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Grounding Exercises for Spiritual Journeying

©2013 Joseph Mancini, Jr.

In Episode #5, Past-life Regression and Shamanic Journeying, of my radio show, “Explorations in Consciousness with Dr. Joe”, my guests, Dana & Shana Robinson, shamanic practitioners and teachers, discussed with me a unique workshop we did combining the modalities.  We mentioned a number of grounding exercises for any kind of spiritual journeying, but we did not have time to add more to the list.  So I am sharing a whole bunch more here.  May your journeys in Spirit be expansive and useful to this incarnation!

To be ungrounded to a degree is not a problem as long as you are in a safe place where you do not need to attend to your body and your surroundings to be safe.  This place may be, for instance, a chair, bed, couch, floor, patch of ground in a space where you will be undisturbed and protected.  You would use this kind of ungrounding to go on a spiritual journey, to focus on writing or playing music or other such activities.  But a substantive part of your consciousness should stay with your body consciousness so you can return easily to full groundedness.   Those who make proper use of the somewhat ungrounded condition know when they have chosen to be ungrounded to accomplish a specific purpose, and they have the means to return safely and at will to a grounded condition.

Being Ungrounded means (in varying degrees):

  1. You are not fully in your body; much of your consciousness is somewhere else.
  2. You are not in the now; you are either back in the past or far in the future.
  3. You are emotionally upset—sad, angry, frustrated, etc.—and not open to what else is going on around you that could calm the emotion.
  4. You are obsessed with thoughts (usually of the worrying kind) and feel compelled to do certain actions, often repeatedly (like over-eating or smoking)—once again, you thereby lose awareness of what is going on around you in the moment.
  5. You are doing something that you are not focused on.
  6. After a spiritual journey, you are feeling dizzy, confused, unbalanced, irritable, nervous, outside of yourself, unfocused, forgetful, overwhelmed, lacking organization, sleepless, chronically anxious, overly hungry, and suddenly very tired.


To Ground:

  • Get sufficiently grounded BEFORE you go into trance or shortly thereafter.

Do the grounding cord exercise described in #3 below.  Doing so is not to constrain you but rather to remind you that, while you remain incarnated, you cannot do your mission fully or make use of the fruits of your spiritual journeys unless you bring them back to the material world.  The grounding cord can “stretch” to allow you to go anywhere in the realm of Spirit and stay tethered to this Earth and this incarnation.

  • Orient to your immediate physical context.

When you arise out of the altered state of consciousness, no matter where you are, do not attempt to get up and walk; simply and slowly look at every THING, seeing ALL of its details and even saying aloud the name of the thing.  Look behind you, as well as up and down.  You can also attune to what you hear, smell, touch, and even taste in your environment without moving very much at fi   Go into Nature:

  • Go into Nature

Hug a tree:

Open up all your senses in finding and embracing the tree.  Do a full-body hug by standing up next to it, wrapping your arms around it and letting all of your body touch the tree.  Or sit down in front of the tree, wrap your arms AND legs around it.  Bring home a piece of bark or branch that has broken off the trunk to remind you to ground.

Pay attention with all of your senses (you can do this anywhere, not just in Nature):

What do you see?  What do you hear?  What do you smell?  What do you feel (touch)?  What might you taste?  If one is available, work your hands into the dirt/loam in a garden.

Sink roots into the earth:

Sit or stand and concentrate on your feet touching the earth—this works best when you are barefoot and are safe to be so.  Imagine roots emerging from the bottom of your feet and sinking into the Earth until they meet and join the energies arising from the center of the Earth.

Send a grounding cord into the earth:

This is similar to the previous exercise, but, instead of using roots growing from your feet, use a white or golden cord or beam of light that at one end is attached to your crown chakra while the other end is sent down along the spine through all the other chakras, exiting out the first chakra, and then down to the center of the earth where it is anchored in the iron crystal that is the core.

  •  Stomp your feet/Exercise

Stand up or sit down and either march vigorously in place or stamp your feet hard onto the floor/ground without hurting yourself.  You can also jump up and down in place for as long as you can without injury.  Or do some steady exercise so you can feel your muscles operating, but do not overdo it.

  • Pat/gently slap your body:

Either you or a friend can rapidly pat your body all over (even your head if you do so with care) so you can feel your body more intensely as the blood is brought to the skin.

