Composing Experience

Much is written about being grounded. A google search turns up more than 700,000 entries for the term. Some are about the kind of being grounded that happens to a child as a form of punishment, but most have to do with connection to the ground and its consequences. Some writers see it in terms of an energetic connection to the earth, others in terms of calmness and presence, others in terms of feeling empowered and in control. It is all these things, I think, but at it’s core, it is about your proprioceptive experience of connection with the earth beneath you.

Today I want to explore the experience of being grounded from a physiological and a perceptual perspective. What is that experience, and how do we create it for ourselves? In particular, what forms of somatic organization facilitate the experience, and what forms of somatic organization detract from it? And how can we encourage those which facilitate it?

You live in a field of gravity. Gravity is an ever-present force pulling you and everything around you toward the center of the earth. You end up being pressed against whatever supporting surface is immediately beneath you — the ground itself, the floor if you’re in a building, a piece of furniture you’re sitting or lying on, or whatever. Supporting yourself within the gravitational field is an ongoing activity that you manage automatically and largely unconsciously. Your sense of being grounded, or not, grows out of how you do that.

Supporting yourself in gravity involves an interplay between three anatomical systems — your skeleton, your muscles, and your nervous system. Your skeleton and your musculature together provide the physical support that keeps you upright. Your nervous system provides the necessary control to make it happen, as well as the sensory information and processing from which you compose the experience of being grounded, or not.

Your skeleton and your musculature share the role of providing your physiological support in gravity. Ideally, your skeleton should do most of the weight-bearing, while your musculature’s primary job should be to align your skeleton to bear that weight. The weight your muscles bear directly should be minimal. Using muscles for weight-bearing takes work, while bearing the same weight with the skeleton doesn’t take any work. Skeletal weight-bearing is easier, and more efficient.

The key to skeletal weight-bearing is balance — each vertical segment supported by the one below, in a balanced chain from your feet to your head. Your body as a whole should resemble a finely balanced mobile. Very little muscular effort will be required, and the finely balanced body will be able to effortlessly absorb and adjust to perturbations. This is the state that Chinese T’ai Chi masters describe as “a body so light and fluid that a fly alighting on it will put it in motion.”

Most of us don’t live this way. Instead, we carry ourselves somewhat out of balance — often leaning slightly forward as we hurry through our lives. Our off-balance weight must be supported with muscular effort, and living this way habitually we come to experience that added effort as normal.

Explore this difference for a moment. Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart and sway slightly, left and right, forward and back. Let yourself relax and gradually diminish the movement until you come to rest in a place that feels easy and balanced. Notice your sense of the ground under you. This is your current approximation to a balanced state; with practice you can get even better at it.

Now begin to lean slightly off-balance, in one direction and then another. Notice, as you leave the balanced state, how your body begins to stiffen and use more effort to keep from falling. Which of those ways of being more closely resembles the way you normally go through your day? How did your sense of connection with the ground change as your balance diminished?

I’ve described composing experience as a process of filtering and selecting elements of the information flow in which you are emersed and assembling them into the perceptual images that make up your experience. The information from which you compose your sense of connection with the ground consists primarily of proprioceptive sensations of support collected from throughout your body.

In a state of relaxed skeletal balance, the forces generated by the weight of your body pass cleanly through your skeleton into the ground, and the supporting force from the ground is transmitted back up through your skeleton. Every part of you has a clear line of skeletal support, so you experience a unified and effortless connection with the ground. This is what it means to be grounded.

If you’re not well-balanced on your skeleton, on the other hand, muscles will tense to support the off-balance weight. If you’re feeling anxious or unsafe, you may protectively stiffen, producing additional tension. This tension disrupts the clear skeletal path of weight down, support up. Rather than feeling supported by the ground, parts of you may feel supported by the tension, or feel no support at all. The effort required to maintain the tension will feel necessary for support, which is no longer experienced as easy and safe. You feel less stable, and less grounded.

Balance and relaxation are the physiological keys to being grounded, but it involves more than that. There’s also a perceptual dimension. Feeling grounded is an experience, and as such, it requires awareness. Not only must your body weight be supported by your skeleton, but you must sense that support, You must feel the ground under you, feel your body weight dropping through your skeleton into the ground and the ground returning a supportive force. To do this, you must maintain enough awareness, i.e., a broad enough perceptual field to include your body and your connection to the ground within your experience. If you’re very narrowly focused on some other activity — like typing on your computer or hurrying from one place to another — in a way that blocks awareness of your larger self, you can’t feel grounded.

The physiological (relaxed skeletal balance) and perceptual (broad perceptual field) dimensions of feeling grounded are intimately interrelated. Tension and perceptual narrowing amplify each other, in a mutually reinforcing feedback cycle. Tensing narrows your perceptual field, making it harder to feel the balance necessary for good grounding. Conversely, perceptual narrowing encourages tension, as you stiffen to stabilize parts of yourself that you’re no longer aware of. Next time I’ll look at this interrelationship more closely, and suggest some ways you can experience a better connection with the ground. In the meantime, my article on “Connecting with the Earth” is relevant.