Grounded
When the flow of life puts everything up in the air, we seek connection with solid foundations.
If the emotion of feeling grounded is separated from its context in human life, it is itself no longer grounded.
Listen to this episode on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that celebrates the diversity of emotion. When I started this podcast a couple of years ago, I began in the very first episode with friluftsliv, an emotion articulated in the culture of Norway. Friluftsliv is a feeling of being comfortably at home in natural settings.
In that first episode, two people made a passing reference to another emotion, and I promised then that we would get back to talk about that feeling separately.
Let’s listen briefly to what they said again. The first voice you will hear is from Audrey Holocher, a researcher and hypnotherapist.
Audrey Holocher:
“I'll be walking in the woods and sit down under a tree. And, I don't know, I just, I feel very connected in it and at peace with when things in the world get crazy and chaotic. I just feel like it's the trees are so grounding. Nature's very grounding. I feel like all is well there.”
Pinelopi Margeti:
“I took my shoes off because I didn't have good shoes to run on the grass, and I just felt like right at home, and I just kept my shoes off the entire time and I was just walking on the grass and just felt so good. I feel so grounded when I'm in nature under trees, and I don't know, for some reason, just being barefoot on grass makes me feel like I'm in the right place.”
Jonathan Cook:
The second voice you heard was from Pinelopi Margeti who is now working as a consultant at Kotter, a business transformation firm headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Did you hear the emotion that Pinelopi and Audrey both mentioned? Audrey talked about how nature feels grounding, while Pinelopi spoke of how she felt running barefoot in a natural setting.
What they described is the emotion that’s the subject of this episode: The feeling of being grounded.
We’ll begin our exploration of feeling grounded by considering the perspective of Todd Saddler, an environmental activist who works week after week to rally support for action to confront climate change.
Todd Saddler:
My name is Todd Sadler. I'm an activist with Extinction Rebellion here in Ithaca, New York. Extinction Rebellion is a worldwide movement for climate action based on the premise that climate change is real, we are causing it, and collectively, we are not doing what we need to do to address the situation.
Jonathan Cook:
Todd’s activism has to do with a crisis in an immense, planet-wide system of meteorological and ecological equilibrium. Scientists have studied that system using sophisticated instruments deployed on a planetary scale, and the data that they have gathered over decades of work has established a strong rational consensus that human activities are causing a dangerous destabilization of climate.
The trouble is that most people aren’t motivated by scientific knowledge. We should take it more seriously, but we don’t. Information is not enough for most people. We can rationally understand that our planet’s climatic systems are changing in destructive ways but still struggle to summon the emotional motivation necessary to maintain action in opposition to climate change.
The Extinction Rebellion activist network has developed a brief ritual that helps to break through this cognitive gap. Todd practices this ritual by reaching down and touching the Earth.
Todd Sadler:
I've been involved in, you know, activism for twenty years now. I guess we're right about it the twentieth anniversary of my first arrest doing nonviolent direct action. And so, I've been at a lot of protests and felt a lot of things, and I decided I need to come to this from a centered place and a place of love and grounding. I don't always feel that, but it's my intention.
So, one thing we do with Extinction Rebellion is each time we meet, we try to reach down and touch the Earth and reach through the Earth and just give thanks for the Earth that's supporting us and give us life, and to say, we're still here, we're with you. It makes me a little bit calmer, less likely to argue with people who are heckling us or people who are, you know, my fellow activists or whatever just says, “Okay, the Earth is speaking through me.” I guess it goes past my various psychological defense mechanisms and disturbances, and so forth. Yeah, I can't quite describe it, but it's a feeling of contact with the Earth, and with, yeah, my fellow human beings, a connectedness.
Jonathan Cook:
This ritual Todd describes includes a literal grounding in order to achieve a metaphorical grounding. Touching the Earth is a symbolic act. The Earth doesn’t actually have nerves to feel Todd’s touch, or ears to hear his words. The act is a way for Todd to center himself, and to reconnect with the physical reality of the planet that is the stage for his climate activism.
