Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020
Coming Home
How to Use This Book: Growing the Gifts of Ecological Consciousness
Introduction
The Earth Spirit Dreaming practices are a map of my own story of healing and transformation. I dedicate my story, and all that I share in this book, to the healing of all of our lives and the world. Together, we can find our way back to our heritage of Earth and Spirit connectedness. As I tell my story, I know that it goes against many of the things we value in our culture. Much of it may seem irrational or even crazy, and much of it is based on ways of knowing that are not situated in fact but derive from subjective experience. Mine is a story of unfolding soul and spirit in a culture that struggles to find its way back to these modes of experience. I did not go to others to learn this way of being but found my way on the soil beneath my feet in the United States of America, living a Western life and reading books written largely by Western, and often white male, thinkers. But my experience is one that is happening throughout Western culture: a breaking through of our cellular memory of ways of living and knowing that we need now to effectively resolve the challenges that we face as a planetary community.
Everything that I share in this book is a gift from the Earth, from the helping spirits, from the Divine Creator of the Universe. My wish for myself, and for all of us, is to be an emissary of life power to wake up the people to reclaim our birthright of creative connection and to walk in beauty on the planet. I came to this knowledge and intention by sitting with Earth, speaking directly with Gaia, asking for direction and learning to read the mysterious and, many times, magical feeling of the messages as they come in imaginal and symbolic ways. My guides and I have developed methods for communication over many years.
In every day that passes, I am surprised by life. There is always another circle of discovery and magic to stretch and grow into. As I continue my journey, which is often a struggle, to maintain awareness of my ecology, I continue to face the challenges of sitting with this knowing alongside techno-industrial consciousness. I find recently that there is a new feeling-quality to this experience of walking between worlds. That as I move every day closer to the Earth, I begin to feel the vibrational matrix of life more often and in more and different places: not just in the woods or meditating with my rocks, but at the coffee shop, in my kitchen, while driving; or in the city, in the grocery store, late at night in my bed. I want to describe this feeling, but words elude me. It is a world, a consciousness, a feeling experience that is not slower, but slower is the only word that is close. It’s like a broad long, constant, slow wave amidst short colliding waves.
The feeling of the web of life is usually soft. While sometimes these experiences of oneness can be large, jolting, mind-splitting, I find that the everyday feeling of connecting with the web of life is quiet. It is like a very soft whisper in a room of people talking loudly. If I’m not paying attention I won’t hear it; if I don’t consciously wake up the parts of me that can feel it, it can easily slip under the brighter, noisier, busier perceptions of the dream of techno-industrial human culture. In my life and work, I increasingly try to hold both at once. This is challenging, as the attractions and pressures of the human culture world are very engaging and often hold my attention rapt. It’s almost like listening to two kinds of music at once. While these songs can go together, they can also clash and hurt.
In these moments, I focus on connection with the Earth, and on love. Love can shift thousands of moments of weighted fear and other negative emotions. We are not left to flail in a think-soup of loneliness and longing. Now more than ever the great light guides of the planet, and the depths of our own humanity, are calling us back to ourselves, to reclaim our home of beauty and love on Earth. We can close the gap of separation with ourselves and others as we share our joys, our grief, our fears, our dreams in circles of care. We learn to give our feelings to the Earth, all of them. To be reconstituted into the consciousness of the planet. We compost these feelings through contact with the Earth, always with requests for permission and profound gratitude.
To change the world, most, if not all, of us will need to commit to an Earth-connecting practice of some sort, because while culture is expressed outside of us, it originates within and among us in the embodied psycho-spiritual fabric of community. We can only grow an Earth-honoring culture by learning to honor the Earth again. In my personal experience, reaping the unexpected and life-changing gifts of Earth-connected consciousness began by feeling my way along, literally, amidst rocks and trees. Touching the Earth regularly, I had what I thought was a peak awakening, until I started to speak to the Earth and all of the community of life and engage through creative, intuitive ritual practice. This brought me to new peak awakenings, which, when I did these things first with just a couple of people, and eventually more and more, opened onto completely new horizons. Eventually, my goal, my hope, became to be a part of the shift on Earth that is healing through re-indigenizing Western minds. At some point it dawned on me: this isn’t just something that might happen far off in the distance; it is happening now, in these circles, speaking with nature, touching the Earth in ceremony, sharing stories around fires, allowing our experience to move beyond our individual minds into collective awareness of the energetic fabric that holds us all in the matrix of life.