Jessica:  Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

Hello, Sweet Ones, and welcome back to “Astrology Hot Takes!” on Ghost of a Podcast. This week’s Hot Take is truly bite sized—truly just a nibble, and I hope it hits you in the right spot.

This is actually an excerpt from a live event that I did in San Francisco, California in April of 2019. I had a conversation with Madeline H.D. Brown over at CIIS, and this was part of their Public Programs Podcast series. You can listen to the whole podcast over at CIIS Public Programs—and that’s anywhere podcasts are heard. But this little Hot Take is on grounding and centering. I hope it serves.

Madeline:    I was curious since, I reckon, you’re probably pretty good at boundaries and working on the modelling and embodying of it, if you could give us all a consensual, magical injection of boundaries.

Jessica:  Ooh. You mean like energetically?

Madeline:   Yeah. What would you wish to see more of in the world or just wish that folks could step into in that kind of way? Does that make sense?

Jessica:  Yeah, it does. It does, and my brain is going in 50 directions about it. But I think the most universal approach to boundaries—because everybody has their own path and their own situations and yada, yada, right. But the most universal thing is do not seek a specific outcome, seek authenticity. If your motivation is to achieve something specific, then you’ve already de-stabilized and left your center because you’ve got this idea about if so and so likes me, then maybe they’ll share a professional opportunity with me one day or maybe I’ll get more followers or maybe they’ll date me or whatever. When we have these ideas, we’re projecting. And, as soon as you project, you’re in your mind, and you’re out of your body. And you cannot have boundaries from outside your body. Your body is your—it’s your car in this life. This is it. Like it, love it, hate it—it doesn’t matter; it’s yours.

Madeline:   I heard breath from there, that’s why I’m…

Jessica:   Yeah.

Madeline:    Yeah, like, huuh.

Jessica:      Yeah. It’s—that is the work. It is the work for all of us, and I think some people can best resource their boundaries through grounding, some people through centering. There’s a way to connect with different elemental forces that is more self-appropriate for different people or at different times.

Madeline:    Could you speak just a little bit, for you, the difference between centering and grounding?

Jessica:      Absolutely, yeah. So grounding is literally about running one—and this is woo not astrology, obviously, right. But it’s running one’s energy intentionally through the body and into the earth and then coursing that earth energy into the body, and now we have flow. We have an—kind of an interception between these things. That’s grounding.

Centering is taking all your energy and bringing it into the center of your body, and, if you’re in a human body, it’s your abdominals. Your abdominal core, regardless of your proportions, that’s your center, and that’s where you want to bring your energy. And to center the energy is a lot more tolerable for a lot of people. If you’ve got a lot of fire, a lot of air in your chart, you’re going to probably have an easier time to center than to ground. If I’m getting on a stage and talking to people about myself, I’m going to get centered instead of grounded because I want to be flexible—that’s how I’m going to be.

And, so, there’s different ways for different moments and different natures. But the easiest way, I find—and there are many ways—is to say your full name out loud in your head or out loud three times; bring your energy in, call it in. If you’ve got a million names, if you’ve got nicknames, call it in. When I’m doing kind of energy work or psychic work, I have people say their full names, and I will generally have them say their mother’s maiden name because to think that your patrilineal name is your energy name is weird. That’s patriarchy—that’s not energy. So all the names, bring in all the names. And it helps because your ancestral trauma, your childhood shit is locked into your name. And, then, if you also have chosen names, use those, obviously, right. Use all the names because they’re all part of kind of like the mental part of your body, right. So call them in and from there, do what needs to be done—ground, center.

And, if you can’t do that, you can always connect to water, which is more about connecting with flow. It’s connecting with the water that is our oceans, the water that’s in the air, the kind of fluidity and interconnectedness that is deeply psychic and emotional. And, for certain people, that’s going to be a lot easier than grounding. And it’s okay to do one until you feel really kind of more neutral or peaceful inside and then practicing grounding.

We have this idea, if I can run a tangent, that we’re supposed to do it, we’re supposed to do it one way, and there’s—I go from feeling like I’m having a panic attack, and I feel like my life is falling apart to having peace and finding a blue light, and that is just inhumane; it’s cruel. What we want to be able to do is give ourselves permission to be where we’re at and then to take the next step—just the next step. It doesn’t have to be all the steps at once.

And when we can do that, we’re exhibiting healthy boundaries with our self, and we’re not abandoning ourselves from the place of trauma or pain or turmoil that we’re in. And sometimes that turmoil or pain is like, “Oh, my God. Things are working. Oh, my God. I’m getting what I asked for.” It really—it sends people off in a spiral because then you have something to lose, then you have something you have to live up to. Nobody wants that. So—I mean, maybe you do, but maybe you don’t, right. It’s complicated. So grounding, centering, getting connected with flow are invaluable for any kind of manifestation work.

Madeline:                     I loved hearing all of that, particularly tangent land because I do think that a lot of times we’re told that we should all be able to ground a certain way, we should all be able to center a certain way, and this is how you do it. And, if you don’t do it that way or if that doesn’t work for you, something’s wrong.

Jessica:    Yeah. And that’s not true.

Madeline:   And it’s clearly not true.

Jessica:       Yeah. It’s definitely not true.

Voter suppression wouldn’t exist if your vote wasn’t important. We are the majority, and it’s essential that we all get to the ballets this November. Go to vote.org to double check if you’re registered to vote or to request your ballet to vote by mail this November. That’s vote.org, and the link is in my show notes.