How do you stand your ground if you feel pushed around by other people’s feelings?

In my last post, I talked about how energetic boundaries are crucial for highly sensitive people who want to start setting more boundaries. This is because if you can feel the energetic hit of someone’s anger almost in your body when you say no to them, then actually saying that no is a lot harder.

When other people’s energy — their anger, their expectations, their worry — easily invade our space, we can almost feel compelled to give them what they want just so we can stop feeling so overloaded.

But just because we are highly sensitive people doesn’t mean that this taking on of other people’s energy HAS to happen.

If we have good energetic boundaries as highly sensitive people, we can be sensitive without being an emotional sponge.

That can feel almost impossible if we don’t know how to do this. And it can almost feel as if it’s our destiny as highly sensitive people to take in people’s energy.

But that’s not true.

What’s missing is a piece that no one teaches us. What is missing are energetic skills.

There are several energetic skills we need to learn to embody energetic boundaries.

In this post, I will talk about one of them: Grounding.

Why is the energetic skill of grounding important for highly sensitive people?

If you are part of online forums or Facebook groups for highly sensitive people or empaths, you might have noticed sensitives talking about how they feel like aliens on this earth.

Many highly sensitive people talk about how they feel like they don’t belong, how they think this world simply isn’t for them. And sometimes, there’s even talk about how sensitives actually belong on a different dimension, almost on a different planet.

Of course, this experience of not belonging is a valid psychological experience. As highly sensitive people, we ARE in the minority, so we are going to feel different.

We can sometimes be looked at as the weird ones. We are also the ones who notice things that no one else seems to notice. And we are often labeled “too emotional” or “weak” because we feel things intensely.

So, the psychological experience of not belonging, of feeling like we are aliens is a real one. It is a valid feeling to have if you have always felt like an outsider.

BUT in online forums, sometimes, this feeling gets mixed up with the intense wish to not be here and to escape onto another planet, another place where we do belong. And while my heart goes out to anyone who feels this unbelonging (and I have been there myself), I know it’s also important to tease out the real challenges of being sensitive from the stories that our mind forms about it.

We don’t belong on another planet. We belong HERE.

If you were born, you have a right to be here.

Just as every tree, every animal, every bird belongs on this earth, so do you. That right to exist was yours from the day you were born.

But often, we can’t find this felt sense of being connected to the earth, which is what grounding is.

Without having a direct connection to the earth, we feel uprooted. We feel as if we don’t belong. We feel as if we don’t have the right to take up space. We feel unstable, as if there’s no ground below us to hold us or nourish us.

We don’t have a secure sense of connection to earth and the physical plane.

This is why grounding is so important.

Being grounded — having an energetic connection to the earth and feeling that flow of energy coming into us — makes us feel stable, secure and as if we have a patch of land in which we can take root and grow.

If you have a history of trauma as a highly sensitive person, grounding can feel a lot harder.

There’s another thing. While grounding is hard for many of us (no one teaches us these skills), if you are a highly sensitive person with a history of trauma, grounding can feel even harder.

My heart goes out to you if you are a sensitive person whose feeling of belonging, whose feeling of safety was shattered in some way.

Maybe, you were physically abused as a little kid. Maybe, you were an unwanted child and someone actually told you that. I have heard horror stories of extended family telling little kids that their parents didn’t want them almost as a joke after many years (and even though the parents did love them).

The damage that trauma as well as deep discounts to our very being can do to our sense of belonging and safety are HARD things to deal with.

If you have had experiences like this, you might have a tendency to run into your mind or get lost in your fantasy world. You might be hypervigilant — hyper-aware of any danger lurking around — and find it hard to connect to a felt sense of safety.

You might feel like you don’t trust being here.

The pattern of running away into our mind can become embodied in our bodies if we have a history of trauma.

So, working with a therapist or someone who works with a modality like EFT to help clear trauma is a part of coming back into your body and starting to get more grounded.

And we also need to start repairing our felt sense of connection to the earth and reclaim our right to be here.

We can do this by practicing the energetic skill of Grounding, which is about having a felt sense of connection to the earth.

When we can feel connected to the earth, we have a way to feel stable and secure and actually draw up energy from the earth without having to depend on other people for our sense of safety or stability.

What if you could belong on this earth like a tree belongs on this earth and draw nourishment from it?

That’s what practicing grounding can do.

So, how do we ground as highly sensitive people?

I am pretty sure you have heard of the classic grounding exercise, which is about visualizing that you have roots growing down into the earth. You can either visualize these roots growing from the base of the spine or from your feet (I like the base of the spine.)

Even if you are in a building high up above the ground, you can imagine that your energetic roots are going down into the earth until they reach the earth for support.

What we are doing when we are using this image is to focus our attention on our connection to the earth (either at the base of the spine or the feet). Soon enough, you’ll feel an energetic current flowing through here.

If you have never done this before, this connection or energetic flow might be faint or subtle, but the more you practice, the more you’ll feel this felt sense of connection to the earth.

The more you do it, the more you’ll feel this current of energy.

There is another slightly different way to do this. So, there are two variations to this basic grounding exercise.

Some people find one way much easier and more natural than the other and I’ll talk about it in my next post. Until then, I want to leave you with this thought:

Grounding is an embodied SKILL.

It’s NOT something to start practicing or doing in the moment when you are confronting someone (maybe, they are really angry with you & you are feeling shaky and want to feel stable).

It’s something to practice EVERY DAY just as you would practice learning how to ride a bike.

The skill of riding a bike becomes embodied the more you practice. And once you learn how to ride a bike, that knowledge is deep within your body. You don’t have to think about it.

Your body does the thinking.

In the same way, the energetic skill of grounding becomes embodied in our bodies the more we practice.

So, if you have ever tried grounding and felt that the visualization doesn’t work or isn’t giving you results, it’s because it’s a SKILL that you are learning to embody. It’s similar to learning to walk as a child and falling down and getting up again and again until you have had enough practice, and then, you can do it quite easily.

And once you have truly embodied a skill, you do it without consciously paying attention to it.

So, try grounding. Try doing it for even 5-10 mins a day and see what your experience is. Do you feel better? Do you feel more energized?

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can experience it for yourself.

Feeling stable and secure and having a way to nourish yourself without depending on anyone else can be a huge game-changer. So, I hope you’ll give it a try and let your inner experience guide you. In my next post, I’ll talk about the two different variations to the classic grounding exercise.

We are living through a lot of change, a lot of shakiness. I hope you stay safe wherever you are.

With love, Ritu.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, and a Silver Medal Awardee at the Rex Karamveer Chakra Awards, co-presented by the United Nations in India. Sign up for The Highly Sensitive Creative Newsletter HERE.