A Beginner’s Guide to Earthing (Grounding) – Part One

In writing most of the nearly 4000 posts in this blog, I have always felt a reasonable confidence and certainty about my grasp of the subject. I don’t know who said it first, but this time it’s different. I am the beginner. Before late June I don’t believe I had ever even heard of Earthing or its other name Grounding. I stumbled across it in one of the blogs I read – Learning From Dogs.


As a dog lover this title naturally attracted me. There turns out to be a great deal more to the posts than simple dog info. In late June I ran across this post – all about Earthing.

I confess the term ‘Earthing’ was new to me. As you can read in his post, however, the practice seemed to hold very high promise as far as being a healthy practice. Since sleeping on an earthing sheet, his prostate problems improved and he is closer to sleeping through the night. As a plus 70 year old myself, this was music to my ears. I decided to try Earthing.

What is Earthing? The book Earthing available from Amazon as you can see from the link, says earthing is walking barefoot outside on wet grass or sand. This allows one to experience the healing powers of the earth simply by touching it.

Regular readers know that I ride my bike with my dog just about daily here In Chicago. I take breaks around every 30 minutes to let the dog out of her basket and to stretch, etc. My part of the break is to drink something for energy and snack on something healthy (no more than 50 calories). So, when I decided to practice Earthing, I added taking off my shoes and walking around some of the grass on Chicago’s lakefront for around 5 or so minutes each time I took a break from riding. Also, later, when I was walking the dog, I would take a similar break and remove my shoes and walk on the grass, or just sit with my bare feet on the grass. I figure I was Earthing around 30 or so minutes a day in five minute intervals.

After a couple of days of this, I noticed the following changes: I slept better, ie., had to get up less often in the night to use the bathroom. Secondly, the pain in my hands from arthritis seemed to subside somewhat. So, it appeared to be reducing my inflammation. Early in the experiment, I took a bad fall on my bike and tore up my knee. I used emu oil and coconut oil as always on injuries like this, but I found that I healed way faster than usual. It was two days and no sign of the street burn on my knee showed at all. So, that was a third change. Finally, my digestion improved and intermittent signs of constipation disappeared completely. All these effects followed just 30 minutes a day of walking barefoot on grass at the lakefront.

I decided to take the next step and order the Earthing Sheet my fellow blogger had written about. That arrived yesterday and I had my first night of sleep on it last night. I slept uninterrupted for six hours which is about twice as much as I usually sleep. I look forward to learning more about Earthing, I have the book. I also look forward to further health benefits.

I called this post A beginner’s guide to Earthing because I wrote it and am a rank beginner. It is by no means meant to be definitive. I plan to post further on the subject with new developments.

As always your comments are welcome.

Tony