Grounding, also known as earthing, is a freely available and accessible way to tap into the highly effective and natural medicine known as Earth’s restorative and incalculable energy. It can help rebalance your body to restore you to greater levels of health and vitality. The best most direct way to get grounded by the Earth is to go barefoot as often as you can. Going barefoot has been shown by many a devotée of the practice to significantly slow the process of aging. It offers a whole host of other remarkable benefits as we’ll discuss throughout this article.
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There’s a reason why most of us kick off our shoes when we get home from work or an outing and it isn’t just to save our carpet: It feels good.
“Research shows that going barefoot strengthens our feet, makes them more flexible and improves body alignment. Why, then, are we buying shoes for infants who can’t yet walk? Wearing high heels that hurt with every step? Spending hundreds of dollars on running and hiking shoes? Some of us are following social conventions or fashion trends. Most of us think we’re protecting our feet and keeping them clean.”
At the least, wearing most shoes can:
upset natural weight distribution
overload joints
decrease foot flexibility
reduce shock absorbtion of the arch
cause bunions and in-grown toenails
But even more than these, our disconnect with nature along and our innate ability to heal caused by our present day modern lifestyle is proving to be a major contributor to overall physiological dysfunction and lack of wellness. But barefoot walking is a simple practice that can help reverse that disconnect.
By barefoot walking, we literally reestablish our connection to our Earth Mother while our body utilizes Earth’s electrons for healing. It has been said that Earth functions as a “global treatment table” when we connect to Earth in this way.
If you prefer not to go barefoot, there are other ways to ground yourself such as sitting, working, or sleeping indoors while you’re connected to earthing devices. These devices bring the Earth's electrons from the ground outside and transfer them through the device into the body.
But going barefoot does so much more than grounding. It not only takes advantage of Earth’s abundance of electrons, it properly and naturally adjusts the body’s posture and internal organs to say nothing of the greater sense of well-being and self-esteem that is achieved simply by being out in nature.
Two hundred thousand neurotransmitters in the soles of the feet send messages about the terrain you are trampling under your feet via neural pathways to the brain. This information assists both body and Earth to work together to heal, protect, strengthen and rejuvenate the body, mind and spirit. The brain literally responds to the sensory feedback received by the soles of the feet and direct physical contact with the vast supply of healing electrons on the surface of the Earth help to supply energy to the body.
An example of earthing’s restorative effects on the body is the one of acclaimed author and expert on Colorado flora, Dr. Bill Weber. On his best days he’d have to walk with either a walker or two walking poles, but he began walking barefoot at age 90 and within months ditched both walker and poles for the freedom of walking on his own two legs doing laps barefoot around his neighborhood. He died March 18, 2020 but he’d made it past 100 years of age.
In Sue Regan Kenney’s delightful book, How To Wear Bare Feet, she recounts her personal story of feeling the ravages of degeneration at just age 55.
Says Kenney:
“I began thinking about how our First Nations people had stayed so healthy. They wore moccasins with no support, slept on hides on the ground, used herbs for medicine, did ceremony and ate food foraged from the forest. Was something in the Earth missing in our holistic approach to wellness? From that place I researched barefooting and learned about earthing, human movement, foot function, anti-aging, footwear dangers, and why I was afraid of falling.”
The intimate account Kenney shares in her book along with Dr. Bill Weber’s story above prove that anyone can get started walking barefoot at any age and enjoy a significant range of natural health and vitality benefits.
Scientific studies are finding that the influx of free electrons absorbed into the body through direct contact with the Earth neutralizes free radicals and thereby reduces acute and chronic inflammation and slows aging, in many cases, actually reversing certain symptoms of aging.
“Throughout history, humans mostly walked barefoot or with footwear made of animal skins. They slept on the ground or on skins. Through direct contact or through perspiration-moistened animal skins used as footwear or sleeping mats, the ground’s abundant free electrons were able to enter the body, which is electrically conductive. Through this mechanism, every part of the body could equilibrate with the electrical potential of the Earth, thereby stabilizing the electrical environment of all organs, tissues, and cells.”
Chevalier adds,
“Modern lifestyle has increasingly separated humans from the primordial flow of Earth’s electrons.”
We’ve been increasingly wearing insulating rubber or plastic soled shoes since the 60s and during recent decades, chronic illness, immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases have also increased dramatically so much so that some researchers who cite environmental factors as the cause are beginning to also cite a lack of environment as cause.