Todd’s ritual gesture of touching the Earth helps Todd maintain a sense of intimate connection with the immensity of climate change. Climate change isn’t made real by that act of grounding. Rather, the grounding focuses Todd’s mind on the reality that was already there.
It captured my attention when Todd referred to a feeling of being connected, because that’s something Pinelopi and Audrey also described when they referred to feelings of being grounded. Being grounded isn’t just about appreciating your foundations. It’s about establishing a relationship of reliable connection with them. That’s a perspective that Betti Rooted Lionheart tries to embody in her work.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
My name is Betti Rooted Lionheart, and well, it's a spiritual name Rooted Lionheart, and I was born with the Lionheart part, and I had to earn the roots. I'm someone who from about the age of seven, for probably a good thirty years of my life, I lived in a state of despair about what humans are doing to the planet.
Jonathan Cook:
Roots are literally in Betti’s middle name. Feeling rooted is another way to describe the emotion of being grounded. The idea of roots focuses on the feeling of connection to the ground, with the idea that we are not simply standing upon the ground, but that we are anchored within it and nourished by it. Betti was seeking this feeling when she moved to the Finger Lakes region of New York to establish an organic farm.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
I was born in San Diego, grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, was living in the Bay Area of California before moving here. And we moved here in 2010, at that time looking to come to a place that we thought, where there's water, where land was something that we could perhaps afford. We wanted to start a small organic farm and an intentional community, all with the idea of surviving collapse of the systems that we rely on, gas at the pump, food in the grocery store. So, that was what brought us here. Not native at all, but deeply in the time since we've arrived, I have become very deeply rooted to this place and in particular to the land that I'm lucky enough to call home.
Jonathan Cook:
When Todd Saddler spoke about feeling grounded, he talked about the ritual of touching ground as a way to achieve that emotion. Betti experiences this aspect of being grounded as well, as an organic farmer who literally works with the ground. She extends the emotion, however, to more figurative manifestations, such as connecting with other people through her attachment to the land she works with.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
All of these aspects of myself I'm bringing together in sort of my life's project, which is creating Braided Root Waters Healing Sanctuary on a hundred and five acres of land in the Finger Lakes of New York State. That's really about me listening to what the land wants, what the land and my spirit guides are asking me to do here, which is to invite people, bring people to come connect with the land, reconnect with the earth, reconnect with spirit, reconnect with ourselves and with each other.
Jonathan Cook:
What does it mean to be rooted in that land? Here’s what Betti said to me:
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
I wasn't rooted before. In the way that I already mentioned, which was, you know, moving from place to place so much. But the other way that comes up is not having roots in any culture or ritual or the human containers that spoke to me that made sense to me. So, for example, I was raised Roman Catholic, and that does not work for me. That is not for me. I grew up within that, but it didn't speak to me, so there were no roots that could really form there.
I'll just point out that in that long ago past, we all grew up with a tribe or village full of adult mentors, not just, you know, a set of parents. These days, if you're lucky, you have a set of parents. And within that context of a tribe or a village of mentors. The young people were watched closely and paired early on with those people who had the skills that the young people were showing up with, and we were guided every step of the way. We were also guided through rituals at different, you know, rites of passage at puberty and at other important times, all of which we lack right now. And all of those things are part of being rooted.
One of the most important things that my shamanic teacher, her name is Bekki Shining Bearheart, is that she teaches people when she teaches us to shamanic journey is grounding, centering and shielding. That's like the very first thing. So, for me, grounding is basically imagining or becoming a tree and sinking my roots into the earth, very specifically sinking a taproot all the way to the core of the Earth first and starting an energy exchange between myself and the core of the Earth, then after that is established, sending other roots in other directions into the earth.
Jonathan Cook:
When Betti wants to feel grounded, she visualizes herself as a tree. That’s fascinating to me, because trees are a core concept within a certain constellation of emotions that relate to things that endure.
Friluftsliv is one of these emotions. Trust is another.
What these emotions share in common is the idea of something that perseveres despite challenging conditions through the passage of time. The Proto-Indo-European root word for endurance and durability is deru. The same root word led to the development of the words truth and trust. It also evolved into the word tree.
