Tool #1 Earthing
The basic idea of “Earthing” has been with us for a long time. Throughout history, humans have strolled, sat, stood, and slept on the ground—the skin of our bodies touching the skin of the Earth—oblivious to the fact that such physical contact transfers natural electrical energy to the body. Modern lifestyle has disconnected us from the Earth’s energy, making us more vulnerable to stress and illness.
Many health-enhancing discoveries are made by regular people who put two-and-two together and come up with an insight that is obvious and simple, but one had thought of before. Clint Ober, who “discovered” Earthing, is one of those guys. He grew up on a farm in the Midwest. As he remembers his early years he ways he chased cows, baled hay, and spent long summer days walking barefoot up and down long rows of beets and beans pulling weeds. When he grew up he worked in the cable T.V. field. He reflected on his years in television and cable and some thoughts began to come together. “Before there was cable, you commonly had lots of flecks (‘noise,’ we call it) in the TV picture. Or you had ‘snow’ or lines of all kinds of electromagnetic interference. In the cable industry, you have to ground and shield the entire cable system in every home to prevent extraneous electromagnetic signals and fields from interfering with the transmission carried through the cable. That’s how you provide the viewer with a perfect signal and a crisp picture.”
Like many discoveries that revolutionize how we see ourselves and the world, this one was sparked by one of those “aha” experiences that seem to grab our hearts. “My ‘lightbulb’ went off one day in 1998,” Ober recalls. “I was sitting on a park bench and watching the passing parade of tourists from all over the world. At some point, and I don’t know why, my awareness zeroed in on what all these different people were wearing on their feet. I saw a lot of those running shoes with thick rubber or plastic soles. I was wearing them as well. It occurred to me rather innocently that all these people—me included—were insulated from the ground, the electrical surface charge of the Earth beneath our feet. I started to think about static electricity and wondered if being insulated like that could have some effect on health.”
After years of research he teamed up with cardiologist Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D. and health writer Martin Zucker to write the book, Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever? James L. Oschman says that “Earthing seems to do away with or dramatically improve so many health challenges common in this day and age: Insomnia, the chronic pain of multiple diseases and injuries,exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and premature aging.”
How can Earthing help with so many chronic illnesses? One answer seems to be that it helps reduce inflammation in our bodies. Inflammation is now believed to be the underlying cause of more than 80 chronic illnesses, and more than half of Americans suffer currently from one or more of them. “Inflammation may turn out to be the elusive Holy Grail of medicine—the simple phenomenon that
holds the key to sickness and health,” says William Meggs, M.D., Ph.D. of East Carolina University in his book The Inflammation Cure: How to Combat the Hidden Factor Behind Heart Disease, Arthritis,
Asthma, Diabetes & Other Diseases.
Earthing May Be the Original Energy Healing Power Tool
We live on a planet alive with energy. Ober, Sinatra, and Zucker describe it as a “six sextillion (that’s a six followed by twenty-one zeroes) metric ton battery that is continually being renewed by solar radiation, lighting, and heat from the molten core at the center. Just like the Earth, your body is mostly water and minerals, and both are excellent conductors of electrons. As we move upon the Earth our bodies are able to transfer these electrons from the Earth to our bodies.
Our ancient ancestors knew nothing about the science of how this works, but they had a firm understanding of the importance of being in connection with the Earth. For them the Earth was sacred. It was the Mother that brought life to all. Throughout human history we have tuned into the cycles of Nature for survival and health. Qi (pronounced chee) is a central principle in the long history of Chinese wisdom and is seen as the energy or natural force that fills the universe. From India’s Vedic tradition the equivalent concept is prana, or “vital force.”
All natural things, plants, animals, and humans, grow and are influenced by the natural cycles of energy coming from the Earth. Native Americans honored and recognized the importance of being connected to the Earth. The late Ota Kte (Luther Standing Bear), a writer, educator, and tribal leader from the Lakota Sioux tradition, described our relationship to the Earth this way: “The old people came literally to love the soil. They sat on the ground with the feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the Earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with their bare feet on the sacred Earth. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.” It is time we reconnected to the power of Earth.
Earthing at a Glance
What is Earthing?
Earthing involves coupling your body to the Earth’s eternal and gentle surface energies. It means walking barefoot outside and/or sitting, working or sleeping inside while connected to a conductive device that delivers the natural healing energy of the Earth into your body.
What isn’t Earthing?
You are not in any sense being electrocuted. In fact, when you “plug in” the Earthing devices into the electrical outlet, you’re only using the ground plug (for those of us not electrically inclined, that’s the fatter prong at the bottom). So, there’s no electricity at all, just the connection through the ground plug to the earth. Earthing is among the most natural and safest things you can do.
What happens?
Your body becomes suffused with negative-charged free electrons abundantly present on the surface of the Earth. Your body immediately equalizes to the same electric energy level, or potential, as the Earth.
What do you feel?
Sometimes you feel, a warm, tingling sensation and often feelings of ease and well-being.
Will you feel better?
Usually, yes, and often rapidly. The degree of improvement varies from person to person. The important thing is to make Earthing a long-term addition to your daily routine, and to do it as much as possible so as to gain maximum benefit. When Earthing is stopped, symptoms tend to slowly return.
What does Earthing do?
Observations and research indicate the following benefits from Earthing. We expect manymore to emerge with ongoing studies.