  • Use your feet to push against something:

Find ways you can use your feet to push without hurting yourself, i.e, doing knee bends, pushing again a platform on a gym machine, getting up from a chair repeatedly (using mostly your legs), using a recumbent bike with a high resistance setting, etc.

  • Drink lots of water:

Doing so reminds the body of its connection to an earthly resource, to its essential component, to its origin in material life.

Among many other benefits, water “is essential to the functioning of every single cell and organ system in the human body” and thereby grounds us into our fleshly state.

“A decrease of as little as 2% in our body’s water supply can have harmful effects and cause symptoms of dehydration, such as daytime fatigue, excess thirst, fuzzy memory, difficulty focusing on tasks and simple math, lightheadedness, and nausea.”

  • Eat certain foods:

Eating anything after a spiritual journey helps the body speed up its metabolic process, which is very grounding.

You can eat comfort food, including chocolate, but not too much!

Of course, always eat in moderation, but certainly enough to sustain yourself appropriately.  If you do not, you will get ungrounded.  Chronically overweight individuals and overly thin individuals are NOT very grounded.

Eating meat, especially red meat can help ground you.  But you can also eat root and red vegetables like beets, potatoes, radishes, onions, turnips, peanuts, carrots, garlic, and cherries, red cabbage, red currants red peppers, red plums, red strawberries, tomatoes, watermelon and so on.

  • Envision red, the color of the base chakra, and thus lower your vibration:

Concentrate on all the red you may find in what is around you.  Imagine red coloring your feet and what they are standing on.

  • Send excess energies out of you:


Write about EVERYTHING that you have experienced on your journey; let the paper contain and hold those energies for you, so you know you will not lose anything important about the experience if you shift your attention onto earthly activities.

Make/imagine a box or tool to hold the energies:

Direct the energies into a physical object like a box or a wand so that they are apart from you but available for your use.

Send the energies deep into the earth:

Direct the Earth Energies to dissolve them or hold them for future use.

  • Take a shower:

Take a shower while imagining (or simply intending) that the excessive spiritual energies flow out of your energetic field.

  • Distract yourself from the spiritual journey

Do something mundane or analytical, like balancing a check book (but later check again what you have done).  Do not do anything that will ultimately hurt you if you are not fully attentive to the activity.

  • Be with others:

Go outside of your inner world and connect with others who know nothing about your journey and talk about non-spiritual topics.

  • Get rest by sitting or lying down for a period of time.

Feel yourself gradually and deeply sinking into a big, fluffy chair or bed, imagining either one as “holding” or “cradling” you in its embrace.

  • Use certain yoga position:

Choose those positions that stimulate and let go of energies, especially in the root chakra.

  • Use chakra balancing:

Focus on aligning all your chakras with each other.  You can do this in various ways.  One way is to see, sense, feel or imagine a golden bean of light fixed at one end to the crown chakra at the top of your head.  Send the other end, the moving end, down your spine through all the other chakras and out through the root chakra to the ground.  Feel energy moving up and down this beam of light.  This process reinforces the connection of the upper chakras with the lower chakras.

  • Listen to and/or utter the sounds associated especially with the lower chakras:

Listen to the sounds made by crystal bowls and metallic, Tibetan singing bowls:

These bowls should be attuned to the lower chakras, especially the root chakra called Muladhara.  Use also music that is tuned to the keynote of C, such as Brahm’s Symphony No. 1 in C Mnor; music with strong base sounds is excellent, such as Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

The keynote of the Root Chakra is C; the keynote of the Sacral Chakra is D; the keynote of the Navel or Solar Plexus Chakra is E.

Utter the sounds associated with the lower chakras:

Root: Sanskrit Letter LAM (“A” is pronounced “AH”)

Sacral: Sanskrit Letter VAM (“A” is pronounced “AH”)

Navel: Sanskrit Letter RAM (“A” is pronounced “AH”)

If you utter in sequence (one way and then the other) the sounds of all the chakras, you can align the chakras to each other and get grounded also in that way.  Here are the other chakra sounds:

Heart: Sanskrit Letter YAM (“A” is pronounced “AH”)

Throat : Sanskrit Letter HAM (“A” is pronounced “AH”)

Third Eye: Sanskrit Letter AUM (OM)

Crown: Sanskrit Letter NG (as in “king”)


If any of my readers know of other grounding exercises for spiritual journeying, please let me know and I will consider the appropriateness of them for inclusion in this blog.

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