How to Stay Grounded in Challenging Times

How to Stay Grounded in Challenging Times
By M. Chia & D. Saxer in Management on November 15th, 2009 / No Comments
These are challenging times, with vast economic, environmental, and spiritual changes. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with stress, worry, or depression – to feel out of control, ungrounded. Staying grounded is our safest and most effective strategy for coping with today’s challenges and finding positive solutions.

Grounding is the kinesthetic sense of being fully present in our body and our environment, moment by moment. It’s the continual flow and integration of sensory, emotional and mental stimuli. Like a sturdy tree, we bend and sway in a storm, but we’re rooted in our core.

A lack of grounding comes from an imbalance in our energy and our body. We feel uneasy, confused, unsettled. Unless it’s corrected, insufficient grounding can make us accident-prone. It can also escalate and cause physical and mental problems. We’ll discuss some of these later.

So how do we stay grounded in the midst of chaos? For thousands of years, Chinese Chi Kung (Qigong) has provided practical techniques for strengthening our grounding. Here are nine immediate ways to improve grounding. These and additional ways are covered in our new book, EMOTIONAL WISDOM: Daily Tools for Transforming Anger, Depression, and Fear,

1. Feel and accept all your emotions; they’re valuable messages from your soul. The positive, joyful emotions tell us we’re doing great. The painful ones tell us we’re out of balance, some situation needs improving, and the painful emotion needs transforming. If it’s not transformed, and it persists, that emotion will embed itself in our body, causing malfunction and eventually, disease.

There are Six Healing Sounds that dramatically transform painful emotions. Here’s how to do one of them, which is called the Relaxation or Sleep Sound. Lie down. Close your eyes and inhale deeply through your nose, inflating your abdomen, which also inflates your chest. Slowly exhale as you say the sound HEEEEE, deflating your chest, then your abdomen, and then, sending the sound down your whole body, into the earth. Rest and breathe naturally; your temperature will even out. Repeat the whole procedure until relaxed or, if you wish, until you fall asleep.

2. Eat three nutritious, organic meals daily, with green vegetables, some raw foods, some fermented foods. Eat foods with a variety of beautiful colors and delicious tastes. Give thanks for each meal, chew thoroughly, and mix each mouthful with saliva. Carefully shopping for and preparing your own food will improve both your grounding and your nutrition.

3. Emphasize earth element foods: beans and whole grains (pre-soaked overnight; soak water discarded), yellow and orange foods, foods grown in the ground.

4. Avoid addictive stimulants: coffee, chocolate, alcoholic drinks. Avoid cane sugar; substitute a little organic raw honey or 100% maple syrup.

5. Soak your feet in warm water. Massage them vigorously with oil or lotion, especially the toes and kidney point, which is located between the two balls of the foot.

6. If you meditate, do not leave energy in your head or heart. End every kind of meditation with this safe method of energy collection: Place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth. With both palms together, rub your abdomen in circles. Women, circle counter-clockwise (when looking down at abdomen) for 36 times; then clockwise for 24 times. Men, circle clockwise 36 times; then counter-clockwise 24 times. Repeat if you’re still feeling spacey.

7. Slow down – get in touch with your own natural rhythms in your spiritual practice and in daily life. Pushing yourself to receive a higher energy than your body is ready to assimilate can cause severe runaway energy. This is especially true of doing spiritual sexual practices without first clearing emotions and balancing the body.

8. Exercise moderately, daily. Walk in nature. As you walk, connect to the earth with every step: roll each foot from heel, to side, to balls, to toes.

9. Grow a garden or plants. Adopt a pet. Use your unique gifts to help kids, seniors or animals in need. Some meditation methods create an ungrounded energy imbalance by cultivating universal or heaven energy, and ignoring or negating body and earth energies. The fundamental safeguard of the Universal Healing Tao System is that our practices are always grounded in our bodies, and connected to the earth.

At every level, we exercise moderately, transform our painful emotions, circulate our chi (life force energy) to balance yin and yang, and store chi in our navel area, as in #6 above. Our Basic courses heal and fortify our body and emotions before advancing to sexual energy practices, and then, to higher energies. Even at the higher levels, we continue our daily grounding practices including transforming painful emotions.

Earlier, we mentioned that being continually ungrounded can lead to physical and mental difficulties. It can make us accident-prone. It can escalate into uncontrolled, runaway energy (sometimes called “kundalini syndrome”), that causes occasional headaches, dizziness, disorientation, or mild heat sensations in the spine or heart.

More severe runaway energy shows up as very hot or very cold energy rushing up the spine, heat or pressure in the head, fainting, localized pain, frequent insomnia, or frequent diarrhea or constipation. The most extreme forms of runaway energy cause an inability to function at all, or as mental illness.

