Standing on the ground

There is a particular kind of tiredness that sleep does not fix. You go to bed early, you sleep the whole night, and you wake up feeling exactly as you did. People describe it to me as being wrung out, or hollow, or running on fumes. It is very common and it is almost never about sleep.

It is usually about the root.

The bed at the bottom of the garden

Of the seven centres, the root is the one nobody wants to talk about. It is not glamorous. There is no insight in it, no expansion, nothing you could post about. It is the lowest of the seven, sitting at the base of the spine, and its whole concern is whether you are safe, whether you belong somewhere, and whether there is enough.

Enough money. Enough time. Enough food, warmth, rest, ground under your feet.

I have watched people spend years reaching for the top of the garden while the bottom bed goes dry. They meditate, they read, they seek, and they keep arriving at the same wall. Every good gardener would recognise the problem immediately. You cannot flower from a plant that is not rooted.

So the first month of Chakra Garden is root, and it is root deliberately. Not because it is the exciting place to begin, but because it is the honest one.

What being ungrounded actually feels like

Not mystical. Very ordinary:

You live from the neck up. Most of your day happens in your head, and you would struggle to say what your feet felt like at any point in it.

You are braced. Shoulders somewhere near your ears, jaw set, breath shallow and high in the chest. You only notice when somebody points it out, and then it comes back within the minute.

You cannot settle. There is always a next thing. Even rest gets scheduled and optimised.

Small problems feel enormous. A late invoice, a difficult email, a change of plan. The reaction is out of proportion to the event, because underneath it the ground already feels unreliable.

If two or three of those are yours, this is your month.

What nature is actually doing

I want to be careful here, because a lot gets claimed for nature that cannot be supported, and I would rather undersell it.

What I can say is what I observe, in myself and in the people I work with. Time spent outdoors, without a screen, without a purpose, without counting steps, changes the quality of a person's attention. The breath drops lower. The pace slows. Something that had been narrow gets wider.

Part of it is simply that the natural world does not want anything from you. Nothing outside is asking you to respond, perform, or reply within the hour. That absence of demand is rarer than it should be, and it is genuinely restorative.

And part of it is scale. Standing under a tree that was here before you and will be here after you does something quiet and useful to a problem that has been filling your whole field of vision.

You do not need a forest. A single tree you can put your hand on will do. Twenty minutes. No phone.

The four for September

Spirulina. Green food, plain and unromantic. Nothing about it is subtle and that is the point. It is for the person who has spent a long season giving out and has not restocked.

Vetiver. If you have never smelled it, it smells like the underside of things. Roots, damp earth, the bottom of a hedge. It is heavy and low and it pulls your attention down out of your head. One drop on a tissue by the bed.

Olive. The essence for exhaustion you have earned. Not the anxious, buzzing kind, the deep kind, after a long stretch of holding something up.

Bloodstone. Dark green with red through it. It has been carried for courage for a very long time, and it is a working stone rather than an ornament. Keep it in a pocket, not on a shelf.

Four doors into one room. Take one or take all of them.

Something to do this week

Take your shoes off and stand on the ground for two minutes. Grass, sand, soil, cold tile, it does not much matter.

You will feel self conscious. Everybody does. Stay anyway, and put your attention in the soles of your feet rather than in the thought about how this looks.

That is the entire practice. It is not impressive and it works, which is true of most of the things that work.

Next time I want to talk about hands, and the heart, and why touch belongs in this conversation at all.

Chakra Garden opens this autumn.

Join the waitlist for Chakra Garden and I will let you know the morning it opens.

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Chakra Garden is offered for educational and spiritual purposes. It is not medical advice and is not a substitute for care from a qualified practitioner. If you are pregnant, taking medication, or managing a health condition, please speak to your doctor or a qualified herbalist before using herbs or essential oils.

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