Mechanisms of Grounding

What you can find in the dirt

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

Hey there everyone—

This is how you transplant a plant. Or to be more precise, this is how you transplant a seedling that you buy from the store because it’s spring and you want to have a garden this year, or some containers on your porch, but no one taught you how.

The temptation is to grab the plant by the stem and tug it up and out of the pot. Instead, you want to tilt the pot, allowing the stem to rest gently on your wrist. You want to touch the green part of the plant as little as possible, and focus instead on the dirt and the roots. With your other hand, squeeze the pot. You can be a little tough here, if nothing is budging. Press each side of the pot against the soil to create a small air gap between the sides of the pot and the dirt. Then, ease the pot off, and look at the square of dirt. What color is the dirt? It should be on the blacker side. If it’s light brown, or if it’s light gray, and full of those little white bits nurseries put in soil to give it air, letting the baby roots grow, then your plant is going to need some nourishment. 

Once you’ve checked out the soil, you want to look at the roots. You might see a few fine threads of root and plenty of soil around them. If that’s the case, your plant is ready to be transplanted, pretty much as it is. If, however, what you are seeing is mostly roots and very little dirt, your plant needs some TLC. A plant that is “root bound” has pretty much used up its dirt and its roots are filling all the available space to grow. A root bound plant may have roots that are generally straight and trying to grow down and out of the pot. The roots may even have grown through the little holes in the bottom of the container. But sometimes, roots snake around in a circle. You’ll see that the roots are entangled in each other in a net pattern, wrapping themselves horizontally around the inside of the pot. 

What you want to do is to help those roots figure out that they are no longer in a tiny pot. To do so, you’ll need to encourage them to grow down, to tap into the soil and to keep branching out, creating a solid foundation and nutrient system for the plant. If your plant’s roots have already started weaving together like a basket, they are going to keep growing in that pattern and choke themselves, no matter how much additional dirt is around them. You have to gently, or forcefully, depending on how big your plant is, tear the roots at the bottom of the block of soil, not the sides. You put your thumb and finger in the center of the bottom and tear “out” towards the sides. You’re making a rip up inside the root ball. Tear a little bit, like less than an inch, in each direction. That loosens the roots and breaks the growth pattern. Then you can very very gently start to massage the roots with your fingers, pulling them out of their old pattern and letting them hang down out of the root ball, which is still in your hand.

At this point, you’re ready to transplant. You want to choose a pot that’s about a third larger than the pot you already have. Put a layer of soil in the bottom and then put your plant with its happy roots on top of your little pillow of dirt. The top of your soil block should be about an inch below the top of your new pot. (If it’s a tomato plant, however, you’ll want to submerge the plant two-thirds down in the soil to allow it to build a strong root system, because tomatoes can root along their stems.) Now gently put soil all around your plant, pressing down firmly but not aggressively on the dirt, to help secure the plant. If you can, water the dirt from the side, rather than pouring water down on top of the entire plant. Give it a few little drinks, to allow the water to slowly sink into the new dirt. If your soil–not your air–is above 50 degrees right now, you can put your plant straight into the dirt instead of a pot. Bonus: gently lift up the leaves of the plant and look at the undersides. Make sure there are no creatures or eggs there, getting ready to use your tasty seedling as their salad bar. Voila! You are now a gardener.

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The first gardening book I ever bought started with this sentence: “Gardening is not difficult. You just need to think like a plant.” That sentence was both a relief to read and a provocation: in that moment I realized I had never thought like a plant. Plants were mysterious. They had their own rules. They couldn’t tell me what they needed; their flourishing or withering seemed pretty arbitrary to me, unless it was obvious that they hadn’t been watered, or had been boiled in sunlight and burned. I suddenly wanted to see the world from a plant’s perspective. 

I think part of the reason I love gardening is because, like writing, it requires an amount of noticing and concentration that releases me from the tedious awareness of my own ego. It halts rumination, list making, grievance, and pettiness. It facilitates my absorption in an enormous system that allows me to join, but does not need or require my presence to thrive. Gardening, unlike writing, is tangible and concrete in its results. Yesterday I transplanted seedlings for several hours. I didn’t even know I was tired until I was finished, because I was so focused on the specifics of each plant. This morning, the tomato plants’ buds had bloomed, and they were standing tall in their new pots.

It is not lost on me that when people say they feel ungrounded, or when therapists use “grounding techniques” to help people suffering from a traumatic flashback or pattern of rumination return to the present, they are relying on a metaphor to describe a psychic state. What is it to be grounded? How do we know when we aren’t? 

One of my favorite grounding techniques is to ask the person I’m working with to notice as many instances as they can of a particular color that’s in the room. A person who is struggling to not dissociate, or who is moving into panic and feeling out of control, can immediately do something: they can counter a well worn neurological pattern by hijacking the brain’s love of puzzles. Ooh! the brain says: How many orange things do I see? I can do that! 

It’s incredible that the mind can’t successfully count orange things and at the same time convince itself that it knows, specifically, how catastrophic the future will be. It has to choose, and the puzzle wins. The brain’s toddler-style focus on counting orange gives the sophisticated self a moment to breathe, to return to the present. It returns agency. It reminds us that we have the power to intentionally feed or starve a hypothesis that is often speculative, in terms of facts, or that is based on projecting into the future a recurrence of an excruciating event from the past. Counting brings us to the present. There, we breathe and interrupt the grooved patterns of thought.

