Grounding and Centring

What goes up must be brought down. Grounding is the plain business of coming back to earth after any kind of working, and centring is the finding of one's own still point before it begins.

Neither is mysterious, and both are neglected, usually by the people who most need them. A witch who has spent an evening raising power, holding images and stretching the attention, and who then drives home without coming back to earth, is a hazard on the road. One who does it every week for a year without grounding becomes, in the old phrase, away with the fairies, and generally does not notice.

What grounding is

The usual image is the lightning rod. Power, whatever it is, should pass through a witch and on to where it is going, and what is left over should run away into the earth, which can take any amount of it. It should not be held, and it should not be drawn from one's own reserves when the earth is there to draw on. A witch who works from their own stock alone ends the evening exhausted. One who holds on to what is raised ends it unable to sleep.

Put less poetically, grounding is the deliberate return of the attention from the inner world to the outer one: to the body, the floor, the room and the time of night. Whatever one believes about energies, that return is necessary, and it is better done on purpose than by accident.

The signs of being ungrounded

• Light-headedness, or a floating feeling that does not pass.
• Restlessness, a buzzing in the hands, or a mind that will not settle to sleep.
• Clumsiness: dropped cups, missed steps, keys that cannot be found.
• Irritability out of proportion to anything that has happened.
• A sense that ordinary things are faintly unreal.

All of these have ordinary causes too, and the commonest is having missed a meal. If you are dizzy during breathing exercises, you are probably breathing too hard, and should stop. If any of these feelings persist when you have not been working at all, they are a matter for a doctor and not for a witch.

Grounding with a tree

This is the method we teach first, because it is the easiest to feel and the hardest to do wrong.

1. Find a tree that you like the look of. A big one is easier, but any will do.
2. Ask its leave, aloud or silently, to stand with it for a while. We have never known a tree refuse, but the asking does the asker good.
3. Stand with your back against the trunk, feet a little apart. Close your eyes and take a few slow breaths.
4. Feel your feet on the ground. Then imagine them going further, down through the soil like roots, spreading and taking hold among the tree's own.
5. Feel the tree drawing up water from the ground, and draw up with it a slow, steady strength through the soles of your feet, up through the legs and the body and out through the head and the hands.
6. Feel at the same time the light falling on the leaves, and let it come in at the crown of the head and run down through you into the ground.
7. Stay with both, the rising and the falling, until you feel steady, clear and heavy in a pleasant way. Some people feel a faint hum or vibration. Some feel nothing in particular except better.
8. Open your eyes, look round, and thank the tree before you go.

Grounding anywhere

Once the feeling is familiar it can be found without the tree, and in time very quickly: in a crowded shop, on a train, at the end of a difficult meeting. Sit or stand with both feet flat on the floor. Breathe out slowly. Feel the weight of the body settling down through the feet. Imagine roots, briefly, if that helps. Press the palms flat against the floor or a table for a moment. That is all.

After a circle, many witches kneel and lay both hands flat on the ground, and let whatever is left of the power go down into it. It is one of the few gestures of the Craft that can be seen at every kind of pagan gathering, and it is a good one.

Clearing

Sometimes one comes away from a working, or from a crowd, or from a long day with someone unhappy, carrying more than one's own. Clearing is a simple way of putting it down.

1. Sit or kneel comfortably. Do not stand until you are used to it, as some people lose their balance.
2. Imagine a clean wind blowing through you, from behind, carrying away whatever is not yours and whatever is more than you need.
3. Say, in your own words, that you release it, and let it go into the earth to be made good.
4. Breathe normally for a minute, and then ground in the usual way.

Centring

Grounding comes at the end. Centring comes at the beginning, and is the gathering of oneself into one place before a rite or a working. Its object is to arrive: to stop being half in the day that has just ended and half in the work that is about to begin.

Stand or sit upright. Breathe slowly. Bring the attention down from the head, where it usually lives, to a point a little below the navel, and rest it there. Some people lay a hand on the place. Feel the weight of the body balanced over it. When the breath has slowed and the mind is quiet, you are ready. It takes a minute, and it changes everything that follows.

Eating and drinking

The oldest grounding of all is food. It is no accident that every circle of the Craft ends with cakes and wine before it is closed, or that the coven goes on to supper afterwards. A body that has eaten knows where it is. Our founding High Priestess holds that the most effective grounding technique yet discovered is a cup of tea, and in forty-five years nobody has been able to prove her wrong.