Grounding is definitely the most natural direct form of healing that I know of
That’s why there’s not a patient on earth that I’ve worked with that hasn’t benefited in some way. It’s not something that is a new concept. It’s something that we actually forgot for a while and we’re just rediscovering. It’s literally just touching the earth. I mean, it’s as simple as that. Obviously, since the dawn of time, anything alive has bloomed from the earth and in contact with the earth, and it wasn’t till super recently that we invented plastic shoes and installation in our homes and cars that we drive around on.
The disconnect has been really recent, so it’s interesting when I get interviewed for talking about grounding, it’s like, they’re like, how do we discover this? It’s so ridiculous that we’ve been so removed that, that seems such a foreign concept, but over time, everything has evolved and the earth gives us life in the air, and in water, and in food. Obviously, we’re meant to live on the earth in our bodies, and the health of our bodies is supported by the earth. People think of being supported by the earth in indirect ways, like taking that deep meditative breath or eating raw food or juicing, all these fads, supplements.
But all of it really comes from the gifts of the earth in the most direct way to circumnavigate all of those indirect pathways is just to touch it. It’s the most basic thing. I almost like that’s an anti-climatic answer because it’s like, it should be something more involved, but it literally means going outside and touching it, that’s it. That is an electrical connection between our body and the earth. It’s the most direct form of healing. I’d love to go into the science behind it because yes, absolutely, there’s documentable, reproducible scientific literature showing that, just touching the earth changes our body.
The simple technicalities behind earthing
It doesn’t have to digest something first. It doesn’t have to bring the oxygen into our lungs and disseminate it through our bloodstream. It’s a literally direct, energetic connection. Yeah, it is. But then when you switch that, and actually when you just experience it yourself, it’s not even really about what other people are educating you about or what the scientific literature says. It’s literally you just touch the earth and see how you feel. Then it becomes, it’s almost like surreal because then you look around and you see all the ways we’re disconnected and how weird that is and how the ramifications in our body and over time, and as our society has gone along, and all of the chronic inflammatory conditions, even dementia and cancers and heart disease.
Talking about the heart has skyrocketed, and you start correlating the disconnect we did gradually by removing ourselves from the earth, and then all these diseases start to show up and progress. When you personally then experience just touching the earth for a minute, and everybody I think can already intuitively understand that because it’s just in us. We know we depend on the earth for our physical bodies, and then everybody knows what it feels like to have spent even five minutes on the beach or to stand up and look at the stars for two minutes and feel a little bit realigned.
No health trend can amount to the astounding benefits of earthing
I think it’s something that’s a foreign concept because we haven’t talked about it a lot, but I think it’s something we all know and can resonate with pretty quickly. Because I have a holistic approach, I get a lot of spiritual patients who are very open-minded. It’s funny because those are generally the ones that feel the crappiest and are the most physically disconnected from the earth. You wouldn’t think that. Most of my patients are people who spend hours meditating or doing yoga, and they eat the best foods and all these supplements, and they juice and all this.
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I mean, they’re really connecting to the earth in an organic, healthy way. Every other way, but directly. They talk to me and they say, “I eat everything right. I’m on this paleo gluten-free sugar-free diet, and I meditate for three hours. Why the heck is my back hurting and I can’t sleep?” It’s just that one missing piece. But that to me is the most direct and most powerful piece because there’s not a supplement that helps everybody. Conventionally, there’s not a surgery that helps everyone. Holistically, not everyone can meditate, not everyone likes yoga, not everyone can do a certain posture in yoga or whatever
Only one healing modality is universal, and that’s earthing
There’s no one universal thing. Only one healing modality is universal, and that’s earthing, like touching the earth and grounding. It’s the only one. I have a checklist when I work with a patient, and the first one is, are you touching the earth in any way? Even the most holistic open-minded person generally is the most ungrounded and they have residual effects from being completely disconnected. There’s no amount of meditation you can do or deep breathing you can do.
There’s almost no amount of healthy foods and healing supplements that you can do that really can replace just being docked with the earth. If I’m speaking to someone very conventionally minded, in my medical training, working in the ER, or in the ICU even, and having a physical body that you can literally do anything to. You can put them on artificial respiration, you can defibrillate, shock their heart and get it beating again. You can have them on every kind of antibiotic on earth. You can put a tube into their stomach to feed them directly, exactly what you want to put the nutrients in their body.
Being disconnected to the earth is a huge puzzle piece that’s missing in modern medicine, and in holistic fields
None of those things are guaranteed. People can be completely, completely 100% artificially supported and still pass away. There’s no amount of other things we can do to the body that forces it to stay alive if it’s not healthy and healing. I think that being disconnected to the earth is a huge puzzle piece that’s missing in modern medicine, and in holistic fields. Like I said, even holistic people are like, “Why can’t I resolve this one issue?” So, there’s a huge chunk missing, and having everything else, saturating the body with everything else, the best we can possibly do is not enough, specifically to the heart. We could be here all day if we talk about it head to toe.
