In this Grounding Summer series (welcome to #4), we explore grounding as an invaluable and subversive skill that helps us expand and deepen, both our senses and our stories. You can scroll to the gift sequence at the bottom to experience it for yourself.
In the last email, we went a little bit into the science of lying down. How getting on the floor and noticing how we’re making contact allows the parts of our body that are often associated with the fight and flight responses to release.
When they do, our body comes into a more regulated relationship with the ground beneath it, and we can soften into both our bodies and our stories. The terrain of our writing naturally expands.
Ultimately, grounding increases our sensitivity and enhances our sensation—and these are key, invaluable skills that invite us on a journey of artistic discovery.
And as you may have experienced before, this journey isn’t just in one direction on a well worn path.
In this state, we develop the capacity to notice the smallest details: the flash of a bird in the brush, the crunch of a fallen leaf, a small side path that leads to the unknown.
New paths beckon us and terrains open up, not as a distraction or mere diversion, but as whole worlds we never could have imagined before.
We may find ourselves in surprising places, and a multiplicity of stories may emerge.
We step out with new stories and find new ways to tell old ones. And we discover that we have all kinds of stories—not just the ones that have helped us cope, but also the ones that we can create.
Coping vs. Creating
During pandemic days, grounding was often positioned as a coping mechanism to get through the day. And it is indeed a great tool to help us be present with the tasks of everyday life, better perform and up our productivity. But our intention with grounding is different when it comes to writing.
For our creative terrain, grounding is used as an infinitely renewable resource to connect to our inner world, regardless of what’s happening outside of us.
In the creative process (just as in our regular lives), we can feel stuck in the demands and the doing. We may hardly stop to pay attention to what we’re doing or why. We simply keep going.
And when we do, our stories can get stuck too. Our narratives become patterned, numb, fragmented. We get trapped in the old ways of creating, trying to push through, determined to create anew.
Rest as Subversive
When the narratives that have shaped our understanding of ourselves no longer hold, it can feel disorienting.
We can react in the moment with bewilderment and frustration. But what if, instead, we were actually trying to tell ourselves to stop? What if our frustration and overwhelm were telling us that we needed to turn things upside down?
Lying down on the floor—the literal act of becoming horizontal—pauses the forward momentum of our everyday narratives. It allows us to step out of the stoires we’re stuck in, the old habits that no longer serve us, in movement, thought, and language.
Lying down opens the pathways to create new, surprising stories, and ultimately invites us to deepen and expand the way we tell our stories, away from all the “shoulds” we’re carrying around.
And in this way, lying down can be not just be part of a pleasurable creative practice, but a little subversive.
So here’s an invitation to experience this for yourself. To soften into the landscape of your body, explore new terrain, and take the next step along your creative path.
All you need is the floor.
