Before diving into your subconscious to deal with emotions or thoughts or traumas or limiting beliefs or repressed feelings or any of the other parts and facets that make up the shadow. It’s important to ground and set the set and setting for the space before doing so.
Set and setting is a popular phrase used by psychedelic psychonauts, and it also applies to non external alchemy. Internal exploration and meditation can allow one to achieve the same feats of psychonautical exploration.
In Ceremonial traditions, ceremonial magic, and rites, there are sets of rituals and tools, proceedings and procedures, that are followed to ensure a orderly standard before diving into a graduation, a journey, or any sort of larger event.
For instance, before a ship or vessel sets out to sea, they do checks on the anchor, the fuel, the food, cargo, and more checks before they start. In another sense, if there’s a graduation ceremony, there’s a pre-ceremonial check, a mic-check, a practice and rehearsal. In terms of flying a plane, there’s a pre-flight check.
The rite of passage in many warrior cultures include doing a feat that allows one to become a ‘self realized man’ per their traditions. This might include tattoos, enduring bullet ant bites, hunting a strong beast, or more. Rites and rituals aren’t limited to the esoteric ideas of magic, but also the real practical solidified forms of tradition that we do.
When there’s enough experience, we humans tend to create our own (seemingly-superficial to the outsider) order for things that we follow to ensure a set execution of the proceeding, whether it’s a morning routine or unwinding from work. When we do this in a group setting, it becomes formalized in tradition and culture, and may even be codified or written down to be practiced for many years to come (much like religious rituals or mass or practices or fasting).
As such, we would do well to ground ourselves as a ‘pre-game’ ritual before undertaking shadow work. Especially if you plan on diving deep into either passive or active realms of the psychic space.
What are some ways to Ground?
Being grounded, can mean being present in the Here and Now. A lot of Zen teachings and Buddha have talked about such a thing, as well as modern renditions by Eckhart Tolle’s books and sayings or Ram Dass’ Book ‘be here now’ or his talks.
This is very popular practice in the Indic area, and has been mentioned in passing by famed Greek(Heraclitus) and Roman(Seneca and Marcus Aurelius) and other Western Philosophers(Alan Watts).
Finding a safe headspace or spatial space, and being aware or self realizing where you’re at in life and the universe helps to ground you. The idea of a safe space is to be in a room that acts as a safe container to sound out your ideas, you can also use other people that you trust to just listen and not judge or critique. Sometimes, a listener is all we need. This helps to allow you to unfold and spill out all the contents of your ‘closet’ mind and allow you re-evaluate old programs or thoughts or habits and see them in a new light to adjust, remove, add, or replace what you have.
Self love, love, and compassion can help to ground you. Knowing that you are not alone and have support and love. For instance, you have parents, who have parents, who have parents, so on and so forth. So you have an army of ancestors and the majority wish for your success and want you to succeed in many things. Finding that you have people in your life, friends and family, no matter the distance, is a kind reminder that you’re not alone in the universe.
One trick or way to help be grounded, is to find your anchor or ‘totem’ as they say. Similar to the idea of ‘totems’ in that movie Inception, as you dive through realities and psychic head space, whether it’s active or passive imagination. Something that helps call back to or tether you like a rope to help re-ground yourself.
One of the best Anchors or Totems is not a physical object, but a process that we naturally do and have control of when we want. Breathing – is also very grounding. When you consciously do it, you remind yourself that you exist here and now in the present moment in time and space in the universe. When you don’t, it’s still there when you need it.
If you go further out into esoterica, you might find external spiritual ideas that could help aid your journey. Things like God, Gods/Goddesses, the Muse, Source, Spirits, etc. All of which can fit in your own personal world view or reality to aid you allowing you to better co-create with the universe. Just remember that you also exist, so that you don’t outsource all of your wishes and dreams on the external as a sort of spiritual bypass
To recap:
Things that can help you to be grounded;
-Here and Now, be present in time-and-space
-Safe Spaces, Safe times, and Safe People
-Self love and compassion
-find loving and supportive energies and connections
-You are not alone
-Anchors and Totems
-Breathing
-You exist
-Higher or External power as an aid
Your personal language and world view is unique, so please adapt the languaging of what I’m saying to match that of what you could gain the most out of. And always feel free to explore these ideas or concepts further, add nuance, and even build off, from, or away from them.