What does connecting to the earth do for your health and heart?
So, I’m going to narrow it down to the heart. Even in the heart, we have to narrow it down further because what doesn’t being grounded to the earth do to the heart? It not only helps the beat of it, and which I’d love to go into that particulars, but it helps the rhythm, then it helps the strength of the heart. It supports musculature because the heart is a muscle. It’s an electrically beating muscle, so both those things, then it goes further and it supports the circulatory system. That’s why one reason it doesn’t matter what you eat or how well you’re breathing or what your air quality is because you need the blood to get there. Right?
So, the circulatory system is a mesh that connects and interconnects your entire body. So, supporting that supports all your organs. Then, even down in the circulatory system, looking at your red blood cell, it helps that too. There are medical studies showing the effects of all that. I mean, I can run through, but if you want to pick, because it’s the heart, it’s the way it beats, it’s the meshwork of delivery system, and then it’s the cells inside that meshwork, and all, all are affected, and that’s just the heart. So, if we were talking about the lungs, if we were talking about the brains, or we were talking about your circadian rhythm, or we were talking about hormones, or adrenals, same thing, bones.
I mean, literally everything. Because you asked, when did we start discovering this? It’s really, when did we start forgetting it? I don’t know where along the way we forgot it, but probably with the invention of plastic is where we started seeing the effects. Now it’s been rediscovered about, I’d say 25 or 30 years ago now, and so there is, at least 20 years of medical literature now supporting grounding.
There are double-blind placebo studies. They show statistically reproducible results, clinically significant results and they are being published. It’s fringe, but it’s starting to be accepted, and I would expect that to really boom. Just like omega-3 fatty acids, or vitamin D supplementation that was so fringe, and now there are huge medical trials that are going to come out in the next year and a half. I was just reading the medical literature on it now. There are huge studies involving millions of people and these are going to be published in the next year or two.
I think grounding might be a decade behind that maybe, but it’s the same thing. I mean, taking fish oil supplements was in competition obviously to taking prescription medication. It was ignored for a long time, but now it’s just irrefutable, and so it is being accepted into huge studies. Grounding is, I’d say, 10 years behind that. The studies that we have in grounding that are published and accepted on the fringe now are showing individuals, showing maybe a dozen people. There are studies that are up to 40 or 100 people. Yeah, in the next say five years, there’s going to be studies of thousands and thousands of people.
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Effects of Earthing on Heart Rate Variability
Well, it’s interesting, with the heart, the heart is like an analogy to our whole health. It’s hard to talk about the heart without also talking about the emotional and energetic health of your whole body. It’s all tied together. Anything we delve into, we can pan outward and see how that affects our whole body. If we just talk about, for example, let’s just start with the rhythm of the heart, because that’s just beautiful, everybody knows what that looks like. You put your stethoscope on and listen to the rhythm.
Just the rhythm alone is a predictor of mortality. It’s actually a risk factor for death. When you lose the sensitivity of your heartbeat, your heartbeat is responsive to your environment. Your heart, everybody knows, and emotion really. Your heart can pound when you’re anxious or angry, and it can, hopefully when you sleep and you’re relaxed, and it can slow down. The strength of your heart is the fact that it is connected to the world around you. Medically, I can say, so that’s called heart rate variability.
Heart rate variability is a prognostic indicator of mortality and morbidity
If your heart is like a robot and it’s not responsive—that’s what you are when you’re hooked up maybe in the ICU, and it’s just beep, beep. That you have lost your sensitivity to the environment around you and you’ve lost your strength and your capacity to respond. That’s the strength of our heart, it’s connected, it’s an electrical sensor. When it’s very variable and when it’s super connected to the world around us and the people around us, that’s healthy, and you have a longer lifespan, it can predict your lifespan. When you have suffered stress, or PTSD, born prematurely, heart transplant, for example, when the heart’s waking back up, you’ve transplanted it, the heart rate variability is actually a predictor, a prognostic indicator of mortality and morbidity.
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Docking your body and your heart electrically into the earth can help you adapt to stress better
When it goes into that robotic function of losing the sensitivity and the variability, then it’s stressed and your lifespan is decreased because of it. Now, taking that concept of heart rate variability being very important to your overall health, grounding has been shown to help support the robustness and the variability of your heart. In other words, docking your body and your heart electrically into the earth increases your sensitivity to respond to the world around you so you can adapt to stress better. You can have a stronger response when you need more heart pumping. When you need more blood to flow to the muscles, you get more oxygen, you get more nutrients, you can combat illnesses and environmental exposures that are stressful to the body.
In studies, they took 40 patients and they grounded all 40 of them, and they showed, that after just a half-hour of grounding, every single patient’s heart rate variability increased every single one. It wasn’t like half of them, every single one had. That means the positive predictor of their life span increased in that time while they were grounded. You undock the patient, you take them away from the electrical connectivity to the earth, and they’re ungrounded, and every single one of them, their heart rate variability went back to baseline.