Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020
Nature Art Rituals in Sacred Places
Nature Art Rituals: Earth-Connecting through Creativity
Earth-Connecting Practices
You can support your connection with your special place, or with any place, by creating small nature structures. When building in nature, the act itself becomes a ritual of connection with the world around you. Touch, feel, smell, vision and embodied awareness of space become sacred movements celebrating life. Creating structures in nature also connects us with archetypal and instinctual memories of making our lives outside. Often, when building or creating in nature, deep feelings of connection, memory and “home” can emerge. These feelings can feel new and powerful for those who haven’t experienced them before. They can also feel extremely normal in the moment, only showing their transformative power when we return to our “normal” world and realize that we are sensing and experiencing differently.
Art works in nature can be big or small. As the creation and building emerges, be sensitive to the natural habitats and other visitors of the area. It is important that the impact is respectful, and even reversible if that is necessary.
EXERCISE: Simple Sacred Nature Art
Purpose
Collecting nature beings for any kind of nature art is soothing and satisfying to the soul. Doing so with the intention of making each movement sacred expands the process into a spiritual practice. Creating with a small collection from nature can be very pleasing to the senses and bring you “down to Earth” for some time among the small world at dirt level that keeps our ecosystems functioning. Collecting rocks, leaves or sticks that seem to you to share a pattern or a symmetry and arranging them in any way that is pleasing to your aesthetic sensibilities enhances your connection with your special place or any place, and with yourself.
Description
Creating nature art in your own sacred nature place, inside or out, expands atrophied natural senses. Touching, smelling, arranging and otherwise relating to patterns and rhythms in nature, we find our own natural rhythms as they are intertwined with life. If you can’t get to your special place, you can do this activity any time and anywhere to help you slow down and realign with life. These activities do not require any artistic abilities. Often, simple, quick and easy shapes are the best place to start. Just making circles and circles within circles is healing and enriches our participation with our ecological community.
Creating very simple shapes can bring unexpected balance, healing and clarity. This happens because it taps into parts of our mind/body/spirit that are often neglected. Collect any natural objects/beings that are pleasing to you. Place them into piles, sculptures, circles or spirals. This is one of the kinds of activities, mentioned earlier in the book, that seem too simple to achieve much, but because we are fostering something unrelated to achieving we find our way to completely different kinds of results. As you work, remain conscious of respecting the growth and homes of living things.
If you are creating nature art in a sacred space in your home, go on a foraging expedition for nature beings to bring inside, or create simple nature art with collections that you already have. Making circles and mandalas, or other arrangements, with your set of sacred stones is a quick and easy daily practice to remain grounded to the Earth and maintain contact with the stone beings in your care.
EXERCISE: Working with Ancient Symbols
Purpose
Nature art rituals often begin with ancient symbols that reflect humans’ understanding of and relationship with the world and the cosmos. Stacks, circles, spirals and mandalas are highly effective symbols for healing and integration, and have been throughout known human history. They are symbolic “messages from the gods,” reminding us that we are in the cosmos and the cosmos is in us. They capture the essence of our place in community with all of life.
Stacks: stacking leaves, or sticks, brings simple joy and develops many aspects of community relationship with the Earth and, if done in a group, with others. Working with pebbles, stones, pine cones, leaves, of either all the same or different colors and shapes sensitizes us to rhythms, consistencies and natural patterns and cycles of growth and decay. You can also build in a creek, with care to not overly disturb the creek bed. Stacking in water, building small dams and waterfalls, watching what you create change in relation to Earth, air or water opens channels to ancient archetypes of the human psyche.
Circles: Circles can add an element of order and aesthetic meaning to nature art projects. Tiny circles, many tiny circles within circles, overlapping circles or larger circles big enough for a person or a group to get inside creates an energy center that can be used as the end in itself, or a “container” for ritual and shamanic work. Circles are an ancient representation of the self and deepen the reflective experience of building in nature. There is no need to try to understand the meaning of building a circle in nature. Immerse yourself in the experience of creating and allow your mind to wander freely. Often, unexpected insights and integrations will occur during or after this process as creativity and nature come together.
Spirals: Spirals are another symbol to work with in nature (think labyrinths). Building spirals adds an element of complexity that can turn collecting and building projects into symbolic experiences. Each spiral is an energetic imprint and has its own relationship with the landscape. Each spiral tells a story, and often strong feelings come up during the process of creating them.
Spirals can be any size, large or small. Spirals can be arranged using leaves, sticks, pine cones, pebbles, rocks or dirt, or can be drawn into soft sand and dirt, or stepped out in the snow. Begin your spiral from the inside and work out, creating the spiral with your hands, feet or sticks used as tools. To deepen the experience, create a spiral large enough to walk into and out of. Large spirals can be walked on, like labyrinths, in a meditative fashion.
