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

Developing Earth-Connected Consciousness
Earth-Connecting: The First Step of Earth Spirit Dreaming
Earth-Connecting Practices

Consciousness is a complex idea and a complex experience that is difficult to capture in words. There are many definitions of consciousness, of how and why it’s possible, or if it is possible at all. There is too much to say about consciousness to deal with it in this book in the depth that it deserves. The debates and questions surrounding “consciousness,” which require the study of millennia-worth of ideas in metaphysics, epistemology and ontology from many cultures, are addressed in many books. For this discussion, we are going to assume that there is something called consciousness, and that, at least in some ways, we can change and focus our consciousness. For the Earth Spirit Dreaming method, I understand consciousness as something that evolves, and I make an educated and considered assumption that we can take part in and support this evolution.

Consciousness is both what we perceive and experience, and how our attention to the world and preconceived notions set the stage for these perceptions and experiences. Intertwined with this is the part of us that is physically and psychically connected with the world. At the same time, we are “the watcher”: Able to watch the world while watching ourselves watching. To develop Earth-connected, or ecological, consciousness we move beyond the perceptual limitations of the human-created level of the world that is foremost in most of our minds and experience in Western culture. We expand our sense of self and awareness to include the realm of the life-world: A level of knowing that emanates from parts of our bodies and brains that are subconscious most of the time.⁴⁰

To simplify the idea of discussing consciousness, I think of consciousness as a radio station: I can tune in to certain “stations” by how I think, act, take care of my body, engage in spiritual practice and community, and in the many other ways that I choose to live my life. There are many outside influences that inform and affect my consciousness “wavelength,” which I can deal with in different ways. Sometimes another “station” will cross my signal of consciousness — a road rage driver for example. Or my husband will come home in a bad mood, and I will absorb and begin to reflect his mood. I can choose to let my consciousness drift to another “station,” or signal, or I can work to maintain my own wavelength.

We are always embedded in a community of wavelengths of the human, and more-than-human, worlds. So, it can feel like a full-time job to steer through the web of wavelengths consciously. As I will discuss in more detail later in the book, we are either sending or receiving. We are either actively tuning our consciousness to our “station” of choice, or we are picking up and unconsciously vibrating to whatever other “stations” we encounter, often the loud, bright and shiny vibrations of our techno-industrial realm of life. Actively staying tuned in to and transmitting a spiritually awake, ecological consciousness, or any signal that we value, requires tremendous vigilance; the kind of vigilance that is developed through long spiritual practice; the kind of vigilance that can change the world.

While it is overwhelming to think about this level of responsibility, this is what is required to shift the very large entity that is our global civilization from a stream of destruction to a path of healing, light and life. Many people across the planet are working on this shift to a healing planetary consciousness in so many ways, and so much is already changing. It takes each one of us adding our own commitment and voice to this challenge of transforming global consciousness to make it a reality. And, it takes place in small moments, put together one after the other; many very simple, yet challenging, steps of conscious choices in each moment create a new path, a new culture, a new world.

As an example of the kind of small shifts in consciousness that are required, this morning as I walked my kids out to the car on the way to school, I noticed that a flock of birds were singing noisily and enchantingly from a tree in front of our house. Plenty of mornings I am too tired, frazzled and focused on the tasks at hand to notice these same birds. Today, by some grace, I stopped (though we were a little late) and said to my kids, “Listen to the birds.” We all stopped our rush to the car (actually my rush, as they are more inclined to stop and listen to the birds). We had a moment of noticing the birds with our ears and eyes, to feeling their songs with our hearts, which led to noticing the late sunrise of the early fall sky. My personal and professional work are about being mindful of the life-world. So, maybe because of my commitment to this work, I was able to stop the rush to slip into this other mode of consciousness. However, many days it is challenging to remember to notice that I am connected with life all around me. This ability to be connected in this reality grows with time and practice, and I require continual reminders. In these and similar small ways, I try to expand my daily engagement in ecological consciousness, as well as the engagement of my students and clients. The practices and rituals that I will share in the next few chapters support the development of ecological consciousness, so that these moments of connection with life happen more often and for longer periods of time.

