Where Did This Come From?

You Are Not a Tree: The Grounding Advice We Got Wrong

Picture roots growing from your feet into the center of the earth. It's one of the most common grounding practices in yoga and new age spirituality, but Denise spent years doing it and kept coming up short. Then, in the middle of the visualization, she heard a question that changed everything: "Are you a tree or a human?"

In this episode of Where Did This Come From?, Lila and Denise trace where our ideas about grounding came from and why some of them may not fit who we are now. They get into chakras, bare feet, grounding mats, kundalini, and why real healing is usually pretty boring.

In this episode:

- Where the tree roots visualization came from

- The question that ended Denise's tree practice

- Bringing in a vertical column of light and connecting with the earth's etheric body

- How Theosophy and Alice Bailey shaped Western ideas about chakras

- Why you may not be subtle enough to worry about your chakras yet

- Grounding as a balance between the etheric and physical bodies

- Root vegetables, heavier foods, and other everyday ways to feel grounded

- Ayurveda's five elements and why the prescription might be to go touch a rock

- Bare feet, moving water, and that recharged feeling after a dip in a river

- Rubber soles, Skechers Shape-ups, earthing shoes, and what comes between us and the ground

- Synthetic fabrics, cotton sheets, and what our bodies have to process

- Why being ungrounded can make intuition feel chaotic

- Denise's pineal gland phase, including tuning forks and a crystal in her hair

- Kundalini, spiritual psychosis, and why you shouldn't force an awakening

- How ashwagandha sharpened Denise's abilities instead of taking them away

- Why Denise threw her grounding mat in the trash

- Rudolf Steiner's view of electricity as decayed light

- Why healing is simple, boring, and unsexy

- Copper through the lens of Steiner and Ayurveda

A note on grounding mats: Even when a mat is wired to the earth through an outlet's ground connection, electrical ground isn't the same as the etheric earth we're talking about here.

What do you think about grounding, and what should we trace back next? Leave us a comment with your thoughts and episode ideas.

Check out our work:

🌿 Lila Swanberg, Clinical Herbalist and Ayurvedic Practitioner: tvnhc.com

🔮 Denise, Medium and Spiritual Facilitator: thecosmictree.me

Lila and Denise sit down with Victoria, a soul-aligned brand and business strategist with 17 years of experience, to unpack the human design reading she gave them — and discover all three share open heart centers. The conversation moves through open vs. defined centers, the solar plexus and spleen as sources of absorbed fear and emotion, why highly sensitive people tend to over-give and under-charge, and how open centers create both the deepest wounds and the deepest gifts. Denise and Lila trace their own patterns — Denise's lifelong instinct to jump in and help strangers, Lila's struggle with pricing and boundaries — back to their charts, and the three weave in threads from traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, anthroposophy, and gene keys to show how these different systems are often describing the same truths. The episode closes on grounding, ashwagandha, and what it really means to build a soul-aligned business from an open heart.

In this episode:

• What human design is and how it blends astrology, I Ching, Kabbalah, and the chakra system
• Open centers vs. defined centers — and why open doesn't mean broken
• The open heart center: over-giving, self-worth, and proving your value
• Open solar plexus and open spleen: absorbing others' emotions and fear
• Why sensitive people struggle to set prices and hold business boundaries
• Cross-system parallels: TCM, Ayurveda, the four humors, and anthroposophy
• Grounding practices and why ashwagandha (whole herb, not extract) matters for ungrounded, gifted people
• Devotion vs. discipline, and this week's Gene Key 4 theme




Check out Victoria's work here:

Free Clarity Call

https://victoriaanlight.com/contact

Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/@victoriaanlight

Check out Lila & Denise's work here:

Lila — Clinical Herbalist & Ayurvedic Practitioner | tvnhc.com
Denise — Medium and Spiritual Facilitator | thecosmictree.me

Feeding the Beings We Don't SeeLila and Denise dive into egregores — the thought-forms and collective energies born when enough attention, emotion, and ritual get poured into a single idea. From an anxious presence Lila feels outside a neighbor's office to a being Denise had to release from her own home with the help of a protection Buddha, they trace how these forces form, grow, and feed on our focus. The conversation ranges into religion, ancestral work, sports, Dungeons & Dragons, AI, and even herbalism itself — asking where healing power really comes from, and how much of what we call spiritual influence is something we've built ourselves, one act of attention at a time.

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Some conversations change the way you see the world. That's precisely what we're here to do: change the way we see the world, and share that with you. The Herbalist and the Mystic brings together co-hosts Lila Swanberg (Clinical Herbalist blending Eastern and Western thought) and Mystic Denise (Medium and Spiritual Facilitator) to explore what matters most, and say what too often goes unsaid. Though they hold different gifts and walk different paths, they've noticed their work shares an eerily similar arc with a shared commitment to lifting the fog that confuses both the spiritual and natural health spaces. From the physical to the spiritual, the seen to the unseen, these conversations stay grounded in real-world experience, real study, and a genuine desire to expand your understanding of what is possible.

Lila — Clinical Herbalist & Ayurvedic Practitioner | tvnhc.com

Denise — Medium and Spiritual Facilitator | thecosmictree.me