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Why Practice Grounding?
On incorporating ancestral traditions in our modern lives.
In the holistic health realm, there’s a pull towards ancestral medicines and practices. For example, the popuar Paleo diet is named for foods that humans ate in the Paleothic era before farming. The idea is that our ancestral bodies have not evolved to our modern diets, and so the healthiest way to eat is to go back in time. Outside of our own physical bodies, and in environmental health, some modern experts are looking to what indigenous groups have already known: traditional practices of burning—ones developed for the specific landscape—can help prevent massive wildfires or bushfires. Again, the idea is that health can be found by sticking to ancestral wisdom as though maybe there is a science to it that our modern minds haven’t discovered yet.
That being said, our ancestors also used to get basic infections and die. Because of this, I’m not for all the ways of the natural world; for example, one thing I will be sticking to, courtesy of the modern age, is not dying in childbirth.
Still, I think we can intelligently pick a few ancient practices to incorporate back into our modern lives. You could say I’d like to do some cherry picking on the subject (and literally, why not do some some cherry picking?). To start with, I’m interested in a relatively simple…