Language contains codes of deep emotional truth, because words aren’t just pieces of information. They are expressions of urgency, of desire, and fear. The words that survive are those that represent something important, an idea worth speaking about.
So, when Betti speaks metaphorically of feeling like a tree growing a root into the Earth when she is emotionally grounded, she is telling us that the feeling of being grounded is one that expresses a trust in the place where she stands, and a feeling that her relationship to that place can be sustained.
“Ground” is another interesting linguistic concept. The word “ground” survives only in the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. It refers to the Earth under our feet, whether it’s soil or stone, or even an artificial surface such as concrete.
To be on the ground is to be on a solid surface that’s thoroughly connected to the planet, but also exposed to the sky. When we are on the ground, we are not up in the air, or in the water. We are also not underneath the surface. Caves, tunnels, and basements are not in the ground. They are underground, suggesting that the ground exists only as a boundary at the surface of the planet. When we emerge from a cave or an underground chamber, we describe ourselves as being above ground.
Strangely, not every solid surface above ground counts as being the ground. If we are on the 25th floor of a skyscraper, for example, we are not considered to be on the ground, even though we stand firm within a structure that itself stands on the ground. We must ride an elevator down to get to the ground floor.
We can take the pulverized bits of coffee out of the filter of our coffee machine, and throw them down onto the ground, where they may decompose and become part of the ground. Nonetheless, these coffee grounds don’t tell us much about what it means to feel grounded. That’s because they are grounds in the sense of having been through a grinder, and grinding has a distinct word origin from the ground that we stand upon.
However, when we say we have grounds to file a lawsuit, we are speaking metaphorically of what it feels like to have firm footing beneath us. Furthermore, we can speak of an electrical current being grounded, which means that it won’t flow dangerously in ways that could harm a person, but will be absorbed into the ground.
There’s something about feeling grounded, then, that is contrary to the feeling of being in flow. In fluid situations, we are immersed in a medium that is not solid, and so we lack the ability to remain reliably in one position. To feel grounded, therefore, is to feel confident in one’s position, and in one’s ability to remain there.
To understand the emotion of grounding, it makes sense to consider what the ground actually is. Author Ian Williams reflected on this as he spoke to me about soil.
Ian Williams
So, I just released a book: Soil and Spirit. That's kind of the two-halves of my professional world: author, speaker, business advisor, consultant. The subtitle is Seeds of Purpose, Nature's Insight, and the Deep Work of Transformational Change.
One of the lessons that I feel emerged out of my own self-study, which continues, of course, is this notion that really the greatest gift we can give the world is saving ourselves.
As I was moving through adolescence, young adulthood, I was really consumed with what I would call existential challenges, right? What are we going to do about the climate as a collective? What are we going to do about social justice as the collective? That led to a lot of overwhelm, and quite often resulted in debilitating depression. How do I, as an individual, have some sort of substantial impact on the world?
And so, I spent a lot of time reflecting on that, and it's naturally led me to now, you know, how I express myself personally and professionally.
But the book is really a message which is meant to communicate this notion that in order to have the greatest impact in the world, the greatest positive impact in the world that we desire as individuals, it's incumbent upon us to go inward and embark on that inward journey of self-discovery in order to uncover what our underlying innate talents, skills, interests, passions, etc. are, and that that self-awareness about self, coupled with an awareness of the external environment, the social landscape, are going to show us the clearest path as to how we as individuals can have the greatest impact in the world around us.
Jonathan Cook:
Ian Williams has written a book about soil, but he’s also a business consultant, and he’s talking about an inward journey of self-discovery. How does this all come together?
One clue is in his reference to the social landscape – a metaphor for the common ground that we share with other people.
Ian identifies the feeling of being overwhelmed as one of the primary barriers to effective performance in business. Feeling overwhelmed is an emotion that we will explore in full in a future episode. For the present, I want to observe that the idea of being overwhelmed is a metaphor for feeling as if one is drowning. Originally, to be overwhelmed meant to flooded or swamped, like a boat that has taken on too much water to remain afloat. When we’re overwhelmed, we feel as if we are dangerously immersed within a surging, chaotic fluid. Flow can be productive, but when it takes place without restraint, it can swallow us whole.
