Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 1 | Written Reflection

There is a kind of armour a person puts on when there is too much to feel and too little time to feel it in. Mine, on the day I left the United States for good, came in the form of a cowboy hat. Boxes had to be shipped across an ocean. Documents had to be faxed across the same ocean. And somewhere in the middle of all that logistics, I was also supposed to be saying goodbye to seven years of my life. So I did what any reasonable person does when the emotional maths does not add up in the time available. I put the hat on, channelled something closer to a stoic rancher than a woman quietly unravelling, and got on the plane.

It worked, for a while. Through one flight, through a last meal in an airport the size of a small city, through a boarding gate filled almost entirely with fellow South Africans heading the same direction I was. It stopped working somewhere over the ocean, once the plane levelled out and there was nothing left to organise, nothing left to pack, nothing left to do except sit with seven years compressing themselves into a single overwhelming replay behind my eyes. The hat stayed on. The composure did not. You can outrun a feeling for exactly as long as your hands stay busy, and not one second longer.

What surprised me was not the collapse, grief tends to collect what it is owed eventually, however cleverly a person tries to dodge it. What surprised me was what happened the moment I actually landed. Something in my body recognised home before my conscious mind caught up. My exhale came out longer than my inhale, which is the physiological signature of a nervous system finally being allowed to stand down after months of running on alert. This is where the first kind of ground shows up, and it is the one most people mean when they use the word at all: the physical body settling back into safety, measurably, in real time.

That settling deepened the moment my bare feet touched the grass of the new lawn my partner and I now owned. There is an actual name for this specific practice, grounding, sometimes called earthing, direct physical contact with the earth through grass, sand or soil, used to support the nervous system’s return to baseline after periods of chronic stress. Researchers have found measurable changes in cortisol rhythm and autonomic balance in people who practise it consistently, and whatever the precise mechanism turns out to be, the felt experience is difficult to argue with once it has happened to you. Standing barefoot on my own patch of earth for the first time in years, I felt more anchored in thirty seconds than I had in the entire chaotic month leading up to that flight. This is physical grounding at its most literal: skin against soil, breath against panic, a body being given permission, finally, to stop bracing.

But physical grounding on its own could not account for everything that steadied me over the following weeks, and this is where the story needs a second kind of ground entirely, one built from time rather than terrain. Standing at the base of a mountain reserve overlooking a statue of Nelson Mandela, arm raised in the salute that has become shorthand in my country for power returned to the people once denied it, I felt something that had nothing to do with my nervous system and everything to do with lineage. The statue faces the church where the oldest liberation movement on the continent was founded. Surrounded by giraffes, ostriches and undecorated history, I understood that grounding is not only a present tense event happening inside one body. Sometimes it is historical, the deliberate act of tracing yourself backward into the people and struggles that made your current freedom possible. Clinicians working with displaced or historically marginalised communities sometimes describe this as ancestral grounding, the process of consciously reconnecting to where you actually come from, and it matters most for anyone whose lineage carries displacement, forced removal or struggle somewhere in its history. Standing there, I was not calming a stress response. I was remembering, physically and geographically, that I descend from people who fought for the exact right to stand where I was currently standing, and that kind of remembering does something a passport stamp never could.

That same historical thread pulled taut again a few weeks later on a road I used to walk with my grandmother as a child. My hometown had changed in the ordinary ways hometowns change, new shops, aged faces, the particular disorientation researchers call reverse culture shock, the experience of returning to a familiar place and finding it subtly, unsettlingly new because you have changed as much as it has. And yet walking that specific road, I felt exactly as safe as I had as a child, which told me something about historical grounding that the statue alone had not. It is not only about ancestry stretching back centuries. It is also about the accumulated ground of your own single life, the roads and rituals that stay solid underneath you even after everything else about you has shifted. A hometown, it turns out, holds you for a lifetime whether or not you still technically live there, because the version of you who once belonged there never actually leaves.

The third kind of ground took longer to recognise, mostly because it never arrived as a single clean moment the way the grass and the statue did. Attachment researchers have a concept that fits it precisely, the secure base, the idea that another person’s steady presence can regulate a nervous system almost as directly as solid earth underfoot, a process sometimes called co regulation. I felt an early, communal version of this at a wedding a few weeks after landing, plate piled with the kind of home cooking that had lived rent free in my memory for years. I ate slowly that night, fully present with every bite, less because I was practising any deliberate mindfulness and more because being surrounded by family who had missed me made the food, and the moment, impossible to rush through. That is what relational grounding often looks like in its earliest, least dramatic form: full attention arriving naturally because the people around the table are the ones holding you steady.

The clearest version of it, though, came later, and it was not a place or a plate at all. It was handing a piece of this new life to my younger brother, showing him a home built from nothing, letting him help choose the small things that would fill it, watching him ring in a new year in a space that had not existed a few months earlier. There is something quietly restorative about letting the people who knew you at your least established see exactly what you have since built. It closes a loop that words alone struggle to close. He got to walk through the rooms and see, in a very literal way, that the version of me who once left was not the version standing in that kitchen now, and that whatever had been given up to get here had amounted to something real. That is relational grounding doing its fullest work: not just another person calming your nervous system in a single moment, but another person witnessing the whole arc of what you built, and steadying you simply by seeing it clearly.

If there is a single thread running through the cowboy hat, the tears at thirty thousand feet, the bare feet on new grass, the statue and the road with my grandmother, the wedding table and my brother in that kitchen, it is that grounding never arrives as one clean, singular event. It moves through three distinct layers, and each one does a different job. Physical grounding steadies the body in the present moment, breath and skin and nervous system finding their way back to baseline. Historical grounding steadies identity across time, connecting a person backward to the lineage and personal history that shaped them long before they had language for any of it. Relational grounding steadies a person through others, whether that is a table full of family or one sibling standing in a kitchen that did not exist a year earlier. You can armour up to get through the leaving, a cowboy hat, busy hands, forward motion. You cannot armour your way through the returning, not fully, and I am not convinced you would want to. The entire point of coming home is finally letting all three kinds of ground catch you at once.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.