In order to cultivate ecological consciousness, I find I have to be very diligent quite often about creating moments of reflection, small and large. There are many articles and books available about how terrible our smartphones are, our social networking, our technology. I actually like these modes of being and find them creative and connective. And, I also find that they are entrancing; they are loud, bright, insistent, and constantly pull on our consciousness dial to the point that it can be hard to find time to develop and maintain other modes of consciousness that are primary modes of being when we are children. As I have rituals of checking my email, my texts, my phone, supported by beeps and bings throughout the day, I try to set up markers to remind me to tune in to ecological consciousness: to notice my connection with the life-world.

Connecting with the Life-World with Reverence

Ecological consciousness, as an idea and a way of being, is intertwined with the relationship of Westerners to indigenous people throughout the world. Ecological consciousness is a pathway back to our own connection to the land and our place within the web of life. In the company of some other thinkers and practitioners, I think of this as a returning for Western people.

The influence of indigenous culture on Western environmental thought is a faint trail that can be found with diligent detective work. Many paths of awakening to Earth-consciousness in Western thought can be traced back to contact with indigenous people. Two examples include Ralph Waldo Emerson’s contact, and that of other transcendental thinkers, with Native Americans in the early 1800s. Another example is Aldo Leopold’s interaction with Native Americans in the American southwest before and during his conception and writing of “The Land Ethic,” a chapter from his A Sand County Almanac that is central to the development of Western environmental thought.⁴¹

Also, too often unremarked in environmental thought, but essential to a growing sense of the necessity of psycho-spiritual experience for creating a sustainable civilization, is the intersection of the ecofeminist and women’s spirituality movements in opening doors to re-indigenized experience for Western people. These thinkers call out the patriarchal subjugation and oppression of nature and women (and other “others“) as primarily responsible for the separation from and degradation of nature.⁴²

And so, thus seen, we come to the juncture in the history of Western people where it is essential to come back to our connection with nature, with every aspect of our culture and belief structures, to rescue humanity from extinction and the Earth and other species from irreparable harm. Through an ethic of care for each other and the Earth — informing our actions from a perspective quite different than the one that got us to where we are now and reawakening our sensual belonging to life — we find our way into what feels new but what our bodies are born with. This “something deeper” is outside of the confines and accepted ways of knowing of the culture of the “rational.” It is a sensual intensity of feeling our bodies as part of the Earth. In the context of ecological consciousness, living becomes a sacrament. As we do this work we are returning to and maturing back into the child’s view of the world that we were born with. We enter an initiation into adulthood as citizens of the Earth community; we discover the truth of our responsibility to all of life and our co-creative abilities in dreaming the collective dream of the Earth.

Alongside the weight of responsibility, a feeling of the joy of living begins to seep in as we find our way back into alignment with a reverential, and decidedly non-linear, relationship with life.

We Are Always Connected

So how do we begin the journey back to our embodied relationship with the Earth? There are many simple ways to start connecting consciously with the life-world. Of course, we are connected all the time, but it’s easy for this connection, essential as it is, to become a background, unconscious attribute of our lives. Like our hearts beating, or the ongoing rhythm of our breath, the life-world supports us and is the canvas of our lives. Despite the nature of our connection with the life-world, it is easy to forget this connection and to take it for granted. When we stop to notice our heart beating, it can be a surprising reminder of the miracle and fragility of our lives. In the same way, remembering the life-world in conscious ways can remind us of the complex miracle of life and, like our heartbeat, that we could not live without these systems. This awareness of the life-world is the underlying experience that leads to a sacred reverence for life on Earth. Yet, how do we start when so many of us feel too often so alone, and separate, in charting the course of our lives?

In a recent class, our discussion somehow led to the ways in which individual students experience themselves. They described feeling “on their own,” taking care of themselves and feeling completely separate from everyone around them. This radical individualism underscores the American experience, and many ethical positions of American society, but, as I pointed out, my students are not at all on their own. Their beliefs are handed down to them and shared, their food is grown by others and cooked by others in the cafeteria, their cars and clothing and other “stuff” is made by others, their breathing, eating, sleeping, existing is made possible thanks to the trees and plants all around us. The atmosphere is made possible thanks to our place in the solar system and the daily incoming rays of the sun. Water comes from the complex, interworking systems of the planet. Endless complex systems of cells and organisms keep our bodies functioning, our food digesting, our lives running. We are not individuals, yet we seem perpetually trapped in this feeling.

