Grounding is a very effective process for calming and stabilizing. Grounding connects you with the earth, carrying overpowering negative energies down and away much like a lightning rod. There are many methods for grounding. Try this one daily, as often as you think of it. Even if you don’t “feel” anything while you are doing it notice the difference grounding makes to your overall sense of well-being. Grounding is also an excellent practice whenever you are feeling sexually “wound-up”:

• Sitting or standing, with your body relaxed, take a slow breath in through your nose.
• Gently exhale through your mouth.
• Focus your attention on the top of your head (your crown chakra).
• Picture a funnel on the top of your head through which vital energy from the cosmos flows into your body—this is powerful, masculine, active energy.
• As this sun and sky energy travels down through your body it gives you strength and vitality.
• As it passes it also gathers up any negative energies you may be feeling—anger, lethargy, hyperactivity, grief, anxiety, fear.
• Now focus your attention on your genitals (your root chakra) and picture a funnel there—with the small end of the funnel inside your body and the mouth of the funnel pointing down to the earth.
• Allow the energy to flow through your lower funnel, away and down into the center of Mother Earth, taking with it all your tension; leaving vigor and calm in its wake.
• Continue to visualize energy flowing in through your head, down through your body and out into the earth—bringing vitality and serenity and taking away stress.
• Do this for a minimum of 3 minutes at a time.

Excerpted from the book Soul Sex: Tantra for Two, by Al Link and Pala Copeland