Of course, if you have these severe or extreme symptoms, have them checked medically, to rule out physical or emotional disorders. Note that chi kung literature and the experiences of our students report that western medications do not heal severe runaway energy. We advise you to contact a Universal Healing Tao Certified Instructor, or other skilled spiritual teacher or counselor, who has successfully worked with healing runaway energy.

We hope our suggestions will help you to meet the challenges and unprecedented opportunities ahead by staying firmly grounded. Have a marvelous journey, nourished and balanced by Earth’s Yin and Heaven’s Yang!

7 Ways To Stay Grounded by Staying Organized

Think about the last time you were all over the place, full of a free floating anxiety, bouncing from one task to another, reacting to people and situations emotionally in a way you later regretted. I’ve learned that when I feel like that I have become ungrounded, disconnected from my center, from my knowing that I am OK and all is well.

How do I get back to my center? How do I ground myself? Staying grounded requires daily attention and effort. Here are some of the ways you can stay grounded:




Make your bed every day. Creating order and peacefulness in the bedroom settles the energies in that space and those good energies affect the rest of the house and you.
Clean up your kitchen every day. Having a clean and orderly kitchen calms the part of the house most associated with nurturance and comfort, also calming you.
Have morning and evening routines that are made up of activities of self-care, like bathing, exercising, tending to pets, straightening up. Tending yourself is a powerful way to ground and center yourself.
Sort your mail daily to make yourself aware of tasks that need to be done and bills that need to be paid. Knowing your reality is more calming than the anxiety produced by not knowing.
Keep paper in no more than two main locations, for example, the kitchen and the home office. Avoid allowing paper to spread throughout the house. When it spreads, its negative energy pollutes whatever area it is in. Paper is usually associated with some kind of task that needs to be done, like deciding whether you need the paper or not, or deciding where the paper should go next. When you see it all over the place it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the message it is sending, “You need to do something!” When you are feeling overwhelmed your are not centered.
Maintain order by putting things away all the time. Avoid the temptation to just drop things. It takes much more energy to pick them up than it does to drop them. When items are just dropped they have a negative, chaotic energy that is anything but grounding. And, dropped things attract more dropped things!
Do at least one 5 minute cleanup per day. Either start or end your day with a quick cleanup. Put things away, move things to the part of the house where they belong, straighten your papers, throw out trash. Take that time to restore order to your space. One of the first things I do when I’m thrown off center by some bad news or a difficult situation is to establish order in my home. Some would call my behavior compulsive. I call it grounding!

As I wrote the above list it occurred to me that all my recommendations are the same recommendations I make to people who want to learn how to stay more organized. So, staying organized in your physical space is a great way to stay grounded!

Joan Borysenco, Ph.D, author of Inner Peace for Busy People writes of the benefits of being grounded, centered, “When I’m centered it’s easier to respond to people, to catch the nuances of their attention, and to let inspiration flow through me. Thinking of myself as an instrument that life plays, rather than the source of the melody, has helped me be a better juggler. The instrument needs to be cleaned and polished, treated with care. When I’m in balance, the unbalanced hodgepodge of things on the to-do list are accomplished more effectively.”

Treat yourself with care and stay grounded by committing to maintaining an organized space. That way when you are confronted with one of life’s challenges you can handle it from a place of clarity and calmness, centered and able to access your inner wisdom.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/7-ways-to-stay-grounded-by-staying-organized.html

Grounded

Here are some very important things to help keep you grounded:

1. Get all of the rest you need every night. Nourishing your body, mind and soul with blissful hours of sleep can do a world a wonders. You think better, have more energy and can get good things done.

2. Clear your work space so that positive and new energy can flow through and around you. Spend a few minutes each day to keep it clean (or creatively organized).

3. Disconnect for an hour or two every day. Go outside, sit in the sun, take a deep breath and a good look around you. Meditate. Be in the moment.

4. Spend quality time with family and friends. Make a connection with someone, listen to their story. Laugh. There is nothing like a good laugh to bring you back to earth.

5. Re-evaluate when needed. Sometimes sticking to the plan or schedule is not the right thing to do. Step away when needed, come back with fresh eyes and see what needs to stay or go. Some of those really great ideas need time to ripen. Set them aside. The really good ones will be waiting for you.

6. Practice gratitude for all that you have. Be thankful for the good and even the bad (usually there is a valuable lesson). Do this daily!

7. Be super kind to yourself. Nurture your heart, your soul, your body. Eat nutrients rich foods with occasional treats –chew mindfully. Read good books, listen to good music, pamper yourself and give yourself a few compliments every day.

http://yourheartmakesadifference.com/2012/03/a-world-of-possibility-and-staying-grounded-by-regina-lord/