By learning how to connect with the Earth, you’ll discover just how soothing, strengthening, and healing the Earth is. It will totally change the way you regard the ground under your feet and your relationship to the planet you live on.
Returning to the bosom of Nature
For most people, reconnecting with Mother Earth usually means camping, hiking, gardening, going to the beach, or pursuing some other activity that returns us – in body and soul – to the bosom of Nature. The reconnection we talk about in this book is something different. By reconnection we mean taking off your shoes and socks and sitting, standing, or walking barefoot on the ground, something that is absolutely free and available (of course, where safe and comfortable). The reconnection can also involve the use of conductive bed sheets or floor pads linked by wire to a ground rod outside your house or office, or plugged into a wall outlet with a modern Earth ground system.
Either way, we call this reconnection process ‘Earthing’ or ‘grounding,’ terms we use interchangeably. They simply mean you are connected to Mother Earth. What you are doing is akin to what is well known in the electrical world as a grounding, the common practice of connecting equipment and appliances to the Earth to protect against shocks, shorts, and interference. Applied to people, Earthing naturally protects the body’s delicate bioelectrical circuitry against static electrical charges and interference. Most importantly, it facilitates the reception of free electrons and the stabilizing electrical signals and energy of the Earth. Earthing remedies an electrical instability and electron deficiency you never knew you had. It refills and recharges your body with something you never knew you were missing… or needed.
Vitamins from the ground
Exposure to sunlight produces vitamin D in the body. It’s needed for health. Exposure to the ground provides electrical ‘nutrient’ in the form of electrons. Think of these electrons as vitamin G – G for ground. Just like vitamin D, you need vitamin G for your health as well.
As you will read in this book, the results of Earthing often translate into a significant improvement – even total transformations – in health and vitality. One patient, a thirty–six year–old woman with advanced multiple sclerosis (MS), was so happy about her improvement after Earthing that she once ran out of her house, stood in the middle of the street, and screamed to all her neighbours to get grounded. She said she wanted to start the ‘barefoot revolution’ and teach everyone how to get well. She had tried Earthing out of desperation – something someone had told her about – after a doctor advised her to purchase an adjustable bed, a large screen television, and to make herself as comfortable as possible. MS doesn’t get better, the doctor told her. In her case it did, and dramatically so.
Another woman spent over five years with debilitating pain, inflammation, fatigue, and sleep problems after a serious car accident. Despite a long career in the healthcare industry, she found herself locked in an exhausting struggle to regain her health. She went from one practitioner and treatment to another. ‘Like Humpty Dumpty in the nursery rhyme,’ she said, ‘all of the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put me back together again.’ Unable to work, she found herself instinctively drawn to lying in the grass or walking barefoot on the beach. In 1999, a friend gave her a conductive bed pad. She slept on it nightly, and within months her pain, fatigue, and sleep problems vanished.
‘After years of pills and failed costly treatments, all I did was lay down on my bed and sleep!’ she said. ‘I believe our bodies have the ability to recover from almost any condition if we relieve imbalances caused by stress. To do this, we must provide our bodies with essential natural elements, including clean air, proper nutrition and pure water, and the missing link, our connection to the natural electrical rhythms of the Earth.’
The missing link in the health equation
Even athletes, who operate at the most intense levels of physical human performance, have learned to ground and plug in to the natural energy of the Earth. From a group perspective, perhaps the most dramatic test of Earthing’s effectiveness was demonstrated by victorious American–sponsored cycling teams at the Tour de France. The extreme physical and mental stress in this grueling race often causes sickness, tendonitis, and poor sleep among competitors. They tend to experience slow wound healing from accidents. In the 2003 to 2005 races, and again 2007, team cyclists were grounded after their daily competition. They reported better sleep, significantly less illness, practically no tendonitis, dramatic recovery from the day’s racing, and faster healing of injuries. The practice has now been found to be so beneficial that many top athletes – including swimmers, NFL football players, triathletes, and motorcycle racers – routinely Earth themselves.
Earthing is simple, basic, and powerful.
We regard it as a genuine missing link in the health equation, something with astounding potential to do much good for humanity. Connecting to the Earth – either by being barefooted outside or in contact with a grounded device inside – doesn’t cure you of any disease or condition. What it does is to reunite you with the natural electrical signals from the Earth that govern all organisms dwelling upon it. It restores your body’s natural internal electrical stability and rhythms, which in turn promote normal functioning of body systems, including the cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, and immune systems. It remedies an electron deficiency to reduce inflammation – the common cause of disease. It shifts the nervous system from a stress dominates mode to one of calmness and you sleep better. By reconnecting, you enable your body to return to its normal electrical state, better able to self–regulate and self–heal.
In 1863, the eminent biologist T. H. Huxley states that ‘the questions of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting that any of them, is that of the determination of our place in nature and our relation to the cosmos.’ The content of this book explores that question from the simple perspective that your place in nature, in your immediate cosmos, requires you to be directly and routinely connected to the Earth under your feet.
In Earthing we explore the health implications of mankind’s disconnect and present the unusual story about how the disconnect and the reconnect were discovered. You will read accounts of amazing healing from doctors and people from all walks of life. Most importantly, you will learn how easy it is to reconnect, to get Earthed, and to feel better.
From Earthing © 2010 by Clinton Ober, Stephen T. Sinatra & Martin Zucker.