Finding a way to become grounded is a fitting emotional response to feelings of being overwhelmed. While being overwhelmed feels like a flood that could sweep us away, being grounded is all about finding something solid, and remaining connected to that.
Like Betti, Ian talks about this grounded feeling in terms of the metaphor of roots. Ian describes a time in his life when he lost his roots, and became adrift.
Ian Williams:
Some of my fondest memories are from childhood are outside, you know, camping trips, horseback riding, time is spent at the family cabin in the summer. You know, as I moved into adolescence, it began a 10-to-12-year journey of substance use and abuse. So, I drifted away from some of those, you know, we could call them roots, no pun intended. That entered, when I really started to uncover and explore why that substance to use was coming about in my life, I realized I was simply masking, you know, an underlying depression and anxiety, which I think was probably present in childhood as well.
Jonathan Cook:
Why would Ian drift away from his roots? Here’s the thing about roots: As much as we want to stay planted in one spot, we are not plants. We are animals, and animals specialize in motion. Ian may have appreciated his roots, but he wanted to move out into the world as well.
Life would be simple if we only had simple desires, and then just needed to stay true to ourselves to meet those desires. That’s what a tree does. It stays true to the place where it began its life. It becomes a superspecialist in occupying that space. For as long as it lives, it extends its roots deeper into the ground.
People are not trees. Our desires often conflict with each other. Our emotional lives are diverse, and often, we have multiple feelings that don’t match. When we have conflicting emotions, we can’t simply conclude that one emotion is right and the other is wrong. Each emotion has its own point of view.
People who live mature lives need to learn to deal with this kind of complexity, and come to grips with the reality that we cannot satisfy all of our emotional needs. There is no moment of enlightenment that will bring us pure bliss. We are forced to choose an emotional balance that satisfies some needs while minimizing the counterbalancing dissatisfaction that results.
The same feeling of being grounded that brings us a sense of solidity can at the very same time make us feel confined. This is a theme that you’re going hear over and over again in this podcast: Humanity is characterized, within individual human minds as much as between them, by diversity. Diversity can be harmonious, when it’s simple, but human minds are not simple. The diversity of our emotional lives therefore often is experienced as a form of dynamic equilibrium, in which the most we can hope for is a manageable level of struggle.
Our emotions are, in this way, like a psychological ecosystem. Our personalities are not singular. There is a multiplicity of motivations behind any single facial expression, not just one mood that can be scanned and labeled by an artificial intelligence algorithm.
To bring this back to feeling grounded, Ian’s work in exploring natural ecosystems has identified a similar diversity within the substance of the ground, in the material that some dismiss as dirt, but which he refers to as soil.
Ian Williams:
We need to find those leverage points if we're going to address these grand challenges at scale in the timeline that the science tells us we need to address them, particularly as it relates to climate change.
Soil, not only is that metaphor, but it's also the number one land-based carbon sink that we have. And so really, if we talk about human health, we talk about food health, if we talk about biodiversity, if we talk about, you know, multi-species health, it all ties back to the soil.
The health of the soil dictates the health of the plants, which dictates the health of the animals that eat those plants on a physiological level. But also, this notion that what makes soil healthy is diversity, this is kind of a natural law. You look out in nature, there's this notion that diversity actually creates resilience.
Monocultures don't exist in the natural world, and therefore, being natural beings, they won't exist within us either, or at least they won't be sustained with ease within us, right without our societies, etc.
So, this notion that we can create monolithic structures, socially or individually, I think is really one that puts us inevitably swimming upstream, right, against the current of natural law.
Jonathan Cook:
Soil is not a dead, inert substance. It’s full of a huge variety of living things. The biological action of the living soil is necessary to support the health of plants that grow in the soil, and the health of the animals that eat those plants.
Industrialized agriculture has sought out efficiency by creating monocultures, fields in which only one genetically homogenous crop is grown. We have learned, however, that such monocultures are vulnerable to agents of crisis: Insects, plant diseases, and erratic weather.
