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

Cultivating Ecomindfulness: Increasing Our Conscious Connection with Nature
Earth-Connecting Practices

Awakening natural senses, a seed of ecological consciousness, is best done, in the beginning, by becoming mindful of the natural world. Once we are awakened to nature in general, it becomes easier to maintain ecological consciousness without being in a “nature” setting such as the woods, a park or a yard. A reward of mindfulness in nature is often a deeper appreciation for our own natures, and the revelatory discovery that we are nature. We begin to see ourselves mirrored in nature, and nature mirrored in us. Reconnecting with the patterns and rhythms in nature helps illuminate our own recurring patterns.

No matter how or where we live, we are alive and functioning because we are always connected within our natural settings. After slowing down, we come to the practice of ecomindfulness: Intentionally and consistently tuning in to the natural world around us through daily mindfulness practices wherever we are. Mindfulness practices increase our state of being conscious, or aware of something. When we are developing ecomindfulness, we are using practices that help us become more aware of our connection with nature, and more specifically of our dependence on and connection with our ecology.

Nature in an ecological context requires broadening the most commonly held understanding of “nature,” such as parks, woods, mountains and wilderness. Ecologically, the term “nature” encapsulates human nature, in the sense that we cannot exist or be understood outside of our role in our ecological context. “Nature” also stands for the entirety of the biosphere and our embedded relationship with this network of interwoven systems. With this complexity in mind, our work to reconnect with the life-world begins simply: by remembering to regularly notice the natural world.

When we cultivate mindfulness of the life-world, and our place in it, we shift from focusing on the world as objects to focusing on relationships and interconnection between beings and things. We come to hold as a daily aliveness — through study, contemplation and practice — our relationship with one another and with all of life on Earth. As we engage in this transformation of our self-perception, the felt experience of separateness begins to fall away. As we come to feel the depth of our intimate connection with all of life, our experiences and our actions begin to radically change.

As we begin to focus on relationships, we can awaken sensitivities that too often lie dormant. In his book The Participatory Mind, Henryk Skolimowski calls these sensitivities “participatory.” As discussed in detail in Chapter Three, a participatory worldview assumes that the underlying fabric of reality is relationships.⁴³

To perceive these relationships we begin to develop senses beyond the “five” that we in Western culture are used to thinking of and using.⁴⁴ Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen suggests that we have 54 natural senses. In his book Reconnecting With Nature he says:⁴⁵

Often we are habitually conscious of the world through the following three senses:

1. Sight

2. Language

3. Reason

Our highly trained and educated three-sense perceptions often overpower our other awareness abilities. This leaves our consciousness and thinking devoid of our many other non-language, sensory ways of knowing and being.

For this reason, it makes sense to produce some nature-connected moment in which we may thoughtfully discover and experience, first hand, many other natural ways of knowing that we inherit from nature.⁴⁶

The practice of ecomindfulness helps us notice our embeddedness in the life-world: The web of life systems that intersects with every aspect of our lives in any given moment.⁴⁷ Opening up to this reality transforms our sense of ourselves and helps us experience the individual self as a conceptual construction. As we deepen this practice through meditation in nature, this connection with something larger than ourselves opens a doorway to experience that we might think of as spiritual as our continuous encounter with the miracle of life brings us face to face with the mysteries of the cosmos.