A good friend messaged me about grounding, also known as earthing, early this year: ‘Pretty amazing and well worth checking out,’ he enthused. ‘Many health benefits. I’ve been spending as much time barefoot as possible and feel better for it.’
A Google search revealed a vast alternative health movement, with web sites for everything from a 2010 book (Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever? by Clinton Ober, Stephen Sinatra and Martin Zucker) to a 2019 documentary (The Earthing Movie by Josh and Rebecca Tickell), a fullon Earthing Institute in the US (earthinginstitute.net), and earthing products available even here in South Africa (groundlive.co.za).
All centre on a single premise: that we are designed to be connected directly to the earth and its electromagnetic field, and our wellness depends on it; yet we insulate ourselves in shoes with rubber or plastic soles, spend our time indoors with synthetic flooring and furniture, and travel in vehicles with rubber tyres.
Watching tourists in trainers getting off a bus in Sedona, Arizona, some 20 years ago, this suddenly struck Ober, a retired cableTV technician who had dealt daily with electricity and insulation, and was battling a liver problem and a midlife crisis. As he tells it on a number of platforms, he decided to experiment: he stuck a strip of metal duct tape across his bed, threw a wire out the window and attached it to a metal rod to ground him – and he felt and slept better than in ages. Inspired, Ober headed for the University of California, where research persuaded him, and eventually several academics and integrative medicine professionals, that he had made an important discovery. The book he went on to write with one of them (Stephen Sinatra is a cardiologist turned bioenergetic psycho therapist) consolidated the movement.
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