Lately I’ve been watching the noir crime drama Sugar. There’s a scene that’s been stuck in my head since I saw it. The brooding, film-obsessed detective drives a sweet blue vintage convertible around LA. He and one of the characters, a formerly famous rock musician who is also a suspect, have just interviewed a young woman who has told them a harrowing story of sexual violence. After the interview, the detective and the musician drive through the city and he takes her home. They pull up to the house and she looks at him, while he stares straight ahead. She says: “Everyone talks about how important it is to be in the present moment. How we should slow down.” Then she says, “But maybe we aren’t in the present moment because when we slow down, when we notice, everything is just so sad.”

The detective doesn’t say anything back. Then the scene ends. 

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In Everyday Zen Charlotte Joko Beck talks about what it means to be an enlightened being, and how “full integration” is a step on that pathway, one that is extremely difficult to attain. She writes:

Most of us are in some of the stages leading up to [mind/body integration], which means we cannot own even our own bodies completely. Any tension in the body means that we cannot own it. We won’t say that we are a body, but that we have a body. And then there’s the state before that, when we completely disown the body, thinking we’re just a mind. And there’s a state before that in which we cannot even own all of our mind; we split some of it off as well.

The musician is asking about the utility of allowing in the pain of others, and of her own suffering. The sexual violence has already happened. The young girl is sitting with the fact of her powerlessness in the face of the enormous wealth and standing of the man who has blackmailed her. She has had no redress for what happened to her. What is the utility of sitting with pain about violence that cannot ever be undone? Isn’t it better to split it off and keep going?

We could talk to the musician who doesn’t want to be present and coax her into widening, ever so slightly, the aperture of her experience. Can she stay a little longer with her sadness? Can she hold both the sadness and her helplessness to have prevented the violence? I love that the creators of Sugar put this line in the musician’s mouth, because she is a person who used to be a rock star and is now older, no longer performing, and in recovery. She’s moving into presence, but as she does so, she’s having to face her past, and possibly the ways she’s implicated in extreme violence, not only in the present, but with roots in her past. We know that she was able to run away from herself, on tour and performing. We know that even with running, she needed to check out with alcohol, stay as numb as she could. To stay sober, she has to encounter the pain that she cordoned off from her consciousness. But it feels like a pointless exercise.

We can’t enlarge our capacity to feel if we’re dissociated or running away. We can’t experience our own power if we’re afraid to make a decision, for fear of making a mistake. In these scenarios, grounding strategies, and becoming grounded, are a precondition for awareness and, perhaps, action. 

But the musician still has a point. She’s still staring at the fact of violence, having occurred, occurring, not stopping. She’s looking at the larger structures that keep the powerful man insulated from accountability and the young woman silenced. Does it matter if she feels it or not?

Is there a tension in therapy, in psychology, that is illuminated in the focus on grounding? Does the field fear a person falling apart, entering chaos, if that is the consequence of the full flood of feeling? Is the field afraid of pain if there’s no reason for it? Is grounding a way to keep people from staring into the abyss, to pull them back into a framework, a method, a surety that if you do this, you can tolerate that? 

Psychology, born in the late nineteenth century, a time of great specialization and fracturing of knowledge, under the guise of building expertise, has a residue of transcendence in it, even when we are engaging in somatic practices. What is the balance between using a therapy session to sit in the immensity of what we cannot know, and using the session to “get somewhere” and find a use value for the time spent? If I’m sitting with a client who is becoming more and more upset, more submerged in her grief, and the session ends with no technique for her to practice, no homework to help her titrate what she’s encountering; if I haven’t helped her “return to baseline” at the session’s close, I might question my own ethics. I might stay with that session in my mind, not because of its power, but because I’d fear I did something wrong. I didn’t help. I didn’t make something better, even if all I offered is a change in perspective. There’s fear here. Did I not prove my worth? Do I not believe the person can handle her own grief, even if she thinks it’s going to crush her? Does therapy sometimes prevent people from breaking open, from entering a space that may be necessary for deep transformation? Is that breaking the edge of psychosis?

These are open questions, opening questions.

I’m curious about strategies of grounding that are literally about the physical ground. Getting down on the floor. Hands in the dirt. Lying under a tree and really paying attention to the new spring leaves. This is a breaking open of the self that is recognizing our inclusion in the greater than human world. A de-centering of the human experience, a practicing seeing ourselves not as transcendent and special, separated from others, separated from the entirety of existence, but rather a fairly new arrival, in terms of evolution, on the scene of Being.

What might we absorb as our focus is turned toward the practicalities of tending a plant, a forest, a river, a watershed? What ballast might we receive if our communion is not only with other people and animals, but the very soil that upholds us? In asking these questions, I wonder what kind of Self I might inhabit, if I took my emotional temperature not only in relation to my own dreams and desires, but to that of the ecosystem that makes my life possible? What had to happen to make me believe I am independent, a thinker, an actor who determines my fate; what did I have to forget, to arrive here?

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca