The Power of “Grounding”
During the introduction to Holistic Peer Counseling System we held on Easter Sunday, I put an exercise on the program that asked the participants to pair up and tell each other a sad story. The idea was to listen to the first half while being deliberately not grounded and to experience what that was like. For the second half I asked everyone to ground, as we had practiced earlier, and to just notice if, and how that felt differently.
As the teacher, I don’t usually have the opportunity to participate, so it was such a treat to be able to do so this time. I decided to blog about my observations because I think they’re wonderfully illustrative of the usefulness of grounding.
I must say that it was a strange feeling to keep myself from becoming grounded. To do so, I imagined my self as a little boat adrift on the water.
As my partner began to tell his story, I was surprised by the similarity to an important experience of mine. In short order I was thinking “Oh no, this won’t end well! I can see the mistakes everyone is making.” Everything I heard was alarming and I was having a difficult time listening, as I was busy comparing and judging and anticipating where the story was going. Everything I heard seemed to be very troubling and I found it quite difficult to do what I am trained to do, which is to assume the counselor’s attitude that holds the space for the speaker to be whole, deeply wise, and divine, and to listen with exquisite attention and loving compassion. I even found myself judging the other person for the story he had chosen, thinking : “This isn’t even a good story. He should be telling a different one!” For all its twists and turns, I found it boring. I felt a sensation of being crowded; there were so many details with which to keep up. Overall, the experience was very unpleasant.
At the two and a half minute mark, it was time to ground, which I did by saying “I am grounded,” and visualizing a strong connection with the earth in the same way I always do. Secondly, I immediately visualized allowing anything that caused me discomfort to flow down the grounding chord. I pictured it like energy flowing through an electrical cord. All this occurred within a few seconds. The moment I refocused my attention on my partner I noticed a drastic change. I felt relaxed. The story slowed down and I was now wondering if it wasn’t in fact heading for a happy-ending. I was convinced that he had changed the tenor. I realized very quickly that it was I who had changed. Because the story was not only less exasperating, but it was also more interesting and not so overflowing with details; there seemed to now be a lot of spaciousness and I noticed myself smiling. My mind was no longer busy. Love and compassion flowed again and I felt confident that the teller of the story had deep wisdom, telling just the right story.
In our report-backs on how the experience felt, this participant reported that in the second half of the exercise he felt much safer and it was much easier for him to finish telling his story.
I can’t emphasize enough how drastic the difference was. Where, at first, I felt beleaguered and not “up to the task,” I later felt completely free to listen. Where the story was almost incomprehensibly at first, it now unfolded slowly and clearly. And where I had been impatient, I could now be compassionate and attentive.
We learn a wide variety of tools in HPCS, all of which are profoundly supported by the practices of grounding, centering and clearing. I’m grateful to this participant, who shall remain nameless in observation of his privacy, for giving me the opportunity to, yet again, become so acutely present to the purpose and effectiveness of grounding while counseling.