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Grounding and Centering

Before every ritual, after every ritual, and on any Tuesday when the world is too much: ground and centre. It is the first thing we teach and the thing experienced witches most often admit to having neglected. It takes three minutes. It changes everything that follows.

What the words mean

Centering is gathering yourself: bringing your scattered attention, which is in your inbox and your argument with your sister and the thing you forgot to buy, back into your body and the present moment. Grounding is connecting that gathered self to the earth, so that you are stable, so that excess energy has somewhere to go, and so that you can draw on something larger than your own nervous system. Together they are the difference between a witch and a person waving a knife around in the dark.

The tree

This is the classic exercise, and there is a reason it has survived. Stand or sit with your feet flat on the floor. Close your eyes if that is comfortable.

1. Breathe. Three slow breaths, letting each out fully. Notice where your body touches the ground or the chair.
2. Find your centre. For most people it is a point just below the navel, the place you would brace from if someone pushed you. Put your attention there. Let the breath move around it.
3. From that centre, send roots down. Feel them go through your feet, through the floor, through the foundations, into the soil, through stone, through water, down toward the warm dark at the heart of the earth. Take your time. Let them branch.
4. Draw up. With each in-breath, pull the slow, cool, steady energy of the earth up through your roots, into your feet, your legs, your centre, filling you like water filling a jar.
5. Send branches up. From your head and shoulders let branches rise, through the ceiling, into the air, toward the sun or the moon and stars. With each breath draw down the bright, quick energy of the sky.
6. Let the two meet in your centre and mix. Feel yourself held between earth and sky, rooted and reaching, steady and awake.
7. When you are ready, let any excess drain back down the roots into the earth. Draw the roots and branches back into your body. Open your eyes. Press your feet into the floor.

Grounding after ritual

Raised power that is not released and grounded leaves you jittery, hungry, weepy or unable to sleep. After a working: press your palms flat to the floor and let anything extra pour out of them into the earth. Eat something, ideally with salt or carbohydrate in it; this is half the reason for cakes and ale. Drink water. Touch something heavy and ordinary. Do not drive until you feel entirely present. If you are badly ungrounded, go outside and put your bare feet on actual ground, or your hands on a tree, or your face in cold water.

Grounding in the world

You will not always have three minutes and a quiet room. These work on a bus, in a meeting, in the dentist's chair:

• Press your feet into the floor and feel the weight of your body going down through them. Breathe out longer than you breathe in.
• Name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste.
• Hold a stone in your pocket. Haematite, smoky quartz, or any pebble from a place you love. Let your attention go into the weight of it.
• Put your hand flat on your own belly, below the navel, and breathe into it until you feel it move.