Grounding and Centering: In Kemetic Terms

Translating the terminologies of general pagan practice into Kemetic terminology helps me make connections and recognize when I already know how to do something but just call it by a different name.

 Case in point: I thought I needed to go back to the basics. Centering. Grounding. Shielding. Things I thought I had lost over time once I drifted away from the neo-pagan scene. But once I started reading up on them again, I came to the startling conclusion that I do more of it than I think I do.

For example, Centering and Grounding are often viewed as separate things in the neo-pagan world. Take this definition from The Pagan and The Pen:

“Grounding links you to the healing energy of the Earth, bringing stability, calm, and awareness of the physical body and the world around you. Centering puts you in touch with your personal power, connecting your mental and spiritual bodies.”

But my Kemetic take on it is that what I’m actually achieving through both of those actions is consciously bringing my souls into alignment—all of them, including the Khat—and being fully present in the world as a unified being. If I do that properly, my shadows cast strongly on the worlds and are sharply defined; I am connected to existence in a fundamental way. My Sekhem flows properly through me and the world around me.

For me, both Centering and Grounding are easily accomplished through Senut. The speaking of the sacred words, the purification, the pouring of libations and offering of incense and flame, the opening of the way between the unseen realm of the gods and the seen world, the mindfulness of prayer, the act of henu…all these things catch the attention of the souls and brings them together in a shared act where each of them has a duty to tend to.

But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Aligning the souls is basic and intuitive. If I take a few seconds to pause even as I am typing this, close my eyes, and do a “roll-call”, I can feel all the parts—Ka, Ba, Khat, Ib, and Ren—present and accounted for. I can feel the sentient ones gather together calmly in the same, still place and turn their awareness in the same direction-- in readiness to work together. I become a being of one purpose and one nature, a being that can keenly feel the world around me, and my inherent connection to it.

 I am well practiced enough at doing this that I am usually able to find that calm center of self… even when I am under duress. Breath is a call to the center of being, and when breathing alone fails, mindful speech can accomplish the same. (Therapists like to call such mindful speech “affirmations”, but I prefer to call it what it is in my perspective: heka.)

Part of my spiritual “panic” that night some time back was due to the frightening and unsettling realization that I had suddenly become not able to do this myself—that my souls were so “out of whack” as to be coming apart from each other at the seams and I was incapable, through any of the techniques I knew, to pull them back together. (Though in retrospect, there was one thing that I didn’t try: saying my Ren out loud…that probably would have helped, especially if I had thought to do it early on during the crisis. It has helped before with some similar situations, but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me at all in the moment.)

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that terminology matters—I find that preciseness in language, especially in naming, is a source of strength and power in both the seen and unseen worlds. So I shouldn’t be surprised that “centering and grounding” is suddenly more meaningful to me, and more obvious in my personal practice, when presented as “soul alignment ”.

And on an almost unrelated note: I just can't get into the tree roots/branches visualization thing for "grounding".

Maybe it’s just me, but if I dig too deep into the ground when intentionally visualizing in the unseen, I find the dead. The duat swells just beneath the surface of our world like a vast aquifer, supplying us water from another layer of existence: metaphorical ground water. It is that body of unseen water from which all things living grow and the living thirst for its depths as much as the dead thirst for the water of our seen world, of our lakes and rivers and oceans. It is reciprocal. It is from death that life springs and it is upon life that death thrives.

 That is a system of energy exchange, yes, but not one I find particularly comforting as a touchstone for beginning ritual work. Ask me sometime about what you find if you dig deep enough—for I have learned that there are some places the living should not go without adequate preparation. And that experience has made me a bit wary of roots.