Everyday Techniques to Ground (and find pleasure in your life)

Hi, I'm Cat Kabira, and I would love to share with you today strategies around how to ground and what prevents you from grounding.

So if you know me, I am so passionate about teaching How to Ground.

And, you know, if you're going to do any sort of energy work with other people, you must be grounded. But just for you to be able to function healthily and joyfully in your life, ground is essential.

So let's just first start with: what do I mean by ground?

You develop your relationship with ground when you're in the womb through the quality of your birth and for the first few years in your life. We could also argue that how grounded you are could be impacted by also your insight, ancestral heritage, the memories that you've inherited that way. And if you do believe in past lives, how that may impact it.

But let's just stay with your birth as well as your first few years. So ground is all about survival, safety, and I want to be here.

I belong.

And depending on what happens in your birth, while you're in utero, just in your family, in your school, in those early formative years, that's going to really impact how much you feel like you belong with others, you belong with your tribe, your family, how much you belong on this planet, how much you actually want to be here, how safe you actually feel in your skin as you, and how protected you are.

And so there are a lot of people, and I'm speaking because by this point, I have worked with tens of thousands of people.

There are a lot of people, whether they know it or not, are walking around feeling like, I don't feel safe, I don't belong. I don't really know if I want to be here.

And they're tolerating this feeling quite often now, there is no one that is grounded all the time.

And what I mean by grounded is your energy is in your body. And for most of us, in various cultures and societies, we've really been celebrated around how logical, rational we are. Like, that's the intelligence that's really emphasized.

So when I'm looking at people, the energy, when you're in your head, it's like your whole face, your head is very

opaque, and the rest of your body is pastel. And when someone starts to ground, to me, it looks like there's

almost like rainbow colors that are coming down from the head, through the throat, all the way through the body, and then the body is back in color.

I am here.

That's being grounded.

It's also where you can feel so it's something that's palpable, it's not imaginary, but that there's a ground current that goes from the ground through the feet, through the whole body, up through the head, and without getting into a whole, like energy essentials, energy 101.

What is your energy field?

Energy is running through your body both up, upwards and downwards. And it's not just through your body. It is connecting you to the ground, and it is connecting you to source. And so in those moments of feeling ungrounded, there will not be that connection from the ground up through the feet.

And if you were to ask someone or if you yourself, when you're checking in with, like, do I feel like I'm in my body?

Usually you're not even going to feel anything because you're not in your body. How can you feel something if you're not in your body? And also, you're not going to feel your feet, your legs. You'll know that you have them. You can look down and see that you have a body, but you're not going to feel it from the inside. So that's one really easy way to check in.

Also, you know, the thinking will be either foggy or a little bit in overwhelm or anxious or spinning the posture, the physical body will be a little bit more clumsy. There isn't going to be a lot of integration and movement and emotions.

Emotions will be a little bit haywire.

You can be ungrounded and either be really numb and disconnected from feeling, or it's like the feeling is just chaos and it's just too much and it has nowhere to go.

And the beauty of ground is that when you're really plugged in, down into the ground, and up through the body, through the sky, it's like there's all this space for any emotion to move.

Emotions are waves.

Energy moves.

Energy moves in motion, energy moves in these waves, so it gives a place for them to start to transmute. And you can hone your skill to recognize when you're grounded and when you're not grounded, and just to remind you that will impact you physically, mentally and emotionally.

I have a lot of people who always ask me how they can protect themselves. And, you know, especially my

Empaths, where they're like:

• How do I not take on other people's energy?

• How do I not take on their pain or emotions?

• How do I not get drained?

You know, first and foremost, you being in your body means nothing else is going to get in. So it's really learning how to be stable with yourself. But the challenge will be is that if you have some sort of imprinting that's happened, some sort of something that's happened while you're in the womb, during your birth, in the first few years of your life, that may impact how safe you actually feel, how stable you actually feel, feel as yourself on this planet.

And so that's where doing embodied trauma work, meaning not just talk therapy, where you're really sensing how the trauma still lives in your body as energy and how that's still pulling your system from present time and still pulling you into like, a vortex or a portal into the past.

Because what's interesting about the body is the body does not experience itself as past, present, future. Everything that happens in the body is this is what's happening right now. And so that can be part of the challenge, is that you may be so intelligent about all the things that have happened in your life, but it's still alive in your body. There's still a charge. And so even though you're logically realizing, like, everything's okay right now, your body is like, no, that trauma never got resolved. It never got transmuted.

There was never a resolve where I can actually let go and come back into present time. Now, that's a whole other animal of work that we would talk about. But I do want to say that, that for you to know that ground is not just something that happens one time you're in your body, and that's it. 