Earthing:
•Defuses the cause of inflammation, and improves or eliminates the symptoms of many inflammation-related disorders.
•Reduces or eliminates chronic pain.
•Improves sleep in most cases.
•Increases energy.
•Lowers stress and promotes calmness in the body by cooling down the nervous system and stress hormones.
•Normalizes the body’s biological rhythms.
•Thins blood and improves blood pressure and flow.
•Relieves muscle tension and headaches.
•Reduces or eliminates jet lag.
•Protects the body against potentially health-disturbing environmental electromagnetic fields (EMFs).
•Accelerates recovery from intense athletic activity.
Look over the list. Which benefits would you like to have in your life? If this were a new wonder drug, you’d probably be willing to pay a lot of money to get these benefits. But as you’ll see, you can have all of this without the cost or side-effects of “miracle drugs.”
Ready to Start Earthing? Here’s What You Do.
This may be the simplest Energy Healing tool you can use. But remember I warned you that even knowing the scientific basis for Earthing, you may fall into the trap of thinking “This is too easy. It can’t really help with pain or inflammation.” But hang in there. Once you’ve tried it and see the results produced you’ll be glad you stayed with it. You may not be a world-class professional athlete who will do anything to stay in shape, but you know how good it feels to have all your parts working and how miserable you feel when your body is out of whack.
1. Take your shoes off.
We intuitively knew what was right when we were young. As soon as we were out of school we took off our shoes and spent the summer barefoot. Now science validates our youthful wisdom. The late Dr. William Rossi, a Massachusetts podiatrist, footwear industry historian, scientist, and author said in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management, “A natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person. It took four million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement heat to foot.” So, when you can take off your shoes. You’ll walk better and feel better.
But shoes aren’t only bad for our mechanics. More importantly our modern rubber-soled shoes, made from petrochemicals, prevent us from receiving the healing energies from the Earth. “The sole (or plantar surface) of the foot is richly covered with some 1,300 nerve endings per square inch,” Dr.Rossi wrote in a 1997 article in Footwear News. “That’s more than found on any other part of the body of comparable size.” Getting our feet back in touch with the Earth may be the simplest and best medicine we can take.
2. When you wear shoes, wear leather-soled shoes.
“Why are so many nerve endings concentrated there?” asks Dr. Rossi. “To keep us ‘in touch’ with the Earth. The foot is the vital link between the person and the Earth. The paws of all animals are equally rich in nerve endings. The Earth is covered with an electromagnetic layer. It’s this that creates the sensory response in our feet and in the paws of animals.”
Even if we decide to walk barefoot more, there are times when we need to wear shoes to prevent injury and keep our feet warm. What can we do? Get back to wearing leather soled shoes. Dr.Rossi bemoaned the fact that modern shoe soles have separated us from the energy of the Earth and feeling of the ground, which is so important to our health and well-being. He wrote, “the bottoms of our footwear are virtually ‘deadened.’ A cross section of a shoe reveals several layers: outsole, midsole, insole filler material, footbed, cushioning, sockliner. An almost total blockout of sensory response.”
We forget that prior to World War II most everyone wore shoes with leather soles. But as cheap oil became available, even shoes were made of oil-based products. Dr. Sinatra notes that even makers of fancy men’s dress shoes are increasingly switching to rubber, plastic, and other non-conductive material, just as casual and work shoes before them.
I still remember wearing moccasins when I was a kid. I loved playing cowboys and Indians and much preferred to be the Indian. I recently bought a pair of sturdy moccasins which I can wear. It turns out that I stumbled on to the original “earth shoe.” As Ober, Sinatra, and Zucker say in their book, Earthing, “Leather (processed from hides), a conductive material when moist, has been the traditional source of shoes and sandals. The original lightweight, softsole, heal-less and simple moccasin—a piece of crudely tanned leather that envelops the foot and is fastened on with rawhide thongs—is possibly the closest we have ever come to an ‘ideal’ shoe. It dates back more than 14,000 years.”
3. When you’re at home and work, get “barefoot substitutes.”
Another way we can get the health benefits of grounding is by using simple devices that were originally used for research studies on Earthing, but are now available to the public. They provide inside connectivity to the Earth outside. They are connected by a wire to a ground rod placed directly in the Earth or plugged into the ground port of a grounded electrical outlet. They can be utilized during sleep, work, and even while watching TV.
There are Universal chair/desk/mouse/bed/floor mats and pads that can be used interchangeably to fit any setting. A pad placed on a desktop conducts through your forearms or wrists, on the floor through your feet, and on your chair through your butt. And on the bed through any part of your body that makes contact with it. Normal perspiration through layers of clothes, such as a dress, pants, socks, or long sleeves, permits varying degrees of conductivity. The pad utilizes a metallic fiber mesh and conductors coupled to a wire connected to a grounded outlet in the wall or an outside rod.
I tried it out and it’s pretty nifty. They include a little test devise that insures that the outlets in the house have a proper ground. Then you plug into the ground slot. There’s no connection to the electricity so it’s totally safe. On their site they have a good description of each product and a question and answer section that tells you what you need to know. As a special bonus to those in my community, they offer a 5% discount. Simply type in the word “menalive” when you buy something and you get your discount. If you’d like more information on the other Energy Healing tools you can use to reduce stress go to www.MenAlive.com
The above is an excerpt from Jed Diamond’s new book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools.
