what is grounded really?

Perhaps what really is home, safe, ground.. Is love.

Love as vibration, not as a fleeting, moving carrier of attention. But the kind that envelopes and awakens in us a knowing of care and safety that can never be taken….

This week I had the pleasure of co-facilitating a workshop with Lu Yim called base/support/ground/practice. Part of preparing was sitting and musing (with my muses!) on what this really meant to me…

Here are a few reflections:

There is a phrase from a Mary Oliver poem, “soft animal of your body”  that comes to mind. What a yummy phrase! But let’s face it- there is a bundle of sensation of all types that comes with having a soft animal body

I have a cat and a dog- Sometimes my cat is curled up on my lap, purring in apparent bliss… yet other times she stands in the hallway at three in the morning yowling like she is being tortured!  My dog will be relaxed, asleep and snoring… and in an instant startled awake and already on guard- growing, defending. 

Being in an animal body is to inhabit an incredible sense organ that runs the spectrum from immense pleasure to incredible pain. It is to be deeply affected by things out of our control, things we live with daily, like the temperature- which can feel so good on our skin or literally kill us. We learn to weather our body, as our body weathers us.

It is a lot- and I am simply acknowledging with you that having a body is a lot of input, a lot of output, and on top of that, eventually the life of our body ends.

Sometimes what an embodiment practice is, is simply a tolerance practice. While that may sound less than glamorous, learning to tolerate all the intense sensations that comes along with being in a body often is the main practice. 

So if embodiment is sometimes just tolerance, then what does it mean to feel grounded? How do we feel safe and present?

Here are the two things that came to me:

1) The Practice of Return
2) Love

The practice of return- also called Nervous System Regulation. 
This is like my dog- after he jumps up and defends– he shakes it off (literally), trots around, maybe drinks some water.. Then he settles back down. This is a skill and a practice, and not something to engage too deeply with our mind.. This is body practice.

Settle the nervous system. Shake, bounce, sometimes cry, laugh, look around, go for a walk… all signs to let your physiology know that you are, in fact, not about to be eaten by a lion, and that you have returned to safety.  We will all be startled and scared sometimes- and our digital world increases this greatly, so the work is not to never let that happen, but to have resources as to how to Practice the Return to our soft animal body. We can then lean more into trust. Trusting ourselves, trusting life. **

But what I really want to talk about is...

Love. When I say love, I don’t mean love as a transitory current, or carrier of attention. I mean love as a field of vibration, one that is enveloping, witnessing, non-judgmental… but also more than that- it is deeply encouraging. It is a sensation of care and safety that can not be taken, it has a special feeling that, while it is in the wide and all connecting vibratory field, it is also for YOU specifically. 

If we are lucky we receive a large dose of this vibration from a care-giver(s) when we are young- but it can also come from a pet, a friend, a teacher, a plant, a place, a spiritual guide, in material or non-material form…it can come from a book, an idea, a piece of art, a landscape...All of these sources have the power to awaken the place in us that this vibration already exists,  it awakens our internal instrument that already knows this love and whispers to us gently- I got you…

This special kind of love vibration is something that can never leave us, that can never be taken… and to me that is the true definition of grounded. Grounded in love. In safety… safe in this vibration.

I wish this for you, for me, for all of us this holiday and solstice season- a hint (or more, or much much more) of this vibration. 

**There is a lot of accessible information now in the world about these kinds nervous system regulation practices. Some great resources I have enjoyed are these books: “Waking the Tiger” by Peter A. Levine, “The Body Keeps Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk,  and “My Grandmothers Hands” by Resmaa Menakem.