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

Doing Nothing
Coming to Our Senses: Slowing Down, Tuning In, Waking Up
Earth-Connecting Practices

Doing nothing is an essential fuel for many of the best parts of human nature: creativity, moments of awe, heightened intuitive capabilities, learning, integration, flashes of brilliance and profound shifts in consciousness. If it is hard to imagine slowing down your productive life to do nothing, remember that the results can be astonishing. Energy and insight can soar from a regular commitment to resting and “doing nothing.” To intensify the effect, do nothing for longer periods. To make it even more effective, do nothing while sitting in nature. If you sit long enough outside, doing nothing, this is called a vision quest.

Over time, I have noticed that the harder it feels to slow down directly correlates with our need to do nothing. If you feel you are absolutely too busy to do nothing, then you are most in need of doing nothing. When our activities feel so pressing that we can’t conceive of slowing down, that is a sign that we have lost contact with our “flow,” the aspect of ourselves that is our primal wisdom and connection. I am a person who loves to be busy! It is a central aspect of my life’s work to learn to slow down. I often need reminding and encouragement to do it. We all do; we need to build the gift of slowing down into the fabric of habits that make up our communal spaces.

It is often in the cracks of life that the windows to other worlds seep in. When we are still, we notice the bright red bird outside the window, the wind blowing through the grass, the shapes of raindrops on our windshield. These are the moments that are to be sought after and cherished on our journey back to life. It does not mean that we need to get rid of technology, but we must foster our relationship with quiet and stillness as a first step to fostering Earth-connected consciousness.