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

Transforming Sustenance
Earth-Connecting: The First Step of Earth Spirit Dreaming
Earth-Connecting Practices

This chapter begins the journey into the Earth-connecting step of the Earth Spirit Dreaming method. Developing Earth-connected consciousness — our perceptual connection with the web of the life-world — is essential to a re-indigenized spiritual awakening. Of course, we are connected with the life-world all of the time. Often, however, this connection is invisible to us. It exists as an unconscious attribute of our lives, albeit completely essential. I use the word “ecomindfulness” to describe my approach to developing Earth-connected consciousness. Ecomindfulness is a spiritual path that blends mindfulness practices with spiritual ecology to enhance embodied Earth sensitivities. Ecomindfulness begins the progressive consciousness shift of Earth Spirit Dreaming by suggesting simple ways to establish an embodied connection with the life-world. While connecting consciously with the life-world seems simple, it can be surprisingly challenging to slow down enough to find our way back to our natural senses.

Transforming Sustenance

One step toward developing full, Earth-connected embodiment is to learn to become conscious of our ecology: To become aware in an embodied way that we are interconnected with all of the life systems of the planet. We can know theoretically that we depend upon and impact the life systems of the planet, from the very big, the atmosphere (think climate change) to the seemingly more local, the water we drink and the air we breathe, the food we eat and the trees, dirt, plants and animals that are part of our community. However, knowing in our heads that we are integrated with our ecology (it could not be any other way), and experiencing/ perceiving this reality are two different things. Without the fulfillment, meaning and energy that a conscious connection with life systems brings, it is challenging and maybe impossible to transition from a culture of consumption to one of connection with the Earth.

Many people in the West live in denial of our ecological terrain. Though there is a shift toward understanding the Earth as a network of integrated systems, as a biosphere, we still largely imagine that we are individual selves moving through the world relatively autonomously. This illusion of separateness is the source of many of our ills, both personally and collectively. German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, a central figure in originating the concept of ecology in the nineteenth century, realized that organisms could only be understood in the context of their environment. Understanding things by separating them out as individual parts or objects began to crumble in the face of the emerging understanding of ecology throughout the 1800s and 1900s. In the twenty-first century, in order to bring our lives back into balance with the Earth, it is time to integrate the reality of ecology on a psycho-spiritual level. This is a process that has been well under way as a stream of environmental thought since Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American transcendentalists. Yet, after almost a century, the Western sense of self is stubbornly perpetuated and perceived as separate, individual and relatively self-sustaining.

The field of ecopsychology, which emerged in environmental thought in the 1980s and 90s, articulated in the terms of Western psychology that just as separation from and unhealthy relationships with the human community make us sick, so too do our separation from and unhealthy relationship with the natural. While these ideas already existed among some environmental activists, and in visionary environmental thought, it was Theodore Roszak, in his book The Voice of the Earth³⁶, who came up with a way to weave these ideas into a format and potential for practice that a broader audience, healing practitioners and therapists in particular, could relate to and act upon.

Roszak’s dedication in the front of the book hints at an important influence in his life and work. He dedicates his book to Betty Roszak, quoting her essay “Rescue and Restore.”³⁷ He thanks her for opening his eyes to the depth of Earth-connection emerging in Western experience and honors her for “awakening” him. Pointing out that she helped him “hear the voice” — hence the title of his book — he gets to the core of what was rising up as a global consciousness within the dominant Western culture then, and is continuing to rise up now. This wave of an alternative to industrial models of global society continues to stretch across the planet: a new stream of Earth-care, culture, story and values. Betty Roszak eloquently captures this spreading Earth-consciousness in her poem:

....green voices are singing

the dark ecstatic metabolism of hidden Earth.

We may read the shaman’s gestures,

We bear the heat of eggs in our bodies,

The clustering amorous atoms, molecules,

Miracle of future flesh, magnificence of bone,

arteries, sinew, spangled galaxies

craving form.³⁸

We are coming to understand that what happens to the Earth affects us, and that we can impact Earth systems — life as we know it — more than, in previous eras, we ever imagined possible. To integrate this knowledge, we need to make the shift from experiencing Earth and her systems as something “out there,” that we use to our own benefit. Part of dreaming a healing dream for the Earth is coming to know Earth as part of ourselves and, more importantly, ourselves as part of the Earth community. In Aldo Leopold’s words, the shift to an “ethic for the land” requires that we see ourselves as citizens of the biotic community rather than its conquerors.³⁹

When we make the shift to knowing in our bodies that we are interconnected with all of life, our primary psycho-spiritual sustenance transitions from consumption of the Earth to connection with the Earth. By sustenance I mean the beliefs, mores and community and personal experiences that provide us with life, meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging. Currently, our sustenance — what nourishes us physically, emotionally, spiritually — is most often derived from a dominant global culture that is unconnected from the Earth community. Shifting to sustenance that is more in balance with Earth systems underlies and empowers Earth-connected attitudes and ethics by providing alternatives for meaning, belonging and connection that are based on regenerative socio-political economies, social justice and human rights, and honoring Earth communities as sacred and intrinsically valuable. As we come to find our fulfillment and connection through connection with Earth systems, and our communities grow to define meaning, status, belonging and well-being in the context of connection rather than a model of use and consumption, we develop the emotional and spiritual ground necessary to transition to an Earth-honoring global civilization.