Major benefits from grounding have been scientifically found to include:
pain reduction
reduction of primary indicators of osteoporosis
improvement of glucose regulation
enhanced immune response
improved heart rate variability (HRV)*
reduction in tension and overall stress levels
improved healthy sleep
Our bodies are being constantly bombarded by electrical fields. Many people report becoming chronically ill from the constant insult of these frequencies. Earthing actually reduces such electric fields imposed on the body.
A 2005 study by electrical engineer R. Applewhite:
“… showed that when the body is grounded, its electrical potential becomes equalized with the Earth’s electrical potential through a transfer of electrons from the Earth to the body. This, in turn, prevents the 60 Hz mode from producing an AC electric potential at the surface of the body and from producing perturbations of the electric charges of the molecules inside the body. The study confirms the ‘umbrella’ effect of earthing the body explained by Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman in his lectures on electromagnetism. Feynman said that when the body potential is the same as the Earth’s electric potential (and thus grounded), it becomes an extension of the Earth’s gigantic electric system. The Earth’s potential thus becomes the ‘working agent that cancels, reduces, or pushes away electric fields from the body.”
Chevalier’s research finds that going barefoot outdoors or getting connected to grounded conductive systems indoors may be a simple but profoundly effective health strategy for dealing with chronic stress, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, inflammation, pain, poor sleep, disturbed HRV,(1) hyper-coagulable blood, cardiovascular disease and more.
In the journal article, The epidemiological Revolution of the 20th Century, by De Flora et al. we read:
“Since the late 20th century, chronic degenerative diseases have overcome infectious disease as the major causes of death in the 21st century, so an increase in human longevity will depend on finding an intervention that inhibits the development of these diseases and slows their progress.”
Grounding ourselves consistently just may be one of the most effective tools in our arsenal to combat degenerative disease.
Go barefoot outdoors as much as you can especially when weather is most cooperative in Spring, Summer and Fall. Let the sensory receptors in your feet help you to feel your happiness and vitality. Take your shoes and socks off. It’s good natural medicine and it’s free.
The simple act of going barefoot has the potential to provide the following advantages to your quality of life:
more efficient movement of the body
slowed aging process
sharpened brain function
increased physical energy
improved posture
Achilles’ heal can be healed
core muscles strengthen
chin naturally settles into proper position
shoulders relax
better postural alignment can be achieved [both knees should touch each other when you stand up]
the back strengthens
the body becomes better able to focus on important functions other than maintain alignment and posture
reduced inflammation
improved balance
reduced stiffness and increased flexibility
regulated body temperature
arches in the feet returned to a more youthful height and spring
lessened, if not eliminated, bunions and calluses (calluses come from the wearing of shoes)
eliminated athlete’s foot or smelly feet
improved dental bite
reversed vaginal atrophy
decreased allergies
improved digestion
more balanced body weight
increased physical strength and muscle definition
strengthened gait and more even stride (Many people tend to shorten their steps as they grow older for fear of falling or for other reasons.)
improved reaction time (reflexes)
relaxation into a more natural state of being
The skin on the soles of the feet adjusts to the barefoot environment quickly. There are no real side-effects to going barefoot.
In summary, the benefits of barefoot walking come from two primary sources:
the electrons when walking on bare earth and
simply from allowing your feet to walk free wherever you walk (so barefoot walking is good to do even on pavement).
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Endnotes:
(1) the physiological phenomenon of variation in the time interval between heartbeats; reduced HRV has been shown to be a predictor of mortality after myocardial infarction, for example; a measurement of the heart's response to autonomic nervous system regulation.
Sources:
Howell, L. Daniel. The Barefoot Book: 50 Great Reasons to Kick Off Your Shoes. Hunter House, 2010.
Sandler, Michael, and Jessica Lee. Barefoot Walking: Free Your Feet to Minimize Impact, Maximize Efficiency, and Discover the Pleasure of Getting in Touch with the Earth. Three Rivers Press, 2013.
Chevalier, Gaétan, et al. “Earthing: Health Implications of Reconnecting the Human Body to the Earth's Surface Electrons.” Journal of Environmental and Public Health, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, 2012, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3265077/.
de Flora S, Quaglia A, Bennicelli C, Vercelli M. The epidemiological revolution of the 20th century. FASEB Journal. 2005;19(8):892–897.
Applewhite R. The effectiveness of a conductive patch and a conductive bed pad in reducing induced human body voltage via the application of earth ground. European Biology and Bioelectromagnetics. 2005;1:23–40
Feynman R, Leighton R, Sands M. The Feynman Lectures on Physics. II. Boston, Mass, USA: Addison-Wesley; 1963.
Regan Kenney, Sue. How to Wear Bare Feet. CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2017.