If you’ve been following me on Facebook, you may have seen a recent video I did on grounding. In this case, I was walking barefoot on the beach. Many of us love to do that – but did you know you were gaining great health benefits as a result of that barefoot walk? Well, you do and as you read on you’ll discover why spending time connecting with Mother Earth is so very good for you.
Inflammation – the Root Cause of Chronic Disease
It’s widely understood these days that the cause of so many illnesses is inflammation. In fact, inflammation is recognized as the central health issue of our time with more than 30,000 scientific studies per year – for nearly half a century – done on the subject. As such, it shows a critical link between our lifestyle and the soaring global increase of chronic diseases.
Everyone is susceptible to inflammation – from high performance athletes to non-performance couch potatoes. It’s an equal opportunity attacker.
The word, inflammation, comes from a Latin word that means to set on fire. It’s the biological response of the body to harmful stimuli, such as pathogens, damaged cells, or irritants; a protective attempt by the system to remove agents that threaten or injure as well as trigger the healing process for affected tissues. Without inflammation, wounds and infections would never heal and progressive destruction of the tissue would put survival in jeopardy.
Inflammation comes in two forms: acute or chronic. Acute is when the body reacts as it should to harmful stimuli and it’s what we want, as described above. Chronic inflammation, or prolonged inflammation, is not what we want or need. With chronic inflammation there is a harmful free-radical release and encroachment on healthy tissue and it can seriously harm you.
Free radicals have an important role to play in the immune response. However, when they fail to wind down completely after the job is done they cause serious issues. They continue to attack and oxidize healthy tissue, the immunity gears switch into overdrive and send more white blood cells into the affected area. The result contributes to the out-of-control levels of chronic disease we have amongst populations today.
We’ve Disconnected and Now We Suffer
In an extensive series of studies done in the Max Planck Institute during the 1960s and 70s, researchers intentionally isolated volunteers for months at a time to live in underground rooms electrically shielded from the rhythms in the Earth’s electric field. They were meticulously monitored for all types of responses, including sleep patterns, body temperature, urinary output and other physiological activities. The results were astounding as they experienced disturbed sleep-wake patterns, out-of-sync hormonal production and overall disruption in basic body regulation.
When electric rhythms comparable to those measured at the Earth’s surface were pulsed into the metal shielding around the chambers, there was a dramatic restoration of normal physiological patterns. These studies, conducted over many years, documented the significance of the Earth’s electrical rhythms for normal biological function. Normal rhythms in the body establish a stable reference point for repair, recovery, and rejuvenation – for full health.
Interestingly enough, David Wolfe, an author, nutritionist, speaker and outspoken authority on health and lifestyle, deems “the common shoe” as perhaps the “world’s most dangerous invention.” After almost twenty years of lifestyle research, he incriminates the shoe as one of the “most destructive culprits of inflammation and autoimmune diseases” in our lives because it separates us from the healing energy of the Earth.
“Put a shoe on,” he says, “and it’s gone.”
Now, I love shoes … so in order to keep my body healthy, I engage in Grounding regularly.
Enter Grounding: The Missing Link
Before we go any further, it’s important to make the following announcement: We are Electrical Beings. The concept that man is made from the Earth is more than a fable. It has been proven to be fact in terms of our bodies’ abilities to heal when in touch with the Earth.
The land and seas of the planet are alive with a boundless, constantly replenishing supply of electrons. By making contact with the surface of the planet, our conductive bodies naturally equalize with the Earth … in effect, we refill the electron level in our tank that has become low.
So, how do we know this is actually happening?
Well, for one thing, common sense tells us. The Earth is negatively charged and has an endless supply of free electrons. Anytime two conductive objects make contact – like your bare feet and the earth – electrons will flow from the place of abundance (earth) into the place of lack (your body). The electrical potential of the two objects equalizes. That’s grounding.
Here’s where the free radical connection enters.
Free radicals and electrons constantly interact and many free radicals are positively charged. Some are not, but most are. These reactive molecules, hungry for electrons, absorb them from our bodies when we are in contact with the huge amount of electrons available from the Earth. This process reduces or shuts down the inflammatory destruction caused by free radicals.
Big, negatively charged Earth overwhelms little electron-hungry free radicals.