Composing Experience

Being grounded is a natural way of being — part of our human biological heritage honed by millions of years of evolution. And yet, in contemporary society, really being grounded is relatively rare. Being ungrounded is much more the norm. It’s part of a class of behaviors that I think of as pathologies of civilization — shaped by contempory lifestyles and cultural conditioning but at odds with who we really are as biological organisms.

As I noted previously, being grounded has both structural and perceptual components. Structurally, it requires the body to be supported in relaxed balance on the skeleton, with the musculature used primarily to align the body to maintain that balance rather than to support weight directly with muscular effort. Perceptually, it requires a nervous system attuned to perceive and perpetuate this balance, capable of controlling the musculature to maintain it while engaging in the ongoing activities of life.

The principal enemies of good grounding are superfluous internal tension, which disrupts the balanced carriage of the body, and lack of self-awareness, which deadens the neurological sensitivity necessary to maintain balance. These factors amplify each other through mutually reinforcing feedback. Lack of awareness produces poor balance, requiring muscular effort and tension support unbalanced weight, while tension produces “noise” in the nervous system which in turn reduces awareness. Millions of people are walking around with superfluous tension and poor self-awareness, and with a marginal sense, at best, of the ground that supports them.

I see this every day in my Feldenkrais practice. People come to me for a wide range of reasons, from neurological difficulties such as stroke and muscular-skeletal complaints such as back and neck pain, through different sorts of deep emotional traumas, to simply wanting to be more in touch with themselves and to function at a higher level. Whatever their presenting complaint, though, a lack of connection with ground is often part of their presenting behavior, and learning to change that can be a significant part of the healing process we go through together.

In my first session with a new client I often do a tactile/kinesthetic survey of the way they organize themselves to be in the world. I ask them to lie on my table and gently use my hands to support them in various places — their shoulders, ribcage, legs, etc. This gives me a sense of how they respond to support, both from me and from the table. Rather than just lying on the table and accepting support, many people actively stiffen and push back against it — as if they would somehow fly away if they didn’t hold themselves fixed. They don’t do this consciously, of course. It’s a way of being that they’ve developed over many years. They sense this extra effort as providing safety and security, even as it saps their energy and interfers with their functioning in life.

Much of that first session, and often, of many subsequent sessions, will involve kinesthetic conversation through touch about the possility of letting tension go, and of sensing and allowing support from the underlying surface — my hand or the table initially, and eventually the chair, floor, carseat, ground, or whatever happens to be beneath them as they go through life. Their response to these sessions often includes a sense of greater comfort, connection, and a more uniform and supportive connection with the table.

One way of interpreting these changes, I often suggest, is that they now lie on the table without working as hard at it as they usually do, and still get lying on the table done just as well. In principle, lying on the table shouldn’t take any work, but the change they experience is evidence of how much unnecessary work they habitually do. Perhaps, I will say, they could also reduce the effort they put in to other things, and also get them done just as well. (I’ll look more at this idea in a later posting.)

I also contextualize these changes by talking about the idea that the table offered the same support at the beginning of the session as at the end, so whatever change they experience comes from within them. A big part of stabilizing and maintaining this change, I may say, comes from continuing to notice and accept support from the surface under them, whatever it happens to be — the bed, chair, floor, car seat, ground, or something else.

The unconscious belief that stiffening and pushing into the supporting surface somehow provides safety and security is a strong one, despite the fact that it’s wrong. I had my first major insight into this in the mid-1970s. I had become aware that consciously registering and nurturing my sense of ground had positive consequences several years earlier though my martial arts practice, first of Ju-Jitsu and later of T’ai Chi and Aikido. I’d even experienced its value in stressful non-physical confrontations, such as participating in an intense panel discussion at a conference. I was sold on the idea that the sense of feeling grounded was worth cultivating.

In 1973 I moved from Washington DC back to California. I’d been doing T’ai Chi for about four years at the time. I had the form down pretty well and had taught it some, and I thought that I was pretty good. I moved into a brand new house and began to practice my T’ai Chi in the living room, on a brand new thick carpet on top of a brand new thick carpet pad. And I found myself unable to keep my balance on the soft floor. I had previously done T’ai Chi only on hardwood floors and paved surfaces and this surface was just too soft to be stable.

I initially solved my problem by retreating to a tiled entryway, a hard surface where I was comfortable and stable. But a voice kept popping up in my head, saying things like “T’ai Chi is a martial art. It’s about being prepared to deal with whatever happens. And you can’t do it on the rug?” Something was decidedly wrong here. As I explored what it was, I realized that my mistake had been in confusing being grounded with pushing into the ground. I did this partly because the pushing increased the sensation of my feet against the ground, and I thought that’s what being grounded was about.

It’s extremely difficult to consistantly push uniformly over the entire surface of your foot. On a hard surface the variations in pressure across the foot don’t matter, but on a soft surface they cause the foot to become unstable and make it difficult to maintain balance. As I learned to reduce the effort with which I pushed into the floor and to simply allow the floor to support me and to feel that support, my balance returned.

In my Reconnecting with the Earth workshops, where I explore moving on natural terrain, I teach this idea of simply allowing the ground to support you through interaction with a tree. You begin standing next to the tree, lightly touching a its trunk, then sensing through your hands into the tree’s branch structure reaching up into the sky and into its root structure reaching down into the ground. Doing this, you can begin to feel the tree as deeply grounded, and sense that grounding has nothing to do with the point at which the tree passes through the surface of the earth.

You can then explore similar sensations in your own body, first in contact with the tree and then separate from it. You can eventually walk away from the tree with the sense of being deeply rooted in the ground, with that root shifting from one leg to the other you as you walk. The important lesson here, though, is that this sensation is always available within you, even though you may not normally access it. It is there, and will become more accessible if you choose to cultivate it. Practices like T’ai Chi and the Feldenkrais Method are tool that can help with that cultivation.