I attended a Kizomba dance festival last weekend, and in one of the classes a teacher asked us what grounding was. I volunteered and stated simply that grounding is not falling, which got a laugh out of the entire class. I didn’t intend to make a joke, but their reaction made something clear to me: falling is as oblivious to everyone as grounding.

Falling and grounding are two sides of the same coin, so it makes sense that if someone has not embodied the quality of grounding, then they aren’t aware of the internal felt sense of falling either. If you truly understand hot, if you see light, then you will know cold, and you can understand darkness.

I imagine people solely equate falling with the loss of balance and landing on your ass. Of course this is falling but it’s only the most egregious example of a myriad of ever-subtler possible manifestations. In other words, a loss of control which results in going from a position of uprightness, stability, and connectedness to a compromised position where something needed to catch you (i.e. the ground).

What’s not intuitive for people to grasp is that they are falling all the time (and not just physically); their felt sense of being in a stable base of support is in fact the opposite, and there’s a lifetime’s worth of unexplored depth of grounding which offers an entire world of immeasurable pleasure (again, not just on the level of the body, but with the mind and emotions as well).

You can be standing completely still and be falling. When the skeletal system is not aligned, you are falling and relying on the anti-gravity musculature to activate and catch you. We are so accustomed to this musculature being active all the time that we have identified ourselves with the tonus of their effort, and their unnecessary tension has become so habituated that we don’t even know they’re turned on. It’s only when we experience deeper states of relaxation and reduced muscle tonus that we feel something has shifted in our self-image – like after a massage, spa, or yoga class – but these glimpses of greater ease are unfortunately fleeting as we quickly return to our bad habits. We rely on something outside of us to tell us what to do, or to externally manipulate our bodies, to experience such releases, and therefore it is not sustainable.

This is opposed to a state of grounding and relaxation being our baseline and being sensitive to perceiving ever smaller degrees of increased tension, thanks to being self-sufficient and knowing how to produce change from within (which boils down to simply having awareness of ourselves). Knowing how to connect to the earth (through whatever points of contact we have), and to heaven (being suspended from above), to find true support from our osseous tissue at any moment, wherever we are. Don’t settle for a life where you’re surprised whenever you find yourself in states of greater relaxation, but rather strive for a life where you’re surprised to discover what actually brings you out of that state.