Like, you're going to come in your body, and then you're going to leave your body, you're going to come in your body, you're going to leave, and you can build capacity with this, meaning that there's a depth of ground that you have. And over time, that depth can get deeper and deeper and deeper. 

So the more you meet yourself in your totality, you can really develop that ground and capacity. You could liken it to if you were just starting qigong for the first time, and you're really connecting with the energy from your feet down into the ground. And in the beginning, like, you might get that ground, but maybe it's just a half meter down or a meter down, but then you meet some, you know, really, really skillful qigong master, and they're going kilometers down into the earth. So it's like there's still ground, but we're talking to build that depth and capacity. 

So two things that you can do, even if you're not aware of your energy body yet or not sensitive or refined to what's going on, in your body and something that I find myself often teaching because when I work privately and with groups, when I work privately with clients, and, and we'll be doing these, you epic energy sessions, anything that's happening in your body, anything that's happening in your energy body is going to impact your life, and your life also impacts your energy body. 

And so I often find myself giving people homework or ways to help integrate whatever we're doing in these sessions. Because your life matters, you're not going to be separate from it. 

So if being grounded means I want to be here, I feel safe here. And when we unground, quite often, it's just like something is not feeling good right now. 

Whether it's that unresolved trauma from the past that's constantly getting sparked in our system, where it's like no matter what, nothing feels good because they still have this old pain reliving and re triggering within myself, or just right now in this present moment, something isn't feeling good. 

And so I do want you to respect those times when you catch yourself wanting to leave or on ground as you're not being unskillful. There might be something that the sensitivity of your system is saying, your body saying, hey, something doesn't feel right. I don't want to be here. I can't settle in. 

So when I'm working one on one with clients, just even to at least create the best environment for ground, it's like I need to make sure that the space that we're doing the work in is comfortable for them, you know, that the space between us, you know, in terms of boundaries, feels right for them, that the temperatures is good, that the smell is right in the room, you know, there's all these different nuances, the sounds, you know, making sure that it's quiet enough, or, you know, for my clients, where they need a certain sound to help ground, so I pay attention to all of those environmental details. And also, what can I do in our rapport to create also, like, just an organic connection where they feel comfortable with me? 

So, because if not, even if they tell themselves I want to feel good here, their system is going to say, I don't feel good here. So two things to consider if you find that you are doing all these different practices to help ground yourself, and again, you can follow me on Soundcloud and you can get in touch with me directly because I've got lots of actual energy practices where you can learn how to ground yourself. 

And that's just a whole beautiful animal on its own. But what I'm talking about is more in your own life where you're just feeling disconnected, you're feeling stuck, you're feeling like you're working on yourself so much and still things aren't changing. Here are going to be the two things I want you to consider. 

First of all, if ground is I want to show up, I want to be here, I'm engaged, I feel safe, I belong. Your body is your home. 

And my question for you is, what kind of host or hostess are you to yourself? What kind of friend are you to yourself? 

Because if you're doing all these different practices and things and even trying to make your environment so nice, but you're still really hard on yourself, you're still really unkind with you, then you're not gonna want to stay with you. You can imagine that. 

It's like you're trying to be in your body and you're like, wow, there's this really mean, highly critical person that's always there in my body that whenever, you know, I'm never doing right, anything right with them, you know, I'm always having to improve myself. I'm never feeling the way that they want me to feel. I'm never behaving the way they want me to behave. 

I'm never looking the way they want me to look. We could call that like that a very highly critical voice. 

The inner critic. 

It's going to be very hard for you to want to stay with yourself. So I want you to imagine that you're creating an environment that is really inviting to you, that you're having. You're creating a party that is so welcoming that you could show up in any state with yourself and you're forever welcomed. So not just on your best days, not on your good days, not on your energetic days, but on those days where you're moody, where your hair is a mess, where you just want to be in your PJ's, you just want to hide on the couch, you just want, want to read and not talk to anyone, where you can feel really vulnerable and make mistakes and you know that you will be able to be taken care of by you. 

That is a priority because you can do everything else in your life. But if you're still being so harsh with yourself, if you're still being so critical, if you're being unkind, it's just you're not gonna want to stay with you. You're just gonna keep on leaving. And there are so many ways that we can leave. So that's first step sounds super easy. But really, like, if you take this homework on, I want you to start to even observe because we're not always conscious about how we talk to ourselves. Start to observe. How are you talking to yourself throughout the day? 

You know, when you are with other people, how are you relating to yourself? You know, if you're a teacher or when you're at work, how is your voice with you? So that that is a true game changer. 

And of course, it's not that you're going to be like, you're learning to be a kind, compassionate parent to you so that there will be times where you might make a mistake or there is something that you need to look at or clean up, but you're still doing it in a way that's palatable to your system. Okay, so I have. 

