Magick 101: Grounding

I was looking at that really big site I dislike that shall remain nameless, and this week they have yet another article up about grounding, and the definition of the term is different than every other article they’ve put up on grounding. So far I’ve seen about eight different articles on that site about grounding, and not one has had the correct definition, granted I don’t read it every week. The situation isn’t entirely their fault though, I don’t think I’ve seen the correct definition for grounding anywhere on the Internet, ever. And it’s sad because grounding is one of the basic maneuvers of energy manipulation and an important form of defense. So, due to popular misconception, grounding defined.

To begin with, the term grounding is not originally a magickal term. It was hijacked by the community because of similarities in what happens. Outside of magick, the terms grounding and grounded are references to the way in which electricity operates and moves. To be grounded means that there is either a direct or indirect connection between you and the Earth through which electricity can move. The thing about electricity is that it moves towards the ground, and unless you provide a clear path to the ground, it won’t move through you.

For example, if you jump in the air and touch an exposed electrical wire, nothing happens. But if you stand on the ground and touch the same wire, you get electrocuted. If you’re not touching the ground, electricity won’t move through you. This process is why birds can sit on power lines and not get fried. This is also true whether you’re standing on dirt or at the top of a ten story building. You don’t need to be directly touching the ground, you just need to have a connection to it for a pathway to form. Of course this pathway can be blocked by substances that conduct electricity poorly, such as rubber.

Moving on to magickal grounding, although techniques differ and there are a few variations of the term with bastardizations of the word, the very basic definition of grounding is touching the ground and pushing energy out of yourself and into the Earth, in a sense very similar to how electricity would move through you into the ground.

Much like the way in which electricity works, you don’t have to be touching the physical ground in order to ground. You can just as easily do it from the tenth story of a building. Unlike electricity though, you don’t need to be touching the ground at all to do it. You could, if you wanted to, ground while flying through the air.

Although the term usually refers to putting energy into the Earth, it can also refer to putting energy into other things. When two people have sex, under normal circumstances, both participants forcefully push their energies into their partner who in turn receives them passively. This act, putting your energy into someone else like this, is often times referred to as grounding into them, for example.

There are a few different reasons why a person would want to ground. If they had managed to acquire stronger energy then they were capable of managing, if they had absorbed energy that was incompatible with them or was otherwise harmful or imbalancing, if energy was having an undesired effect on mood, if something attacks by infecting the practitioner with energy their energy, ect.

There are of course other methods a person could use for the same effects. They could cleanse themselves, they could bleed out unwanted energy, or they could convert energy. Each of these techniques are best used under certain circumstances, but at times grounding is the best method to use.

One of the main advantages of grounding is it’s speed and ease of use. For those who are at least a little practiced at energy manipulation, touching their hand to the ground is enough of a ritual aid to effectively and quickly ground, although touching the ground is a superfluous act and grounding can be achieved without doing so.

The other big advantage is that the energy goes into the Earth. Energy has to go somewhere, and energy can do things and attract things, and with grounding you have a safe place to put it. The Earth is a huge renewable source of energy that is quite capable of taking care of itself. Most likely there’s nothing you can hold in your body that would be enough to hurt the planet or even pollute it for long, and even in the case of a reverse flow you most likely couldn’t take enough energy into yourself to put a dent in Earth’s reserves.

Finally, so long as a person isn’t discriminatory, grounding can be used to push out large amounts of energy at near instantaneous speeds.

For these reasons, grounding is usually the best course of action when the practitioner is being attacked with negativity or otherwise being manipulated by energy, or anytime the practitioner has absorbed energy which is immediately harming them. Even though it may be crude and a bit of overkill, because of its speed and ease it’s usually the best method when engaged in a fight.

Bleeding is taking specific energy in the practitioner’s body and pushing it out from any point. Bleeding is a bit tougher to accomplish than grounding and generally takes much longer, especially when the practitioner is being very meticulous about what has to go out and what should stay in. Bleeding also just releases the energy and doesn’t put it anywhere, although the method could be modified to release the energy into the Earth, but this makes bleeding even more difficult to accomplish and will make it take even longer.

Bleeding is best used when the real danger isn’t immediate and the practitioner has a lot of time to work with, not only because of the longer time it takes to bleed energy, but also so their is ample time to diffuse the energy without much build-up. Because a person can’t ground out all of their energy, in cases where the offending energy is severe and deeply imbedded in the practitioner a bleed can effectively rid the practitioner of the energy where simple grounding cannot. Also in cases where the practitioner has managed to isolate the offending energy into one area of their body, bleeding will push the energy out at it’s position, where as grounding will use large amounts of energy to flush the offending energy through the practitioner’s body, using them as a conduit, and possibly infecting the entirety of their body with the energy.

Cleansing, meanwhile, can remove energy, but at the same time the process was meant to do much more. Cleansing tends to be a bit more complicated than grounding, and many people are dependent on ritual aid in order to cleanse themselves. With practice cleansings can be done psionically and very quickly, but typically practitioners will still get better results via ritual, meaning these are essentially weak cleansings. Cleansing was meant to remove not only negative energy, but also outside energy and anything else that may have attached itself to the practitioner, while at the same time helping the practitioner rebalance themselves. Using cleansing to get rid of energy is like vacuuming tile. It’ll clean it some, but you’ll do a better job with a broom and a mop. Cleansing, like bleeding, also just dumps the energy, although unlike bleeding it does it all at once, not giving it much of a chance to dissipate. This is why, if you’re a practitioner, more likely than not your shower is haunted. Although cleansing and grounding overlap somewhat, each has specific purposes for which they’re best suited, and as a replacement to grounding cleansing does a worse job while requiring more of the practitioner.

Finally there’s energy conversions, in which energy is taken in and converted to whatever the practitioner wants it to be. Although this is, in many ways, superior to the other methods, it’s not without its problems. To begin with, an energy conversion will do nothing if the practitioner needs to ground because they have too much energy inside them. Secondly an energy conversion can be very complicated. Not only can it take a long time, but it can require a lot of a practitioner, especially when they are dealing with stronger energies or large amounts of energy. Even when an energy conversion may be the best option, there still may be a good chance that the practitioner isn’t yet capable of doing it. And lastly, there are times when you may not want anything to do with the energy at all for various reasons. In the end a conversion is good for conserving large amounts of energy the practitioner may want to use, but at times it’s easiest just to throw it into the ground and be done with it.