As a side note to Breathing,
Breathing seems to be the easiest way to ground yourself, outside of the abstract thought of being here and now (which has some nuance that requires explanation). So it sort of makes sense why a lot of the Buddhist monks, ancient Chinese wisdom, and ancient wisdom worldwide all focus on breathing as a foundation and basis. Breathing is the breath of life. To not breath, is akin to death.
In Ancient Chinese wisdom, they refer to air having energies and chi or qi, which can be split into the yin or the yang. This is also prevalent in many Martial arts and Traditional Chinese energy works.
In Ancient Indic teachings, they discuss the idea of energy in the air as having Prana. Prana is considered the vital life force or energy that permeates the universe and sustains life.
In Ancient Greek held a belief of ether or aether being in the air (or transcendent to all elements). A sort of unseen energy, which has been explored to some extent by Nikolai Tesla and hinted in some plasma theories. Yet the specifics isn’t modernly understood by the lens of consensus science.
In Latin, ‘Spira’, means “breath”, and relates to Spirit. It’s also seen in words like aspire, conspire, respire, expire, perspire, etc. Thus when someone stops breathing, they ‘expire’ which also can mean that they die.
Also in Latin ‘Anima’ also means “soul,” “spirit,” or “breath.” As seen in the words like Animal, Animus, re-animate, animate, etc. It is derived from the earlier Greek word psyche, which also means “soul” or “breath.” giving way to the words psychology, psychosis, psychotics, psychopath, etc.
Hence you might see the connection between psychology and soul work, or shadow work, as well as some Jungian terms on Anima and Animus.
The Greek term pneuma means “spirit” or “breath” and is seen in modern engineering like pneumatics or in medical terms like pneumonia.
The Hebrew word ruach means “spirit,” “wind,” or “breath,”. In the old testament, it is said that God breathed into life the ‘golem’ of Adam (made from dust of the ground, so I consider it a golem, prior to it receiving the divine breath which makes it have spirit and becomes a man). Thus there is a connection with breath and life and spirit or the divine.
In Hawaii, the breath is referred to as ‘ha’, and is seen in ‘ah-lo-ha’ or hello, in which the breath is in the beginning and end. The term ‘ha-ole’ referring to the white colonizers, referred to how their speaking tongues lacked ‘breath’. English typically isn’t spoken with a lot of breath or breathing. Try saying a few words with extra breath and extending it like you’re sighing while saying it. That’s the difference in breath.
Point is, no one denies breathing as a part of life and many think that there is something connected to breathing and life itself. The exact specifics to the energy is open to interpretation and naming conventions, but to doubt that breathing is a thing isn’t. Breath work becomes a simple self-realized way of grounding, that anyone living can do, and is used foundationally as a base to teach many people.
Epilogue
This is simply a few ideas for how you can better ground yourself in the present moment and see your role in your life, with your relationships, with the universe. All of this to help establish a setting and space for you to feel comfortable to return to before diving deeper into your own psychic realms or subconscious.
Also, I wrote a presence based poetry book to help the ‘Here and Now’ aspect, if you’re interested, here’s the behind the scenes; Link.
Hopefully this helps you in shadow work and other actions or rituals you might partake in.
All words benefit from breath. Try saying any word without breathing in or out, without moving air. Just try. Put your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference. There’s a power in words that relates to breath and it’s pretty deep and esoteric if you dig.
I deliver onto you these messages in this passage, a modernized ancient scroll of an article online that you can read.
as you scroll
All via words, because, you might guessed it;
Words Mean Things
Words Mean Things 
Leave a comment