Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality

Your Deepest Ground is a guide to reconnecting with your deepest ground—a state of rootedness that supports authentic psychological healing and embodied spirituality. Drawing on decades of experience as a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher, John Prendergast explores why the lower belly and base of the spine—areas corresponding to the root chakra in Indian tradition, the lower dan tien in Taoism, and the hara in Japanese martial arts—are often the most difficult for people to access due to survival fear and trauma. While most spiritual traditions emphasize opening the mind and heart, they tend to undervalue opening the ground, which remains largely unconscious and defended. The book invites readers to explore their personal, archetypal, and universal ground, and to move beyond the false ground of early conditioning and limited identity. Prendergast provides accessible teachings, addresses trauma held in the physical and energetic body, and offers sensing and inquiry practices for working with your own body and life. The guide includes anecdotes and conversations from his teaching that demonstrate the practical effects of this work. By consciously opening to your ground, you can develop a felt sense of inner safety and stability that supports inner peace, freedom, and loving awareness.