Budd

Some of the very basic tai sabaki in aikido are great methods for practicing the fundamentals of "ground awareness" if you have been shown how to train the ground/gravity/you components (there's more considerations, but those are important to start with).

For example - in funekogi undo, how you are opening and closing your body, how purely you have a connection inside your body from the feet through the fingers (and up out the top of your head, for that matter), how you manage the external forces acting on you (ground/gravity) as you move through the shape of the exercise - these will all impact 1) How you express these considerations as you move 2) How you feel to someone else when they touch you.

I've recently started to look at irimi-tenkan with renewed interest from a training/expression perspective and there's some interesting stuff there. But that said, I think you have to understand how the very basics work before you can get the benefit of doing them through an aikido form or technique.