Trying to Become Grounded

This (long) weekend was devoted to becoming grounded. I had felt myself, since returning from Europe, becoming less and less grounded. I felt reality slipping away from me again, anxiety returning like a toxic fog to cloud my clear judgement.

Feeling connected (physically and spiritually) to the earth is essential in maintaining groundedness. I planted a small garden last weekend for therapy, but it wasn't enough. I haven't been giving myself the mental or temporal space to carry out daily grounding rituals.

There were many helpful suggestions online for ways to regain groundedness. Some involved breathing exercises and meditation, mental self-talk or handwritten journaling, hard physical exertion or prayer, cooking or baking especially with root vegetables, yoga or aromatherapy, getting organized or cleaning, even wearing red to invoke the root chakra. My favorite suggestion is to sit at a pottery wheel, but I don't have one of those.

I think the hardest thing for me is to sit in this uncomfortable and unbalanced position and not beat myself up over and over about not being able to get out of it. I have already tried the things above and I still feel crazy and ungrounded. Maybe this feeling will last until my dissertation is submitted and I know where I will be heading for my first post-doc.

I'm noticing that over the past two years I've been using workouts as a metric for self-esteem. Mileage proved something to me. It was a source of strength and inspiration to myself that I could ride (or run) so many miles and burn so many calories per month to eventually reach this state of health. Now I need to shift my focus to pages of dissertation written and papers published and cover letters written and interviews successfully completed. It's mind-boggling.

Sometimes I feel like academia is so burdened with these metrics of success that the state of health of the individual is compromised in the effort. I feel pressured by competition to produce tangible outputs of this academic exercise. But when I googled "define: academic" I got some scary results.

• "marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects"
• "hypothetical or theoretical and not expected to produce an immediate or practical result"
• "having no practical importance"
• "belonging...conforming to set rules and traditions"
• "orthodoxy...of a scholastic variety"

Is this the source of my unbalancing anxiety? The culmination of a degree that involved large personal sacrifices, which may or may not be worth the paper it is printed on... Not to mention that at the moment (or at least averaged over the past 6 months) I have been experiencing financial tension, household disarray, and family conflict.

But I am working on becoming grounded. As Erica Heinz says on HuffPo, "Feel the strength and security in your legs and hips. You're a part of the Earth, you're fully supported." Like a plant must grow its root system to support an upward reaching shoot, I am working to stabilize my current life situation, drawing strength from the ground up.