Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

A Method for Discovering Magic
How to Use This Book: Growing the Gifts of Ecological Consciousness
Introduction

I developed Earth Spirit Dreaming as a method because I found through my own long-time spiritual practice, and work with others, that using the steps in order consistently creates shifts toward experiential integration with all of life. To create an Earth Spirit Dreaming ritual for yourself, first familiarize yourself with the exercises in each chapter; this can be a quick flip through looking for words, phrases or ideas that catch your eye. Certain exercises will feel like a better fit for you than others. You can also modify the exercises to fit within your own spiritual, religious or other regular practices. Because we are essentially creative beings at our core, each person’s path to connect with Earth and spirit realms will be different. That said, there are steps, or protocols, that support moving into these levels of experience that maintain similarities over millennia. So, while we may “write our own book,” we use a common language and an alphabet of Earth-connected “shamanic” experience.

Over time, and with consistent practice, the Earth Spirit Dreaming method opens us to a journey of spirals deepening into Mystery. More and more, we let go of rational understanding and enter into a new world of sensations. Though our minds cannot conceive of the non-linear reality of “magical” experience, we continue to develop our means of relating with this holonic consciousness.¹⁴ Daily practice turns into weeks, months, years — and suddenly, at first in glimpses, and then sometimes in long and winding waves, we find that we are experiencing the magical, non-linear, out-of-time, emergent creative miracle of the life-world. “Ah,” some part of us long forgotten says, “this is magic!”

You may — and this is my hope and intention — feel and discover strange and exciting new parts of yourself and our world. Through regular practice, I’ve discovered “portals” to ancient Earth memories, ancestors, wild energies of the plants and animals around me, shimmering with shift and light that I’ve never known or seen before. I sometimes run away in fear, and often remember that these miracles are best experienced with friends. Together, in wisdom, we weave our stories and trust the spirit helpers and ancestors to be our guides. I now know that I have a “portal” in my heart. Sometimes, with help from great light guides, my heart opens and I fall through myself and into the cosmos. Sometimes, it feels like too much in a given moment and I’m not ready. I gently say “no.” We have agency to manage these relationships and to set the boundaries and pace that feel comfortable for us. However you choose to follow this path, know that I share my story, as it is expressed through this method, with the deepest hope and longing for everyone to feel the beauty and connection, the constant miracles, that Earth and Spirit have shared with me.

Because I want so deeply to share these states of wonder, and because the method captures how my own unfolding into expanded consciousness occurs, I’ve planned the stages of this book to progressively amplify awareness through what are often considered “altered states” of consciousness. Really, these are re-indigenized states that occur as we revive our Earth and Spirit sensitivities. Reconnecting with our evolutionary capacity to work with elemental nature energies and vibrational reality, we set the stage to contact and communicate with spirit helpers and ancestors that exist around the Earth interwoven and overlapping with reality as we know it. Though we tend to think of “angels” or helping spirits as being “out there” and distant from us, really they are just a thin veil away in each moment. The challenge is to shift the orientation of consciousness to connect with them and receive the help that we need to heal and transform our lives and our world.