The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul

by Brad Stulberg

Eastern wisdom traditions conceptualize practice as a path—tao in Chinese and do in Japanese. This represents the never-ending, infinite nature of practice.

A 2012 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that individuals who react to failure with self-compassion get back on the bandwagon more swiftly than those who judge themselves harshly. For

The work of another psychologist, Kristin Neff, an associate professor at the University of Texas, shows that if you judge yourself for messing up, you are liable to feel guilt or shame, and it is often this guilt or shame that prevents you from bouncing back and continuing down the path. A theme across all of Neff’s research is that being kind to yourself in the midst of struggle and hardship gives you the resilience that you need to thrive.

The self-compassion practices are useful for approaching the journey of transitioning to a more grounded life as a whole: Stop shoulding all over yourself. Treat your failures and the judgmental voice in your head as you would treat a crying baby. Develop a mantra to interrupt negative thought cycles and help get you back on the path: This is what is happening right now or I am doing the best I can.*

In the preceding pages, I’ve argued that the type of conventional success we spend so much time and energy chasing—money, fame, relevance, busyness, followers—isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It is not that we shouldn’t ever strive. It is that we should spend more time and energy focusing on the deep, internal foundation—the ground—from which any and all striving emerges. Once we do this, our definition of success changes, and so does the texture of our drive to succeed and the satisfaction of experiencing it. We still have the chance to reach great heights, but we do so from a more solid ground. We feel better. We perform better. And we become better community members,

My hope is that this book has given you a new way to think about how you want to live your life. And that it’s also given you the practices to actualize it. To choose acceptance over delusion and wishful thinking. To choose presence over distraction. To choose patience over speed. To choose vulnerability over invincibility. To choose community over isolation. To choose movement over sitting still. To choose groundedness over heroic individualism.