I have maybe met one person in my life who's actually kind enough to themselves, but I would say basically 99.9% of people had met on this planet. And I have met so many people around the world, they are not kind enough to themselves. So that's step one. 

Step two is if you don't like your life, you're going to drive yourself crazy and be very unrealistic to try to keep showing up in your life engaged when there's nothing there engaging you. So, you know, I'll have clients that come to me, you know, one to two times a week, and we're doing all these practices, and then they go back home to their regular life, and they're like, I don't get it. 

Like, I'm still finding myself on grounding and I'm like, well, tell me about your job. I hate my job. Tell me about the city you live in. I really, really do not like my home. Tell me about your relationship. You know, I really don't like my relationship now, of course. And again, these are longer discussions. There is that dance around. Is it making specific changes within home, within relationship, you know, with within work, you know, that will actually make you more engaged? Because sometimes we're just. 

We're scared to actually assert our needs, you know, and that's important. Asserting needs is also first chakra, part of your ground. But sometimes it's also having the guts, even though it's scary to admit, like, this isn't working. I'm trying to tolerate something, like I'm tolerating this discomfort because I'm simply just scared to take this risk. And it's so important. 

Like, you incarnated not just for comfort zone, but you incarnated for exquisite risks, for expansion for growth. And that's so important. We actually get off. We get off when we grow, we get off on that healthy friction. So if you're someone who, let's say, have just come out of a really traumatic, traumatic situation, maybe, you know, whatever it may be, there will be a time when you need to incubate, where you need to regroup, where you need to self soothe, where you need to actually have that really small little cave where it's like everything's being taken care of. But once we're resourced, we actually need to. 

We need to express our energy, we need to express our wildness. We need to be able to stretch ourselves. We get. We get a sleepy, we get numb, we get lethargic if we're just staying in that comfort zone. And it is. It can feel scary because it's like, oh, I'm just in this nice little sweet comfort zone. But we're suddenly moving into a place of new possibilities, of learning new things, of finding strength we didn't even know we had or building new strength that gets us off. 

And there's pleasure there. 

So the last piece I'll say, along with exquisite risks and expansion, is pleasure is what will ground you if you leave. Because you're like, this doesn't feel good. 

You can imagine that if you keep orienting towards pain and orienting towards that which doesn't feel good, that is not going to make you want to show up more. You know, you're just going to be like, see, prove my point. 

It sucks here, but pleasure, and I'm not talking, like, negative pleasure. I'm not saying, like, jump on a plane and go to some wild place that can be fun at times, but more about, like, the little things that bring pleasure, but also the things that just. It's unexplainable because it's going to be unique to you. 

The things that just bring delight to your heart. 

And, of course, you have to feel your heart to know that which brings delight. 

So the last note I'll end on this is that that's actually how I began my own healing journey. I struggled with anorexia, bulimia. I took lots of different drugs, and I was suicidal. And it was very painful to be here, and I was not functioning well. I had a hard time being around others. I was so hard on myself. I had a hard time sleeping. I had a hard time eating. Just. I sometimes would pray at night to not wake up. 

And I remember when I first got on the yoga mat. And although my healing journey became much longer because there was many layers for me to meet. What really got me hooked once I got on the yoga mat, I was, like, 18 years old, and at that time, I was 35 kilos, really bony. Like, it just felt uncomfortable being in my body. But I laid on the yoga mat, and it was just some rest in between, some pose. It was a hatha class, and all of a sudden, I felt these sparkles in my body, and I was like, what is this? 

I've never felt anything so magical, so pleasurable before. And so I kept showing up three times a week to yoga, not about the poses, but that somehow something in that practice brought me in to myself, and I started to feel my energy body waking up, and it felt like sparkles. And so I just kept showing up for the sparkles. 

I wasn't showing up for the pain. You would not have sold me on my healing journey if it was like, yep, you go in your body, it's really painful. You know, at some point, it will feel good. I first went with the pleasure. 

And so whether it's orienting towards pleasure or things that feel good inside yourself, including your voice, you know, if you're gonna be a friend to yourself, what kind of voice can you celebrate yourself? 

Can you support yourself? Can you congratulate yourself, but also allowing pleasure your life? 

One thing I've noticed is that, yes, we all are on some journey around how to allow and feel and welcome all the emotions, and you're feeling grief and feeling anger is its own process. But pleasure, interestingly enough, or maybe not even surprisingly enough, but pleasure is the one that we sometimes have the hardest ability to access. My magic love note to you today is, can you start to welcome pleasure in your life because you deserve it, and it will make you want to show up to life more and more and more. 

I wish you a very, very beautiful day.