange to me how it all shook out, but by putting the focus on something external to me, it in fact helped me find the balance I was seeking internally. It redirected my focus from a very painful and ugly healing process to something that was inspiring and beautiful.

For this last trigger round, this was the grounding method that did the trick.

9. Staying in the present- Find the time sucks and evict them!

This one was new, the most eye-opening, and something I hadn’t considered before going through this last trigger cycle as a way to get grounded. It seems, that with deep reflection; you’ll naturally find the things that kind of don’t fit in your life anymore; time-sucks. Old activities won’t have the same sparkle keeping your interest the way it used to, especially if they were bordering on toxic to begin with. In my case, the most shocking was the realization that I might have some food allergies I wasn’t aware of (sorry kiwi), random, right? I’ll dive deeper into the weird stuff that happens with food on the spiritual journey another time. The point is, being in the present comes as a natural result of the activity that is reflection, and this can help not just with triggers, but the time you spend moving throughout your everyday too because it forces you to slow down. I found quite a few time sucks but I was able to correct them because I allowed myself to observe where I was putting my energy.

I hope you enjoyed this series. As drawn out as it was :-). Definitely wasn’t my intention to take 6 months to get through it!

Sometimes when you step into the role of sharing and teaching these kinds of things, you have to revisit your own wounds. I’m grateful for the space allowed to work through this at the pace that was right for me. One reason why I’m coming to like blogging a lot more than I like uploading on YouTube. A blog post or two a month.. or every few months in my case can’t really relay just how much work I was putting into my own wounds in the background by discussing this idea of triggers or even how much healing occurred as a result of it. It makes me smile; I don’t believe anything really happens by chance. So, just like all of you reading this; I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, taking the next steps on my way towards personal and spiritual ascension. It’s the awareness of this that matters most. Keep growing, misfits.