Motherhood Taught Me How to Stay Grounded

I had a kundalini awakening at 31, and I don’t think I realized then how hard it would be to stay grounded afterward.

Energy was moving through my body constantly, up and down my spine, and spiritual experiences were happening throughout my day. The space of Oneness, the Light of God, the Infinite Source, had become so easy for me to access that I could almost slip into it without trying.

The problem was that I wasn’t always fully here.

I was still working in the corporate world, commuting into New York City and going to meetings, and sometimes I would be sitting in a room with people talking to me and couldn’t fully hear them. I was there physically, but I wasn’t completely in my body. I would check out.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care about what was happening around me. I just had such easy access to this other space that leaving ordinary awareness didn’t feel like a big deal.

But you can’t really live that way. At least I couldn’t.

Then I became pregnant.

I had been a vegetarian since I was thirteen years old. During my first trimester, I remember taking the train from Westchester to Manhattan, where I worked at an advertising agency in Midtown. One morning I became incredibly dizzy and depleted. By the time I got to Grand Central, I suddenly wanted meat.

After almost twenty years of being a vegetarian, my body was asking me for meat.

So I ate it.

Looking back, I think that was one of the first ways my body started grounding me. It was telling me what it needed, and I had to listen.

Then my daughter was born when I was 33.

She was very much part of my spiritual journey. I remember taking her to my first group session and having her sit on my lap while I connected to the Light of God, the Infinite Source, the Oneness. My friend Alan Steinfeld took a picture of us that day. When I looked at it later, I noticed what appeared to me as light coming through my heart chakra and passing through my daughter’s throat.

That photograph stayed with me because, for me, it represented what was happening in my life. Motherhood and my spiritual awakening weren’t separate.

But motherhood also required me to be here.

My daughter needed to eat. She needed to be held. She needed my attention. She needed me to hear her when she was speaking to me. I couldn’t always be somewhere else.

So I started doing very simple things.

I cooked a lot. I worked with food and used my hands. I would take my daughter outside and lie in the grass with her. I spent more time consciously feeling my body and the Earth underneath me.

Those things helped.

And then there was time.

Something happened to my relationship with time after my awakening that is still difficult for me to explain. I always say that I lost the weight of time. Dates and hours didn’t hold the same importance in my mind anymore. My mind didn’t cling to them.

Honestly, it still doesn’t.

I still struggle with scheduling and appointments. The difference is that now I know I have to take responsibility for that. I put things in my calendar because I know I can’t just assume I will remember.

Once you have children, time matters. There are school schedules, extracurricular activities, appointments, drop-offs, pickups, birthday parties, and a hundred other things that have to happen at a certain time. Other people are depending on you.

That has been grounding for me too.

And now I have a four-year-old son who is very high energy. He wants to move, play, run around, explore, and have me participate in whatever he is doing. My children are at completely different stages and have completely different needs and schedules.

There isn’t much checking out when a four-year-old needs you.

He has actually taught me that grounding doesn’t always have to mean being still. Sometimes movement grounds you. Sometimes being busy with your hands grounds you. Sometimes getting your children where they need to go grounds you.

And I’ve realized that this goes beyond motherhood.

I believe taking care of anyone other than yourself can be incredibly grounding. It could be your children, an elderly parent, your partner, or even your pets.

Someone needs to eat. Someone needs care. The dog needs to be walked. Someone has an appointment. Someone needs you to listen. Someone needs you to show up.

There is something about caring for another living being that keeps bringing you back to the physical world.

For me, that has become part of what service means.

Service brings spirit into form.

I don’t think grounding means that I have to shut down the spiritual part of myself. I tried for years to understand how these two parts of my life were supposed to coexist, and now I think the answer is much simpler.

The point wasn’t for me to stop accessing Oneness.

The point was to learn how to bring it back with me.

To be able to connect deeply to God and still hear the person sitting across from me. To experience timelessness and still remember the school schedule. To have profound spiritual experiences and then go make dinner.

My awakening opened something enormous in me.

Motherhood taught me how to live with it.

And maybe that is what grounding has ultimately become for me: learning how to touch heaven without disappearing from Earth.

TAKE ACTION: Choose one ordinary moment of care today—preparing a meal, walking a pet, or listening to someone you love—and give it your full attention. Notice how being present for another living being brings you back into your body and into the moment. To explore more of Val Tignini’s work on bringing spiritual awareness into everyday life, visit ValSecrets.com.