Initially, my students were upset to think they were not individuals — although, perhaps in contradiction to this, at the same time they fear being on their own. I put forth a radical idea that they struggled to accept: It is an incredible gift that we are not on our own, but part of an intricate web of relationship in every moment of our lives. The existential loneliness we so often feel can be soothed by consciously rejoining the Earth community we are a part of in every moment of our lives and even after our deaths. We are not alone.

We can know and experience in every fiber of our being that we are not alone. However, only the intelligences of the Earth and Spirit realms can communicate this truth to us on the level that we need in order to see who we really are in relation with the cosmos. We come to know our relevance and importance, while also realizing that any individual is not so important. Hopefully, we are humbled by the vast reaches of knowing and being, the incredible “consciousnesses” that we encounter. Coming fully into our own nature as humans, we begin to learn our responsibilities as creators and dreamers, as care-takers and relatives of all beings. We discover how to meet at the boundary with the great mysteries and truths of life. Yet, we cannot get there with our rational minds; only our hearts and love, and a willingness to embrace the deepest feelings and mysteries of life, can guide us into awakened dreaming.

One day, recently, before a blood moon eclipse, I was driving up the narrow lane to my house when I noticed twenty or more turkey vultures resting on the fence by the side of the road and spread throughout the field. “Well, something died or is dying,” I thought. I pulled my car over to commune with the visitors. The next morning, during my drumming, dancing and meditation time, I became curious about those vultures, the small condor species that peppers Ohio. What wisdom could I learn from them? What could their Latin name, Cathartes aura, illuminate for me; what belief or attachments could I let die; what could I let dry up and be transmuted into new energies in my life. I decided to create a ceremony to journey to the vulture spirit. I set my intention, raised my vibrations through rattling and meditations and leaned back into my soul light to step into the void.

I am walking along the ocean on a long, open beach. I know right away that I am on the California coast, walking along the Pacific Ocean, but in a time that I do not know, far back or forward. The ocean is huge and pulsing, reaching out to me with each wave. I feel the depth of the power of the ocean reach into my soul, feeding me the truth of her rhythms. I walk along the beach for quite some time, each step sinking into the wet sand, which sucks around my bare feet. The wind and noises of the beach surround me; gulls sing and whistle to one another, “There are the fish, over there.”

Eventually, I come to an outcropping of dark stones typical of the northern California beaches. On these stones, a group of California condors perch, larger than life, larger than ever in this realm. I step up to the first and largest bird and ask: What is your wisdom? The wild, ancient spirit of condor blows into my spirit body, free and open, enchanting, beyond my understanding. Our minds struggle to meet in a place where we can share. After a time of watching, waiting and opening to the imprint of this bird, these words come to me: You are never alone. Such seemingly simple words for this penetrating exchange. They seem not enough, and yet this gift enters me fully, releasing a long pain, an ancestral grief in my family, in the structure of my species. I thank the condor and carefully retrace my steps to my portal into this world; returning slowly, carefully, completely I ground into my body and eventually to the quiet of my bedroom.

For the next weeks, I feel an effervescence of Earth community infiltrating my previously ingrained experience, filling a hole that I didn’t realize was so long and wide, re-enchanting me into the music of the wild. I know the elemental energy of all of the friends and relations that surround me, know me, care for me: The birds landing on my porch, flying all around, singing, chirping, calling, the trees breathing air to me, the constant love and companionship of my dog, the huge-hearted softness of the horses grazing the field just beyond my front porch. The animal world, nature world, people world, spirit world always around me become newly lit up with some kind of love that I’ve forgotten, a feeling from long, long ago. I know now in a way that this body never fathomed and I say to everyone that will listen: We are never alone.

We have not yet come to shamanic practice. That will come later in the book. But I tell this story now because it is one of the greatest gifts of my life to feel so intimately and acutely that we are surrounded always by rich and caring community on so many levels. My walks into other realms came after decades of sitting quietly in the woods. Still, I must do the beginning work each day to maintain my connection with Earth and Spirit in order to find my way into these realms again and again. Each time, I am starting over, creating the steps that take me from techno-industrial consciousness into Earth-consciousness. The next chapters offer practices to begin, or to continue, a path of initiation into adulthood as re-indigenized citizens of a community of story-makers, and into a tribal way of Earth-consciousness, as knowers, lovers and healers of life, in a planetary age.