Thursday and Friday July 17 & 18, 2025: 7 to 10 am PDT– Grounding as a Practice & Process

Thursday and Friday July 17 & 18, 7 am to 10 am pm PDT (10 am - 1 pm EDT)(-7 hours GMT)

Join Natureza Gabriel for a 6-hour deep-dive (2 x 3 hour sessions) into the practice and process of grounding.

The simple and profound predicament we are in is that the progression of modern civilization so-called has been a millenias-long denaturing of our roots of relating to the Earth. Cut off from her, unable to feel her, no longer in contact with the GROUND, we are helpless to transform our relating with the Earth because we don’t know her, are not in relationship with her, and therefore do not feel accountable to her. What we do not feel connected to we do not take care of.

Beyond the destruction this wreaks upon the only biosphere in the known universe, it is making modern humans profoundly ill.

This workshop is focused on the neurophysiology of our GROUNDING SYSTEM; the most ancient unmyelinated sub-diagphragmatic autonomic neurology woven, starfish-like, as a net through your guts, its embryonic center in your umbilicus, it northmost purview the respiratory diaphragm, its southmost edge your pelvic floor.

This is the autonomic neurological system that gives birth to gut feelings, and through which we feel the ground. It is the neurobiological correlate of feeling ‘grounded’. When it is shifted out of safety and connection, from a salutogenic (health-creating) to a pathogenic (disease-creating) frame, its action inverts and it becomes the UNGROUNDING SYSTEM, the biolological seat of unmetabolized shutdown, known in the Porgesian world of Polyvagal Theory as the Dorsal Vagal System.

This class will include framing of an autonomic understanding of this system, the predicaments of modernity referred to above, and practices for addressing it.