I’ve been thinking a lot about grounding this week.

Here in Carmel, two very different kinds of chaos have collided at exactly the same time.

It’s Car Week — when roughly 150,000 visitors descend on the Monterey Peninsula for the Concours d’Elegance and the constellation of events surrounding it. For those of us who live here, it means overwhelming traffic, commutes that can multiply in length, and a seemingly endless parade of extremely expensive sports cars revving, racing and announcing themselves at all hours.

And at the same time, the Timber Fire is burning in Big Sur. Highway 1 has been closed, areas are under evacuation orders, and some residents have elected to stay behind and protect their homes and communities while fire crews are spread thin across the continent.

So there’s this strange combination of frivolity and genuine emergency in the air — and I’ve noticed how much it has affected my ability to ground.

Meditation. Morning pages. Walking outside. Breathing. All the usual things I do to come back to myself have helped, but they haven’t quite produced that familiar feeling of there I am.

And that got me thinking.

We tend to talk about grounding as though it’s entirely an inside job: regulate your nervous system, quiet your mind, feel your feet, find your center.

But perhaps grounding is actually an integration of our inner and outer environments — finding center through a balance between the information coming from within us and the information coming from the world around us.

And sometimes, the outside world simply isn’t very grounded.

I don’t have a solution for that larger problem. But this week, a client arrived in my studio clearly experiencing something very similar to what I was feeling, and I spontaneously put together a little sequence that helped both of us enormously.

It’s just 12 minutes, using a resistance band with “bunny loops” tied at either end.

Maybe it was the additional resistance and sensory feedback that created a feeling of physical security and alignment. Maybe it was simply the enforced simplicity of drop in, root your feet, breathe slowly, and complete the task in front of you.

Either way, something shifted.

So I’m giving it to you.

As my own period of reflection around turning 50 — who I’m becoming, what I want to make, and where I want to put my energy — begins to come to a close, a few destinations are becoming surprisingly clear.

One is teaching. I’ve completely revised my Galileo Fundamentals Teacher Training, and the new program will begin in 2027 with a much more intentional educational structure and a deeper emphasis on developing movement fluency, practical anatomy and confident, independent teaching.

The other is art.

Hanif and I, working together as HD, are developing an immersive, interactive exhibition called In the Flesh that explores something increasingly difficult for me to separate: the systems inside the human body and the ecosystems surrounding it.

Breath and atmosphere. Circulation and waterways. Neural networks and mycelial ones. Regulation, adaptation, interdependence, breakdown and repair.

Rather than treating the body as something separate from “nature,” In the Flesh asks what happens when we experience ourselves as part of the same living system.

Which, come to think of it, brings me right back to grounding.

Maybe finding our center was never supposed to mean shutting out the world.

Maybe it means learning how to be in relationship with it.

And there will be ways to be part of both of these next chapters.

If the Galileo Teacher Training has piqued your interest, there will be opportunities to participate in the 2027 program. And as In the Flesh develops, there will be ways to support the project and help us bring this rather ambitious idea fully into the world.

If either one sparks something in you, just reply to this email and tell me. You don’t need to know exactly what your involvement might look like yet — I’d simply love to know what resonates.

Because ultimately, none of this work exists in a vacuum. My teaching has evolved through decades of exchanging ideas, questions, experiments and discoveries with other bodies and minds. And the work Hanif and I create as HD only becomes meaningful when other people enter it, interact with it, and make it their own.

Innovation needs community. It needs people willing to participate, support, question, experience and engage. And as these next projects begin to take shape, your engagement matters enormously in helping us bring them into the world.

Maybe that’s another form of grounding, too.

Finding out what can take root when we do it together.

Domini Anne

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