Ironically, the very soil in which we yearn to feel grounded is a reminder that we cannot be simply one thing, stay in one place, adopt merely one strategy for getting through life. Each emotion we feel reflects an adaptive strategy in life, and we need to be able to move between emotions in order to adopt different adaptive strategies as situations change.
The desire for a grounded life is one that can never be completely fulfilled. We can become relatively more grounded, but it’s inevitable that something will eventually come along to knock us off our feet and force us to move.
For all of her life, Emily Avila has lived in motion. She has set down roots in several places, each of which has been, in its own way, a home ground for her.
Emily Avila:
My name is Emily Avila.
I live in Lisbon. I am a certified leadership coach working with leaders on how to be better communicators and storytellers, and that manifests in a few different ways.
Another hat that I wear is I'm a country co-lead for and a co-founder of an NGO in Portugal called Girls for Girls, which develops leadership skills and courage among girls and young women to take on public leadership roles.
My third little project right now is a little project called Personal Terroir, and so that kind of brings a little bit of both of those things together.
Jonathan Cook:
Terroir is a French word that refers to the study of the way that the place in which a grape vine is grown changes the character of the wine that’s produced from its grapes. This concept can be expanded to understand the impact of setting on the course of a human life.
Emily is from several different places, though. How does that impact Emily’s Personal Terroir?
Emily Avila:
I'm from the Napa Valley, which is a world-renowned wine area, wine region, and I now live in Portugal, another world-renowned wine region. So, there's a certain theme. I'm a big fan of wine. I run culinary events and so on.
Personal Terroir, when you're thinking about wine, really reflects the place in which those grapes grow, right? The soil, the environment, the sun, how much rain it gets, you know, all of those things come into place, and certain grapes will do better in certain environments than others.
You really need to plant grapes in the appropriate place, not just the physical place, but also the people around it that are going to be cultivating it, the trees, flowers, flora, and fauna that surround it. All of those things go into how a grape might best express itself as a wine.
I started to think about how that's personal also, and how where we find ourselves and how we cultivate ourselves, but also the environment that we place ourselves in.
Tying a little bit to the Girls For Girls, what I find is that we very often just look at ourselves, how can I change? How can I self-improve? I'm kind of rebelling against the whole self-improvement industry because it starts from a place of deficit, right? What's wrong with me? Maybe there's not anything wrong with you. In fact, I would suggest that there isn't, but maybe the environment that you're cultivating isn't helping you bring your best self forward. You're not expressing yourself.
And so, yes, there's physical place, but there's also the things that you surround yourself with, and of course, what goes into the soil, in other words, what you're feeding into yourself also creates that terroir.
So that's it's a little complicated, but, you know, what I mean? Do you get the idea? Personal terroir is, what's my environment? What's my nutrition, both from a brain and body standpoint that either help or hurt me express myself in the best way possible. That means moving through the world, how I behave, how I am.
Jonathan Cook
Through both Personal Terroir and the organization Girls For Girls, Emily encourages people to take stock of the influence of their surroundings. If someone’s surroundings are not supporting a flourishing life, Emily suggests that the best response is to move.
Nonetheless, Emily also yearns for a grounded life, in a place where she feels that she could re-establish her roots.
Emily Avila:
My background is, I'm a dual citizen, Portuguese, and I say Portuguese and Californian because I distinguish that as in some country, but my parents were immigrants from the Azores Islands.
And so they immigrated to California, along with my entire family, aunts uncles, cousins.
So I was born and raised there, but it was, I always had one foot in each kind of culture language, food, belief systems, all of that .
And so I often say I'm 100% Portuguese, which I thoroughly am on my genealogy research, I go back centuries in the Azores. And then, I'm also 100% Californian. So, I'm a classic case of nurture and nature, I think, is, you know, where it all kind of convolutes there.
I just want the opportunity to be there, because it's very quiet. It can feel isolating, you know, that island fever kind of vibe, but I've never gotten that. I would love the opportunity to be there until I'm ready to leave, and I haven't experienced that yet.
