Inner work rarely reveals itself in straight lines. More often, it gathers in the background, beneath awareness and beneath language. Assembling itself through lived experience rather than conscious effort. Then there’s a moment when the accumulation becomes undeniable. A shift. A sensation. A sentence that echoes louder than the rest. It isn’t that something new appears. It’s that everything you’ve already been living suddenly organizes itself into clarity.
Today the message was simple, but loud.
Grounding. Grounding. Grounding. You need to get grounded.
It echoed through my body during meditation, not as a thought swimming in my head, but as a directive. My feet felt floaty, unsure of where they belonged. I was in the jacuzzi, the place I do my routine daily meditation, but despite being seated, I was also somehow rocking forward onto my toes, unable to let my heels fully settle. I knew the bottom was there, but my body didn’t seem to know how to meet it.
I remembered a moment from a few weeks earlier with my personal trainer. I was standing for an exercise when something quietly shifted. My feet planted. Not stiff. Not forced. Just… there. Rooted. It felt unfamiliar in the way new truths often do. Obvious only after they arrive.
So this morning, I knew pressing my feet into the jacuzzi floor wouldn’t work. Forcing them would only recreate the tension I’m learning to release. Instead, I recalled that embodied memory. It took a while, but after settling through breath, I pulled energy downward, into my feet and into my toes. I let them root rather than push.
That’s when the tingling started. Alive and pulsing. Expanding. For the first time, the sensation in my feet matched the intensity I’m so used to feeling in my head and hands.
In that same moment, a visual appeared: a tree growing immense roots, thick and deliberate, burying themselves deep into the core of the earth. Strong. Stable. Patient. Not reaching upward. Not moving outward. Just anchoring down into the soil.
And then I relived a memory as a child, standing barefoot in the sand while ocean waves lapped against my shins. I remember burrowing my feet deeper as the water pulled in and out with force. The ocean was powerful, insistent, but I didn’t move. My body stayed put while my nervous system absorbed the sensation of motion. It felt like flying forward without going anywhere, like rocket boots tethered to the earth.
That illusion–that you are moving when you are not–felt suddenly important. Stability, I realized, doesn’t mean the absence of force. It means being able to feel the force without being carried away by it.
I grew up barefoot. Loved being barefoot–even in college classrooms. Barefoot in rivers, on sand, in grass. Somewhere along the way, that relationship changed. Or maybe I just stopped listening. But I still find myself eager to remove my shoes, never quite sure why that feels safer.
Meditating in water has always been harder for me. I can do it, but the buoyancy makes it easier to drift upward than downward. On my silent retreat, I never felt my toes the way I did today. The energy stayed high, in my head, hands, and visions, but never fully arrived at the ground, even though I felt full body sensations. That conscious, isolated feeling inside of my feet and only inside of my feet wasn’t there.
Today it did.
And once it did, everything else started lining up.
I thought about how I have poor circulation. How my feet often feel distant, cold, less alive. I wondered if that’s physical, emotional, energetic, or all three.
I thought about being a Gemini, an air sign. Always eager to lift off. To travel. To think. To read. To observe. To jump into the unknown without fear. My mind moves fast and vividly. There is always a movie playing, whether it be past, present, future, and even while life unfolds in real time in front of me.
My head has always had more gravity than my body.
I thought about my Human Design chart, my undefined root. A nervous system that doesn’t generate consistent grounding on its own, but instead amplifies what’s around it. I absorb pressure. I absorb urgency. I absorb emotion. And unless I consciously anchor myself, I float inside other people’s currents–more often unknowingly.
I thought about digesting sugar and the addiction I had with it. How it used to carry me straight into chaos. How I craved it, surrendered to it, rode the highs. And then how that shifted into an almost desperate need for salt. Salty chips. Extra salt on already-salted food. Salted butter on salted sourdough. My body asking, maybe, for weight? For density. For something to pull me back down.
Now that I am in a healthy relationship with sugar, ie. I don’t consume it, and now that I have a stronger connection with the language of my body, ie. I can feel it, a sugar high is a whole new experience. I had one this weekend by mistake. I drank a soda that I thought was flavored water. It had too much sugar and despite doing deep, beautiful inner work at a retreat, I was high, unmoored. My friend, J, who can hold deep grounding, stroked my back while I sat in child’s pose after nothing from qi gong to cold plunges had the power to calm my shakes. Her touch slowed my heart. Brought my nervous system back into my body. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
Later, in the hot springs, I tried doing qi gong and couldn’t figure out how not to float away. The water made me feel untethered. It took deep breaths into my belly and a conscious effort of pressing my feet into the earth beneath the water. When my other friend T wrapped herself around me, and then J wrapped herself around both of us, I felt something like a happy weightedness.
Maybe I’ve learned grounding through others first. Maybe community has been my temporary gravity while I learn how to generate my own.
I notice how often I gravitate toward my husband G for stability. How walking helps when I feel nauseous or uneasy. How I look at the ground when I walk, watching my feet touch it, needing visual confirmation that I’m here. That I’m held. I’ve also been noticing something else: I don’t love being off my feet. Even in movement, I want contact. A bike doesn’t feel the same. I prefer my feet as my method of transit. Step after step, weight transferring, impact meeting resistance. Walking doesn’t just move me forward; it reassures me that I’m here. That I’m held. That I can feel the ground responding to me in real time.
All of this wisdom is hitting me in a massive wave and it feels like critical information. A lack of groundedness doesn’t mean weakness or instability. It means my system is designed to move, to perceive, to sense widely, but without roots, that sensitivity turns into overwhelm. Without anchoring, intuition becomes noise. Without embodiment, vision becomes dissociation. I need that groundedness. To find it for myself and to use others while I learn how to find it for myself.
My body is elated to hear this from me, but I know my mind is leery of what power it may lose. I am telling it softly that grounding isn’t about shrinking my mind. It’s about giving it somewhere safe to land. I’m learning that grounding can look like barefoot walks. Salt. Slow breaths into the belly. Strength through the legs. Letting my heels touch the earth. Letting others support me without outsourcing my own stability. Practicing weight. Practicing stillness. Practicing presence in the lower half of my body. It is so many things and I need more tools in this toolbox so that wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, however I feel, I can pull from the toolbox and settle myself.
