What Grounding Means to Me
A self-reflection from the forest edge
April sunlight flickers through the trees. I sit on a fallen trunk, moss-soft and half-sunk into the forest floor. Around me, the birds have started their cautious return and the first wild greens are waking from sleep. It’s a quiet Saturday. I’ve left my phone behind. I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to belong in your own life. What does it mean to slow down enough to feel your own edges again? To land in your body, rather than hover just above it, in the mind?
I don’t have a simple answer. But I know this: for me, that feeling is grounding. And I didn’t find it in a book or on a mat or through a wellness routine. I found it, over years, through a slow unwinding. Through the quiet work of returning.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote:
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”
In other words the greatest danger is not loud failure but the quiet loss of self, the kind that happens slowly, invisibly, while no one notices. I think of that often. Especially as someone who has spent much of her life becoming what was needed, expected, or admired. In so many ways, I’ve been shaped by ambition and by adaptation. But grounding is where those patterns soften. It’s where I get to ask who I am without all of it.
As the eldest daughter in a Scandinavian family, I was raised with a quiet current of striving. One of my parents, the person I inherited my drive from, spent their childhood between Denmark and various places abroad, following the movements of their own parent’s engineering work. Later in life, they built a career from the ground up, a path carved through hard work, persistence, and a remarkable rise to international responsibility. Their story is one of impressive ascent, and I inherited not only the pride in that journey but also the weight of its expectations.
As such, my own childhood became a layered blend of contrasting environments. My early years unfolded across a variety of environments. I was born in Denmark, but we moved abroad when I was just six months old. In Denmark, we lived in a modest suburban neighborhood, in a red brick house perched at the top of a hill. Most of my early 1990s were spent in a Southeast Asian city, where my younger sister was later born. There, we found ourselves high above the buzz of a sprawling metropolis living on the 20-somethingth floor of a skyscraper, where the hum of traffic and constant motion seemed to vibrate through the walls. The city never truly slept. In 1997, we returned to Danish suburbia, stepping briefly into a quieter, more familiar rhythm, a pause in what would become a childhood marked by movement and contrast. By the early 2000s, we had moved again, this time to a gated compound in the Middle East. Expat life shaped everything: rows of sun-bleached stone houses, wide streets, and the steady thrum of air conditioning marking the rhythm of each day. I attended an international school, surrounded by classmates from all over the world. Our friendships crossed cultures, languages, and traditions. That exposure deeply shaped my understanding of the world, not as a singular place, but as something layered, dynamic, and always shifting. These environments were often structured and deliberate, yet constantly in motion. I became fluent in sensing what was needed in a room and in becoming it. Image mattered. Belonging mattered. Performance was a form of safety.
And yet, each summer, Denmark waited. In those short months, I traded air-conditioned rooms and stone floors for bare feet on grass and the cool breath of Scandinavian summer evenings. I ran through beaches, built dens in the forest, got lost on purpose, and found myself again beneath the branches. I didn’t know to call it grounding then. But my body remembered what my mind hadn’t yet learned that I didn’t have to earn stillness. That presence could be simple.
As I moved into adulthood, I took the drive with me. I excelled. I pushed. I broke, and then kept going. Burnout became a cycle. Anxiety was familiar. Depression too. I wore my ambition like armour, but it never let me rest.
Then came the pandemic. Alone in a city apartment, the world shrank to four white walls and the sound of my own thoughts. For someone who had always surrounded herself with people, it was disorienting. But eventually, something shifted. I started walking. At first, it was just to escape the apartment. Parks, paths, small green spaces. But slowly, the walking became something else. I wasn’t walking for distance or fitness. I was walking to get in touch with my body. The forest came back to me. Or maybe I came back to it.
That was the beginning of my real grounding journey, not as a sudden revelation, but as a slow unfolding. Over time, I found my circle, a group of women drawn to the same quiet call, to nature, to ritual, to something familiar and yet undiscovered. We came together around fires, under open skies, with feet on moss and hearts slightly ajar. We gathered for medicine walks, holistic retreats, shamanic workshops & drum journeys. Guided by steady rhythms that helped us turn inward and reconnect with what matters. Sometimes we drummed, sometimes we wept, sometimes we simply listened. We sat in silence, sang in the woods, & shared stories and experiences.
I moved closer to the forest. I began practicing my own blend of spirituality rooted in Nordic paganism, but open to what felt real and alive. Mindfulness, shamanic practices, herbalism, and the meditative teachings of Joe Dispenza all became threads in the fabric I was weaving. And through it all, I began to understand that grounding wasn’t an escape. It was a coming home.
I don’t see science and spirituality as opposites. One gives us the lens. The other gives us the language. Forest bathing, for example, isn’t just poetic it’s proven. Studies from Japan show that time spent in the woods lowers cortisol, reduces anxiety, and strengthens the immune system. These are old truths, spoken now in modern terms.
To me, grounding means more than calm. It means sovereignty. It means no longer outsourcing my worth to how much I’ve achieved or how well I’ve pleased. It means feeling my feet on the ground and knowing I am allowed to be here. And it means remembering, again and again, that the forest inside and around me has never stopped waiting.