My family is from this land that is of not just from it, but of it, and so I think there is a deep history. Like I go to places, I walk paths, then I know my ancestors have walked because these are stories that I've heard, and so I feel a grounding there that I really don't feel much of anywhere else, which I love.
And with this weather, it is, and I, you know, I don't want to get too, into, you know, the connection with ancestral, but I do think there is a grounding there that allows me to just let things be, you know, here and in life in general, you're always trying to achieve and check things off the list. But you know the classic meditation: You have nowhere to be, nothing to do, and it was just a great way to just meditate. I know there's often a metaphor of weather in terms of your brain and your, you know, your mind jumping around. It's watching clouds go by, and that was an embodiment of actually doing that, right?
The place I had had a little veranda and so I and it faces south. So, it faces toward another island, which is a peak, highest peak in Portugal. And, you know, I would sit there, and it was so quiet that I could hear rain coming. I could hear the weather coming from behind me because it would come from the north, right? And you could, you know, it could start to get dark and I would sit there on this veranda.
It's exposed, and when it rains, it really rains. So, it's like quasi-tropical, not subtropical, but tropical. I would sit there. It's like, I hear it coming. I hear it coming. I'm going to wait here until the last minute. Like, can I tell when the weather's super, super close, that I can wait? I did that, and I would start to hear it close enough, and I'd come in inside and two seconds later, it's coming down.
Jonathan Cook:
Emily’s experience of her family’s ancestral home in the Azores grounds her. Being in the Azores stills her propensity for motion, and enables her to simply watch as the rainstorms approach and then pass her by. No longer does her mind jump around. She feels stable, and allows the world to move around her.
Grounding is about being in the right place, recognizing its value, and connecting with that value. Sometimes, there’s the feeling of value in a literal space, as with Emily’s Azores, but the space that we’re grounded in can be metaphorical as well. Emily talks about feeling grounded in her ethical values.
Emily Avila:
Courageous leadership is kind of grounding yourself in your values and knowing, you know, where your values are and having the courage to stick to them and to speak up for them and to advocate for yourself or for others or for an idea.
And there's a variety of concepts that come from that. One of them is creating your own village. You know, who are your people? Who is your tribe you know, who's your tribe? Who do you surround yourself with? Again, a little on that terroir piece, right?
Who are the people you're going to surround yourself with that will support you, encourage you, bring out the best in you? So, it's not just about creating comfortable environments and so-called like-minded people, I think having unlike-minded people has a value.
Jonathan Cook:
In the best of all possible worlds, being grounded would involve connection to a place, to a core set of ethical values, and to a community of people we care about. The world that we live in is not the best of all possible worlds.
The emotion that we call being grounded is an ephemeral thing. We talk about it in contrast to the emotions we feel when our connections are ripped away from us.
Rachael Stamps was grounded in her community, and in her work. She was dedicated to helping the advertising agency she worked in to integrate the latest generative artificial intelligence tools, so that people could be more creative and everyone could benefit from the increased productivity.
Not everyone was going to benefit from the increased productivity, it turned out. After Rachael helped the agency integrate generative AI, she was told that her job was no longer necessary, because generative AI could do the work.
Making matters even worse, the same thing was being done in advertising agencies all around the world. Rachael wasn’t just out of a job. She was out of a profession.
Rachael Stamps
My name is Rachel Stamps, and I currently live in San Francisco, California, and I have spent the last fifteen years working as a designer in marketing and advertising.
I worked really hard for fifteen years. I worked in multiple agencies. I did freelance work, to fill it in the gaps.
So, I guess what this is all leading to, obviously, is we see the industry fall apart, right, and fast forward, I'm getting laid off for the first time ever in my entire career, and this was just in November.
There’s this reality, well, the first there's this, just this like kind of disconnected feeling of like, oh, it's just outside of my control, but I'll just get my next job.
I have all these years of experience. I have this great, you know, agency on my book. Like, somebody's just going to scoop me right up. And it's been six months, and nobody has scooped me right up.
Jonathan Cook:
At the very same time that Rachael lost her work, the election of Donald Trump ripped her community apart. How can a person react to such a traumatic destruction of the foundations of a life? Rachael began with a simple act to re-establish the ground underneath her feet.
