Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020
Returning to the Land: Connecting with the Rhythms and Cycles of Nature
Earth-Connecting Practices
Finding a sense of place with the land restores a connection that is often lost or overshadowed. Finding a place, and returning to it again and again, unlocks our natural attunement to the cycles and rhythms of nature. Returning to a place that we develop a relationship with over time helps us to “re-Earth,” to develop the very important human experience of a sense of place. Many of us living in techno-industrial cultures are wandering alone, devoid of a connection with the land. It is through the deeply inherited human sense of place that we realize that we are always connected, that we are never alone.
As we grow into relationship with a sacred place in nature, we can watch with eager excitement for the first buds of spring, the slanting morning sun of summer glistening on the dew, feel the first snowflakes of winter melt on our skin, allow the stunning colors of fall to pierce our hearts with their breathtaking intensity, lie among the earthy smell and texture of a pile of leaves. As with human friends and family, we come to know natural places over time with intricacy and love, questions and concerns, sometimes fear and frustration, and often with joy and the fulfillment found in the intimacy of the connection. Never perfect, always necessary, knowing and loving our place on Earth firmly informs our identity, often whether we know it or not.
Psychotherapist William Cahalan, in his article “Ecological Groundedness in Gestalt Therapy,” offers a useful framework for understanding the enfolding of our self in relationship with the land.54 The author focuses his discussion on groundedness, which he defines as “a dynamic state of the person that includes the sense of confidence, pleasure, and wonder resulting from progressively deepening contact with the wild and domesticated natural community of the person’s neighborhood and larger land region...” He continues:
Being grounded is enhanced and renewed by periods of extended, sensuous, empathic engagement with the world, balanced by restorative moments of inward reflectiveness. This rhythm involves an intuitive cycling between the individual’s more contracted, contained sense of self, on the one hand, and a more expanded, relational, or extended sense of self on the other, including the ability to lose oneself at times in union with the world. When we experience this self-extended state, the Earth tends to be sensed as the all-embracing, enduring Self of which the individual is one unique but temporary expression.55
To be grounded, then, is not just an analogy for a feeling within ourselves. It is both a state of feeling in balance metaphorically, and a reality of really and truly being on the ground. Knowing the actual ground upon which we wake, sleep, wonder and walk through our lives each day is the basis for true “groundedness.” The “ground,” the phenomenological framework of our experience, is rooted in the ground — real, dirty, loamy, sandy, rocky, barren, fecund — beneath our feet. In this way, we move from concept to connection with our sense of place; our lives take on new balance as we literally return our focus to the feeling of the dirt beneath our feet, again, and again, and again.
EXERCISE: Find and Return to a Special Natural Place
Purpose
Making a ritual of returning to the same place helps us tune in to our natural sensitivity to change, cycles, patterns, the space and timing and the rhythms of nature. Nurturing a relationship with a special place opens atrophied channels of relatedness with all of life. Over time, we can come to truly and deeply love many places in nature. This practice draws more awareness to the ways in which we naturally come to love nature; our garden, the beach we visit again and again, special mountains, a green space in our town. Most of us already feel a connection with special places in nature. What is needed is to be more conscious of the profound importance of honoring and nurturing our relationship with these places.
Description
There are many ways to create a relationship with a special natural place. You can go to a nature area near your home, in the woods, in a park, or even in your backyard. Using your intuitive embodiment (gained through the quieting and grounding exercises from Chapter Six), ask yourself and the place if this is a good match for a long-term relationship. If you feel unsafe, or feel any kind of “bad energy” in the place, it is not a good place to relate to over time. These kinds of feelings can come from negative things that have happened in a place, or animals or other natural beings that aren’t open to human contact. Feel in your body, place your feet directly on the ground, lightly touch your “gut,” to tune in to your body knowledge. Take the time to find a place that feels good, open, energizing and special. In his book Reconnecting With Nature, Michael J. Cohen suggests the following approach when choosing a special place:
Ask it if it will help you learn from it. It will not give consent if you are going to injure, destroy or defame it, or it you. Wait for about half a minute. Look for adverse signals of danger such as thorns, bees, cliff faces, etc. If the area still feels attractive, or becomes more attractive, you have gained its consent. If this portion of the natural area you visit no longer feels attractive, simply select another natural part that attracts you and repeat this process. Do this until you find an area where a safe attraction remains.56
If you don’t have a place to go or can’t get to a place that feels natural and safe, you can create a place indoors or on a porch. When creating a place indoors, go through the same procedure of using your intuition to direct you to a location in your home that feels attractive. It’s important to create this space in a low-traffic area: this can be a room, a corner, a tabletop, or even a shelf. When you are outside, feel with your embodied intuition for an attraction to certain beings in nature to bring into your home or office to create your special nature place. Rock, leaves, sticks, pine cones all work well for this task. You can also create a small “nature area” in an indoor pot, or a terrarium. When creating your pot or terrarium allow a sense of sacred creativity to permeate finding the container(s), plants and dirt for your sacred indoor nature space. Collect small rocks, create a small pond with a bowl embedded in the dirt. Make a fairy wood. You can also plant a pot, or a few pots, with seeds and watch them grow over time as your sacred relational nature practice.
Gardens are a natural way to cultivate connection with your land, and create built-in rituals for returning again and again to the same place within the cycles of the seasons. Gardens are one of the most well-known and acceptable ways in Western culture to cultivate ecological consciousness. Growing and tending to gardens of any size, inside or out, deepens connection with the life-world. Eating the plants that we tend with love emphasizes the depth of interrelatedness with the web of life. Gardens give us an opportunity to connect with Earth in an embodied way through daily gardening tasks. When gardening, we use all of our senses; not only the five that we tend to think of, but other Earth sensitivities that help us relate to and cherish our plants.
