Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020
Cultivating Boredom
Coming to Our Senses: Slowing Down, Tuning In, Waking Up
Earth-Connecting Practices
We are all so free from boredom now. With our phones — instant answers to almost any question, the chance to get one more thing done, return one more phone call, send that email — almost every moment can be filled. With the increase in technology, from which does also come great rewards, we have lost our access to boredom. Access to boredom? Surely boredom is boring, a bore, not something we want. But, like many things we struggle to understand and appreciate until they are gone, boredom has qualities that are imperative to our well-being. In terms of transforming our consciousness toward Earth and Spirit connection, boredom is a gateway experience. Often, when shifting from one mode of consciousness to another, there can be a period of anxiety, restlessness and boredom. Certainly, when “gearing down” from the high-speed overstimulation of techno-industrial consciousness — there is also mechanistic consciousness mixed in there — we are shifting from one kind of connection to another. While these names of cultural paradigms are just markers along the way — the map, not the territory — they are important as signposts for journeying across thresholds in our minds.
EXERCISE: Unstructured Time and Musing
Purpose
One way to slow down and get in touch with our own connectedness with the life-world is through unstructured time, the forerunner of musing. Or rather, good old-fashioned boredom. There are certain kinds of work that our brains and “beings” do when we are “bored,” and when our minds are just wandering, that they don’t do at any other time. Boredom and musing are the times when our brains build connections and links between our disparate experiences and create stories and meaning. Downtime is connection and creation time.
Description
To begin slowing down, make dates with yourself to do nothing for 15 minutes at a time. Try to create moments of quiet: leave your phone, computer and other tasks that are pulling on you in another room, and make sure that they are silenced completely. It is helpful to set an alarm on your phone or clock (left in another room) so that you don’t have to check the time. Find a place to sit or lie down where you feel comfortable and relaxed, away from any work or chores that are pulling on you. If you can, find a window to look through, or gaze at a plant, a splash of natural light on the wall, or even a lovely piece of cloth or place in the room that seems attractive, orderly or beautiful to you. If you are able to, take this doing “nothing” time outside.
Commit to doing nothing for at least 15 minutes on a regular basis. Since challenges will come up at first, with both time and attitude, plan to make this commitment to doing nothing as easy as possible. It can be tempting to want to “achieve” results, but this is part of the “producing” consciousness that’s caused this lack of quiet time to begin with. As you move out of the dominant consciousness of the surrounding culture, there will often be a kind of drag on you; you may feel a resistance to the shifts that you are seeking. Step through them and continue.
Whatever feels most doable is what will work. Once a week is better than once a day if you feel less stressed with this level of commitment. The platitude “less is more” is very useful when beginning to make space for moments of quiet and boredom. During this time, don’t meditate, don’t watch your breath, don’t do yoga; as much as you can, allow yourself to make nothing happen. Achieve absolutely nothing. This is a time for complete cessation of all accomplishment, activity, achievement and productivity.
EXERCISE: Cultivating Ecological Consciousness
Purpose
Cultivating ecological consciousness begins with slowing down the pace of our lives, our minds and our bodies. We are programmed by the cultural beliefs and expectations of even our most intimate communities to exist in a state of producing to fit into the mores of current economic and social conventions. And yet we must move through the fears that arise when we step into other states of being if we are to find our way home to the genetic sensitivities that bring an authentic feel and experience of our ecology. Our natural context in the web of life is a real and touchable world. It can be hard to see how slowing down can encourage transformative changes of perception and, further, how these shifts in perception can bring humans and the planetary systems back into balance. The resistance that often arises can make slowing down even more complex and challenging. Also, many of us no longer know how to slow down, so we have to learn, with sometimes many antsy and anxiety-producing sessions leading up to the shifts that eventually occur. The natural world will support us through this process and the joy with which the Earth community responds to our return inspires more and more connection, joy, healing and, eventually, more attraction, to these moments of quiet reflection.
Description
There are many ways to practice ecological consciousness individually, within the activities and rituals already built into your life. Certainly, slowing down as described in the previous exercise is the first and best place to start. Also, if you already have a spiritual practice, you can find ways to build in your ecological consciousness practice within already established rituals. As a first step, if you take time to pray or meditate everyday, you can use part of this time to be thankful for the Earth systems that support your life, and the beings that share your immediate world. Ingraining deep feelings of gratitude for every natural phenomenon that you notice sets these everyday moments apart as sacred events, rather than the background of life that we often take for granted.
Once we are creating moments of quiet and reflection, and embodying the returning sensations that these moments provide, we are ready to re-tune in to nature through daily mindfulness practices. In the next chapter, I discuss different definitions of nature: human nature, nature as something “out there,” separate and pristine, and nature as an evolutionary principle. We will be following exercises that move us toward connecting with nature as we typically think of the word, by spending time in natural settings.