Rachael Stamps:
I like to make my bed every morning. It's a very simple thing that immediately I'm like, I take chaos and I bring order. It's a mess and now it's made.
So, making my bed every morning is a very grounding, simple thing that just changes my life. I tend to get lost in my head and my thoughts. I have a very windy, imaginative mind, and so time will just slip right by me.
So, I try to catch myself in practices of like, okay, if I'm making coffee or something hot, I'm focused on creating a thing. Sometimes when I need a reset in the day, it's like just what's a basic thing? When I'm really disoriented, I just deep clean my house.
In fact, when I found out I got laid off, it was a crazy week. I got laid off. I took my friend. So here's how it happened: I was driving. I had a friend from Mexico. This was around, it was right before the election, and he was an illegal immigrant. He said, “I don't feel safe being in the States, no matter how this election goes.”
So, I said, “Well, let me drive you to the border. It's the least I can do.”
So, I drive my friend down to the border. I get him safely home. I turn around. I go to the San Diego airport to drop off my rental car. As I'm in the airport in line to get on the plane, I get a text from my manager that says, “Rachel, we need to talk. I put time on your calendar.” And, I already knew that layoffs were happening in the ether, but I so I felt that just like, oof, like in the pit of my stomach, but also this just like knowing.
I was like, “Listen, I'm boarding the plane, and I'll call you as soon as I get to SFO.” Get to SFO, get on Zoom. My manager's there. He's got tears in his eyes. He's like, “Rachel, I don't know how to have this conversation.”
And I said, “Don’t. Don't say anything. I already know. It's okay. It's going to be okay. I know.”
The next day is the election. I was like, I just lost my partner and friend. Then I just lost my job, and now my country.
I remember, a friend called to check in on me. She's like, “Hey, I heard.” And she's like, “What are you going to do?”
I was like, “I'm going to clean my house. I'm just going to take a week and I'm just going to clean every crevice of this house because it's what I, it's like one thing I can do, you know?” So, like the dishes for you, I think there's something there for me that I can bring chaos into order in this space.
Jonathan Cook:
By cleaning her house, Rachael brought chaos into order, emotionally as well as physically. As the dust was cleared, and possessions put into place, the scattered bits of Rachael’s identity began to be sorted as well. For Rachael, cleaning worked as a kind of ritual of grounding, transforming her state of mind through obliquitous symbolic action.
Any kind of mundane action can be engaged as a ritual. The purpose of a ritual isn’t to get practical work accomplished, but to enable psychological and social transformation.
Rachael’s ritual of house cleaning didn’t get her a new job, but it did bring the chaos of her life into order, enabling her to gain the composure necessary to figure out what to do next.
Symbolically, rituals take us from one space to another. Rachael’s ritual took her back to a place where she could touch ground, and reconnect with the fundamental realities of her life.
An interesting thing about the emotion of feeling grounded is that its expression looks different from person to person. While Rachael becomes grounded while cleaning her house, that wouldn’t work for other people. Emily feels grounded in the Azores, but I would feel like a fish out of water there.
The emotion of grounding is a reminder that emotion isn’t an isolated cognitive experience that can be assessed through a linguistic analysis of someone’s online chats or a digital scan of their facial expression. As with all emotion, a feeling of being grounded is formed in relationship to a person’s past experiences and future expectations, and in reaction to personal and cultural traditions and interpretations of social events.
Grounding is grounded in physical reality. It can’t be operationalized to a quantitative measurement or a checkbox in a database. If an emotion of feeling grounded is separated from its context in human life, it is no longer grounded.
Feeling grounded is about gaining awareness of the context around you, which aligns well with the focus of this podcast, an awareness of the richness of human emotional life. Producing this podcast is an act of grounding for me, because it requires me to listen to other people, and consider their perspectives. It leads me to step away from my anger for a while, and there certainly is a lot going on these days that can make a person angry.
Still, coming to grips with emotion isn’t only about healing and feeling good. Sometimes, it hurts like hell. Come back next week, when this podcast will explore the distinct pain of the emotions of guilt and shame.