Once you have chosen or created a place, continue to connect with the place with a sense of commitment and ritual. This can happen in many ways, over weeks, months, or even years. You may already have this kind of habit built into your life as you walk to work, walk your dog, go out to run, visit places for vacations. In this case, it is easy to turn a habit into a sacred ritual by intentionally connecting with this place in reverent and sacred ways as you go about your daily routine of living with or visiting this place.
If visiting your natural place is not easy to do within the flow of your life, try not to pressure yourself to return. Go when you can, or for short periods of time. As discussed in earlier chapters, connecting with nature can be as easy and quick as touching and speaking briefly with the same tree every time you walk by. When we are very busy, connecting with nature can be an easy, supportive, relaxing, peaceful activity.
If your special place is not close enough to visit on a frequent basis, try to visit it in each season, noticing the changes in yourself and the land. In between, you can rely on the friendships that you develop with nature beings that you encounter each day. Because connecting with land helps us become more cyclical, we can support this connection by making our visits cyclical in some way. While creating an intention to visit regularly is helpful, don’t let it become stressful. This is a “soft” practice. Feeling nature requires a softening of our bodies and minds; not a forced push into something, but a receptive exchange. This is about just being, so if it’s too stressful, wait for another time.
EXERCISE: Connecting with Nature Beings in Your Sacred Place
Purpose
This meditation supports tuning in to aspects of beings in nature that may not be immediately perceivable. We “tune in to” these “invisible” aspects of natural beings by gazing with soft focus, or feeling with soft emotional states. We are watching for life force and learning the energetic imprint of nature beings through coming to feel the teleology of their unfolding on individual and species levels. This meditation is adapted from one offered by Rudolf Steiner, in his book How to Know Higher Worlds.57
Description
Begin by choosing a nature being to relate to during this meditation (Steiner’s meditation suggests using a seed). I have found this method to be effective throughout nature (it even works with people, but for now we will choose something that we think of as nature: stick, leaf, stone, river, tree, cloud, moon). Always ask the being if it is willing to relate with you in this way and wait for a feeling or a sense that it is open to this interaction. Give thanks for the exchange and invite the being to reveal itself to you. Relate to the being with all of your senses.
To begin, if you are a seeing person, watch them with a soft gaze over an extended period of time. Another option is to feel into the being from your heart, intentionally opening to it with love. Once you have established a connection, allow yourself to imagine the natural forces contained in it. Set the intention and imagine that you are sensing the animating life force. Think about the forces that created this being, and what impact it has on the world around it. What internal life forces will form it into something else? How does this being receive the world and how does it press into or bump up against the world? Stare at, or feel into the being until your perceptions begin to shift and you notice something in the being that you have not noticed before; a form, a shape and impression, or a pattern of difference in depth. Sometimes you may see light interacting differently with the being. You may begin to notice connections of energy between this being and other beings around it. Stay engaged with the being until you perceive something new in it that you have not yet perceived. Invite the being to reveal its nature to you. Practice this meditation again and again and you can have surprising and magical relationships, and share stories, between yourself and beings in nature.
EXERCISE: The Ecophenomenology of Rocks
Purpose
Ecophenomenology invites sensual interaction in the moment with the world around us. This ecophenomenology of rocks exercise engages the mind and body to question our assumptions and perceive nature and the world with a fresh perspective. Participants are invited to connect with beings in nature by observing their patterns and rhythms in space and time.
Phenomenology offers a unique perspective that supports ecological consciousness. It provides a conceptual framework that encourages us to abandon our classification of the world as “objects.” Releasing the abstractions that we use to filter our experiences allows us to open to a more embodied attentiveness to the world.
Description
When working as a facilitator, or in my own spiritual practice, I usually choose rocks for this practice. They bring millennia of patterns, rhythms and relationships to space and time into any location or room. Working with them offers a depth of opportunity to expand our notions of natural rhythms that few other beings offer.
Begin by holding the rock. When I facilitate this experience, I use a basket of rocks to begin the experience, inviting each participant to tune in to their bodies and intuition, ground to the Earth and choose one. For personal practice, you can create a collection of your own to work with (see “Creating a Set of Sacred Stones,” from Chapter Six).
When seeking a phenomenological encounter with a rock (or any being in nature), we begin by clearing our minds of preconceived notions. After “connecting” with the rock for about five minutes, by relating to texture, color, temperature, taste and smell, think of words that you would not usually use to describe a rock. In a group, I ask participants to share these words.
Often, when first seeing a rock we may go to the reductionist concepts and explanations we have come to rely on to categorize phenomena. We tend to think “rock,” and move on. If we have geological knowledge, we may classify or name the rock. The Western use of language tends to take the mind automatically to stored conceptual abstractions. Taking an ecophenomenological approach, we begin by releasing these preconceived ideas. Of course, they will all arise. Notice these ideas, then take a breath and look at and feel your rock again.
Relate to the rock. Meditate on the rock. Notice images that you see in the cracks, crevices, and textures of the rock. Consider its time. Where has it come from? Where has it been? Imagine its history and evolution up to this point. Speculate on its age. Do you notice patterns in the rock? How are the patterns of the rock similar or different to the patterns of other beings of nature living nearby? How might these patterns interact? What are the natural rhythms of the rock? How are these rhythms similar or different to other beings living nearby? Are the patterns and rhythms supportive between the rock and its nearby neighbors? Do you notice any possible breakdown in the patterns, movement, time, history or story of the rock?58
Close this experience by journaling, drawing or sharing your experiences in a group. Try not to rush to analysis of your experience, but to let it linger in states of sensing. As a facilitator, a good way to open a discussion is to ask the question, “What did you notice?”