Intro

I live in northern Thailand. One of the reasons I chose not live in France 15 years ago was the lack of spirituality and sacredness in people’s lives. When I discovered India and Thailand, I fell in love with how pregnant life is with the sacred and the divine. After almost 15 years living here I have also come to realize that, as much as I love spiritually alive people, they too often manifest a deep disconnection from the practical stuff of life: disembodied, spacey, transcendental new age spiritualiy is fun and attractive… but is it playing its role in human and planetary evolution? I am sure that breathing from our root chakra heads down while doing acro-yoga is fun and might even help see new perspectives, but it will surely fall short of honorng of belonging to Nature, restoring the Earth ecosystems and the need to feed 7 billions people…

Life was never meant to be a rat race. And spirituality was never meant to be disconnected from everyday life.

Practical Spirituality

Permaculure and land restoration work have nurtured my life with a sense of practical and sacred spirituality, which I call being grounded. In other words, it is honoring both the magic and the down-to-earth realities of embodied life: we need to eat, shit, be and do. In an ethereal dimension life is an illusion, a matrix, but in the embodied dimesion human incarnation is the gift of this lifetime and we ought to honor it.

Being grounded refers to the quality of our connection to Earth and its energies. If the element of Fire is hot and the element of water fluid, then Earth is strong, solid, practical and pragmatic, anchored, abundant… and paradoxe friendly. All these qualities apply to the definiton of being grounded, which is the realm of the embodiement, something that is by nature paradoxical as it relates to both our our pragmatic attitude towards life and the deep sacred and invisible values that inspire it.

Being grounded is to be supported by Nature, strong in our beliefs and resilient in the face of change and adversity. It refers to an approach to life that is of deep spiritual inspiration while at the same time being very practical oriented.

For monks and spiritualy enlightened ones, it is the gift of contribution. For activists it is the gift of nourishment and self-love.

For working people it is aligning our deep purpose with the needs of society and the ecological transition.

For all it is befriending our strongest ally: Mother Earth.

How can we know?

Here are a few questions to question how grounded you really are:

• In the face of adversity and unexpected change, do you feel lost? Do you completely reinvent yourself? Do you call to your value system to navigate the new conditions?
• Are you reactive to your environment or proactive from your core beliefs?
• Is your spiritual journey about detachment or engagement?
• How often and how intimately do you engage with wild nature?
• Do you spend more time listening to your thoughts or to your body?
• Think about your bioregion (where you live): how many local natural resources can you identify? What food grows here? How much of your daily food in being produced locally?

Grounding is not just a hype New Age concept. If you want to truly practice grounding in your life and see the benefits for yourself, please get in touch with me!