Grounding for Meditation Safety, What is it and How does it work?

[Coordinate_Apotheosis]

I've decided to take on meditation again to examine my fears and various diverse concerns fueling my paranoia and disturbance, as well as to take back up some balancing later on into my meditations.

After much...Deliberation and contemplation, I've realized that when I meditate, I naturally go a bit Out There somehow soneway as to produce some strange experiences.  I have surmised that this is due to a lack of being Grounded.  I'm high energy in mind, low in body, this isn't balanced, it'd seem I live in the clouds so to speak as my body struggles to handle this not easily synthesized form of mental/emotional energy.

There, see, I'm doing it again, intellectualizing, in a meditation these things become sensations that escape my comfort and produce issues.

It is possibly just a giant imbalance of general usage of energy.

So I don't really understand grounding or how it works or why or what produces the effect, or what the effect even is.

To me I have used grounding as a sort of sanity stabilizer, I think I know that all I know is nothing, so as to return from the crazy out there metaphysics my mind gets caught up in sometimes.  It feels like moving from the sky to the ground to rest the wings of my mind.

But this is only my very uninformed usage of such a concept.

I use things much more efficaciously when I understand their function and How that function operates.

So, if anyone has any wisdom or advice to share on Grounding, please please don't withhold it.

I'd make a joke about not wanting to be 6 feet under, but really I just want a special place inside my mind to go to rest when such suicidal feelings come around.  A place to begin healing work.  To sit in silence rather than pain.

[Nau7ik]

Grounding can be done quite easily! I will share my techniques with you:
1- At the very start of the meditation, I’m sitting in a chair facing east with my feet square on the ground. Feel the energy from the earth meeting the soles of your feet. You can literally feel it. That attention establishes a more stable connection, I think.

2- a more formal grounding technique I’ve learned about is to, again, have your feet on the ground and imagine roots shooting out from beneath your feet into the ground. The roots spread out and go deeper and deeper. Then feel the energy of earth, through the roots, come into your body. One can also use this technique as a clearing away of old negative energy. Just imagine dark or grey smoke or energy going into the earth (Mother Earth is great a healer. She can transmute this energy.) and at the same time pure white light flowing into your being.

Don’t be too concerned with your mind wondering. This is inevitable at first. I mean it still happens with me, but Patience is key! We just have to keep returning to our focus. And continue to Practice, practice, practice!

[Sprout]

Put something over your head, like a blanket. A comfortable hat works fine as well.

[Coordinate_Apotheosis]

Both suggestions I have found helpful, thank you very much.

I like how I can actually feel the energy going into the soles of my feet

I wonder if my palms are any similar.

Any other things that help for anyone else?

[Sprout]

I find conscious breathing very helpful, feeling the sensations created by the breath.

[Coordinate_Apotheosis]

The idea that you take in creator, hold, process, then release creator, is a very humbling one.  Alive, part of life, taking upon life. Consuming life, birthing life.  Breathe can be many things.  Sacred, or Scared.

[jacrob]

I have found the following very helpful with grounding:

• Find a quiet spot in nature and lay down.  There is a park next to my workplace and every lunchtime I lay down on the grass and visualise roots coming out of my body and going down into the ground,  picturing all the dross and dark matter going into the earth, down the roots, then drawing up fresh revitalising golden white light.  30 minutes 5 times per week.
  
• Listening to grounding frequencies with headphones, this one is particularly good as it's made with a real cello instead of sound generators and you can really feel it in your feet - 174hz
  
• Get to a qualified shamanic practitioner and have a soul retrieval performed asap!  This in itself will help heal a lot of the disconnect between mind and body.
  

Good luck and don't give up.

[Cannon]

Performing a banishment ritual (such as the one used before every session in the Ra material) as well as grounding may also be very useful. I personally use it and it's provided a lot of aid.

[Glow]

I always just brought rocks into my meditation. I was always uselessly spacey after meditation. One big heavy stone near me and I keep my energy from floating up to far.

