Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My sister loaned me her Kindle ebook, Earthing, and I confess I was just not in the mood to read it. Had it not been on a two-week loan and I knew she was going to ask me about it, I probably would have put off reading it indefinitely. But I'm so glad I read it! The ideas in this book made a lot of sense to me, and I knew from the experience of working outside in my garden that there is definitely a difference in how I feel when I work gloved or gloveless. I adore going barefooted, too, although I never understood why. Now I do. And how nice to have a way of improving one's health without spending any money doing it just by walking around outside barefooted as much as possible to "ground" to the Earth. It's been too darned hot here to go outside at all, so I splurged and bought this earthing mat for myself for my birthday. I was delighted to discover it came with the book and an outlet tester, too! (The whole package would make such a nice, nice gift. Everything a clueless person needs to begin Earthing is included.) I'm going to document here what I've been going through with it so far and will return to add more over time if I think it would be helpful. But I think I have enough experience with it now to give you a sense of it. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am very sensitive to energy and very tuned into my own body. If you are not, you may not notice that anything is happening.) In four days, this has been my experience, and this is how I've used the earthing mat every day: Plugged it in, laid it on my bed where I work on my laptop, alternating the soles of my feet (knees bent) or the backs of my calves (legs straight) while working, just whatever felt comfortable. The soles of my feet tingle when they are against the mat, and the backs of my calves tingle when they are against the mat; I can feel the tingling--actually, more like an energizing--all the way up to my knees. I am up and down during the day, and at night I've been sleeping with the mat touching my clean, bare skin in some way. The first night I slept lying with my cheek on the mat like a pillow. I woke up with a terrible headache and feeling like I was coming down with an awful flu. This lasted two days, and then the third day I was better but awfully queasy. I noticed that some red, inflamed tissue around some slow-to-heal sores on my arms had started settling down and the sores were healing up. Periodically, I'd feel a fleeting, stabbing-pain sensation here and there in my body but had the distinct sense that some healing was going on. I've been through Herxheimer reactions before, and this all felt like classic herxing. DAY FOUR: Something came over me today, and I got up and cleaned up my whole room (which was a disaster area), vacuumed, and did all my laundry and got it folded and put away. As I was working, I noticed that I was really ENJOYING the exertion, like I imagine people who are into working out must enjoy it. Instead of dead-tired and having to force myself to move, I felt a sense of vitality that I don't think I've felt since I was in my twenties. I cannot tell you what a major thing this is for me. I have had such low tolerance for exercise that I've badly failed treadmill stress tests and cannot do anything the least bit physically taxing for more than about thirty minutes without getting dizzy and sick to my stomach. But today, I worked hard and it felt so GOOD to do that! This tells me something majorly good is going on. That's why I just had to come and post a review, even though I had planned to give it more time. I have suffered from fibromyalgia, "painful fat," fatigue and depression, and a tendency to overheat very easily upon exertion for several decades. I am disabled for treatment-resistant depression and have been taking various medications for it for decades just to keep myself in a baseline dysthymic state. I've been aware of my breathing in a bad way; my lungs are not in great shape, and my sister died of COPD when she was my age. There has been no place on my body I could touch without feeling pain; wearing anything binding has been unbearable; and I've been puffy with a pallid, "dead fish" complexion for years. But since I started earthing, the painfulness has improved substantially, the puffiness is going down, and my coloring seems to be getting pinker. It even feels like I'm breathing a little better. So nobody's going to convince me that this is "just another New Age scam." In the interest of single-subject research, I should mention that I ruled out Lyme disease or exposure to anyone who was ill as a cause of my flu-like reaction. In examining possible confounding factors, the only thing I have done differently (other than using the mat) is that I started playing Gardens of Time on Facebook. I'm tempted to assume that playing Gardens of Time had nothing to do with my results, although I could be wrong! UPDATE: It's been about a month now. After a few weeks of really noticing a difference, I stopped noticing any benefits (and I emphasize the word "noticing"). I had to do some work on another computer for a week and did not feel like moving my mat, and it's getting colder at night so I stopped trying to make sure my bare feet and legs were on the mat during the night. I was grounding at most maybe an hour a day, if at all, during that time, and I began to quickly slide back into my usual fatigued/not-feeling-so-good state. Then it occurred to me: I'm not earthing! Returning to using the mat at all times when working on the computer resulted in a quick return to the improved state I noted above. This thing WORKS.