To be grounded is to be in fluent relationship with. To be at ease and connected in context. It’s a participatory knowing of contact, the ground.1
Consider the act of walking. A certain attuned relationship (groundedness) with the floor in the context of gravity engenders the act of walking. Walking isn’t inherent in the floor. Nor is walking inherent in me. Walking is something that happens between the physical ground and me.
It can be useful to look at things through a binary lens, eg someone has the ability to walk or they don’t. But relationship with the ground can also be continuously refined. The endeavor of groundedness, of fluent relation with and in the world, is without end.
The extent to which I am grounded is the extent to which I experience a sense of agency, thereby giving rise to freedom and creativity. Dancing emerges from an intimate knowing between the floor and me. Interestingly, this is counter to the notion that I have to somehow detach in order to find a sense of freedom or autonomy.
For instance, the dependency paradox in attachment theory holds that the more securely attached one is in a given relationship, whether that’s child ⇒ caretaker or partner ⇒ partner, the more a sense of agency is fostered.
The more I trust the ground, the more it opens up my sense of agency in the world. From this contact, there is capacity to leap, willingness to risk.
As DC Schindler puts it, “The movement upward coincides with an entry deeper into things. So you’ll find you’re both simultaneously freer and more attached to things. This is an experiential description of the simultaneity of transcendence and immanence. Your movement is not to abandon things, but to deepen your relationship with them. And you discover that you deepen your relationship with them only if you’re also entering into this higher level perspective and freedom and so forth.”2
Contexts inform, overlap, and nest within each other. My sense of groundedness within myself, self contact, is woven into groundedness with the planet, is woven into groundedness in interpersonal relationships.
What is the context underneath it all, the context in which all other contexts and relationships are constructed? And how I might find and live from a sense of contact with that ground?
What is it to know?: Participatory Knowing - knowing through relationship with the world - as an agent fitted to an arena. Knowing, in the sense of having fluency and ease with, the relational space in and between the world and me. This is where we come to know a sense of home and meaning. To know here is to be grounded.
Just came out of meditation in which I was practicing awareness of ground, feeling my roots in and moving through the ground as an extension of my being, to find your timely and beautiful articulation waiting for me as a gift like a fine cup of freshly brewed coffee :).