Of course all these things are only as good as your intent for them to do as you have requested.
It might work just as well for you to ask assistance from one of your guides to keep you grounded and only let your consciousness drift to where it is ready. Every meditation I do starts with asking my connection to creator to only allow me to go where I am ready.

[sjel]

Bare feet on grass. Eating a lot of large carrots or beets.

[Highrculling]

/"True answers can come only when there is no tight, fearful attitude and when the readiness to deal with whatever the answer may be is really there."/

[Ra1111]

I enjoy meditating outside in the sunshine , and with eyes closed when the sunlight turns my awareness red, I know I have entered something a little different. I recommend focusing on the color red.

[unity100]

A measure of daily routine of light sports/exercise could help you balance better. Whatever works for you, whatever makes you feel good in terms of exercise...

[Minyatur]

If you want to ground yourself you can just picture in meditation your aura forming as an anchor. And then you feel the feeling of gravity pulling you and allow your mental anchor to follow it down and down into the earth's very core or center. Then each time you inhale you breathe in from the center of the earth up to you and when you exhale you push it all down back to the earth's core. Sometimes I like to just lay down and picture a beam springing forth from my heart and going to the earth's core, I had a powerful experience of this in a dream which is how I picked it up. (the former was a tutorial online (except the gravity bit I added because I found helpful) from a series of articles to affirm one's spiritual role, like another was the ways of the sentinel and required opening yourself to the surrounding energies and affirming that you desire to be alert and not unaware of them)

It's a good mean to discharge yourself down as you send off your energy to be distilled by what can better distill it and as you take in back cleaner and less distorted energy to fill yourself with and work your own system distortions from a less helpless emotional state.

Like with any magical practices, faith is the enabler. Don't try, just do it and get better at it doing it.

[Coordinate_Apotheosis]

These have all been greatly helpful replies.

I must say though, Nau7ic's way has an almost immediate effect on me.  In tandem with the other advices given I hopefully won't need to worry anymore as if one way doesn't work, another might.  And if all else fails, I might need to discover a few shielding techniques.

Anyone wish to share any such techniques? Assuming Grounding and Shielding are two separate things?

Elros, your advice almost sounds like a shield but being made by putting the self in the Earth's womb.

Thank you again everyone, all of you have helped me here

[Minyatur]

Elros, your advice almost sounds like a shield but being made by putting the self in the Earth's womb.

It's really just an energy exchange tho. I found back the article, you can search for "grounding" as there are more than 1 technique. I remember I had liked the tree roots one; https://newearth.media/ascend-academy-way-sentinel-1/

About shielding techniques, I think it boils down to crystalizing a thought-form containing an intent. The same serie of tutotials I think made you visualize an all-acceptant ball of light surrounding you and which welcomes all that is pain that enters it and aleviates it before returning the energy back.

[Coordinate_Apotheosis]

Oh no, I understood (I think)

I just had that mental image. Thank you for the link too.

[loostudent]

I remember years ago I read about and tried a grounding exercise similar to the ones described here. It was in a book called Mind Magic by Betty Shine. Here is the quote from the book:

BACK TO YOUR ROOTS

/.../ I want you to choose a time when you know you will be alone, unplug the telephone or take it off the hook [those were the old times ], lock all doors and choose a comfortable chair. (By the way, if family or other domestic circumstances make this difficult, there is one small private room in the house which will nicely fulfil all these conditions!)

Now, make shure that you are comfortable and warm, and when you are feeling cosy and happy, close your eyes. Breathe deeply three times.

Now I want you to imagine lovely fibrous roots going down into the earth. Feel yourself being pulled down into your chair as the roots grow downwards into the very centre of the earth. Feel those roots as they cling to the earth's rich soil. Take your time. There is no hurry. As you indentify with the deeply burrowing roots, you will experience a wonderful feeling of security, of being part of this planet, of simple belonging. Now visualize the fibrous roots thickening until they take on the appearance of tubers. When you can "see" or "know" that this has happened, you will be earthed.