Mandalas: to make an even more complex image, use either similar or different objects and create a mandala. Mandalas have profound symbolic and spiritual significance, and can support our evolving awareness and sensations in relation to nature. To create a mandala, start with a circle of some kind, made from any natural objects/beings that you have collected. To deepen the connection of the mandala with natural cycles, orient the four “corners” of the mandala in what we call the cardinal directions (north, south, east and west). Put something that you have collected directly in the center and create four quadrants, evenly spaced around the circle. We will talk in more detail about creating meditation mandalas in Chapter Fifteen when discussing medicine wheels.
While building your mandalas, be prepared for intense feelings, of joy, sadness, excitement, grief. Mandalas can be unexpectedly transparent windows into the emotional and psychological inner world. If sadness or other “uncomfortable” feelings emerge, allow them to be in the circle. There is no need to fix or resolve them.
Making mandalas can be a form of self-directed art therapy and may bring up aspects and feelings of the self that have been previously hidden or unknown. You can draw and write your feelings down and let them move through you until they shift. If they feel overwhelming to the point that it feels difficult to function, or if trauma memories emerge, I recommend seeking professional help from a licensed psychotherapist.
EXERCISE: Spiral Meditation
Purpose
Creating large works of art in nature allows interaction with our bodies within the structure of the art works. One of my ongoing practices is to create large spirals that can be used for personal or group walking meditations. I create spirals with leaves, rocks, sticks and pine cones, or by making tracks in the dirt or snow. Making the spiral is healing when alone and builds community in a spontaneous tribal way when done in a group. When working with others, you can build one spiral together and take turns walking that spiral as a meditation while standing to witness the process for each other, or each build your own spirals near one another.
Creating walking meditation spirals in this way is a simplified form of labyrinth work. Through creating and walking the spirals in nature, we become embodied and embedded in an ancient symbol of the path of spiritual awakening in human form. Moving to the center of the spiral is a way of returning to our spiritual center, to the center of life and the cosmos. It embodies the truth that there is a map to help us through the challenges of our lifetimes on Earth, and the guidance of how to walk this path is often given in symbols.
Description
Locate a place in a natural area where you feel safe and connected. You can use practices from the previous two chapters to locate and build a connection with a special place. Once settled and comfortable, identify something to create a spiral with. You can create spirals with large rocks, small rocks, sticks, leaves, pine cones, in the dirt or in the snow. In snow, I use my boots to stamp down the snow, starting in the center and moving out. Alternatively, you can begin in the center, using your hands to arrange the nature beings, or to move leaves or dirt into the shape of a spiral. I usually aim to make the spiral at least as big across as I am tall, with a pathway wide enough to walk into and out of the spiral.
Once the spiral is built, enter the path from the outside. With your first step into the spiral, acknowledge that you are entering sacred space and set an intention for this walk to be for the healing of your life and the world. Then, beginning on the outside, walk slowly toward the center, taking one step for each breath. In the middle you can take some time to set intentions, ask questions, make prayers of thanks, make blessings or just feel the Earth beneath your feet. When you are ready, go back to the outside just as you came, slowly and in line with your breath. Say a prayer or blessing of gratitude as you exit to honor this experience and the spiral as sacred.
EXERCISE: Nature Collage
Purpose
Sometimes the best way is the simplest way, especially when our hearts and minds feel overwhelmed by complexity. Making a nature collage is a very simple way to slow down and reconnect with ourselves and nature. Creating nature collages is ideal if you do not have access to a natural area large enough for a nature art ritual. You can do this exercise either using items collected from nature or by cutting out pictures of nature. Like any nature art, collages begin with collecting, a ritual of joy and reverence in itself. Seeing a reflection of aspects of ourselves within the image that we are creating, we become more aesthetically sensitive and creatively ordered, put together in a new way.
Making art collages can be joyful and fun, bringing up memories of being a child. Making art is a gift we all have for shifting into our feeling perceptual selves, and our “childlike” senses, which are actually our atrophied natural senses. We are born with them, but many of us forget them over time. These senses are essential for developing ecological consciousness, so returning to the childhood pleasures of simple nature art takes on new relevance as we move through the Earth Spirit Dreaming process.
Description
Your supplies for the collage can be as simple as leaves and grass, small rocks and sticks, and some basic art materials such as paper and glue. Before making your collage, spend some time watching for beings in nature that stand out to you. Allow yourself to intuit the right time, place and materials to use for your project. Watch for natural correspondences or patterns that are attracting you. Try not to second-guess a “feeling” about your nature art ritual, even if your feelings seem foolish to you, or too simple to be meaningful.
Once your collage is complete you can meditate with it, watching with a soft gaze for correlations, relationships, colors and shapes while opening your heart to any messages or feelings that emerge for you.
EXERCISE: Plants and Nature Art
Purpose
An added element that can enhance nature art structures is to plant plants with or in them. There are as many ways to do this as there are situations and groups interested in doing it. You can create any kind of nature art in a variety of sizes. Over time, especially if the materials have been put together loosely, or are easily scattered by rain and wind, you can observe how the plants grow as the built structure moves, changes and even rots. Maybe little animals or bugs start munching on or living in the structure, while the plants continue to grow and thrive. This juxtaposition of life and decay, growth, rootedness, movement and change represents a coming together and interrelation of nature cycles.
Description
Any nature art work can be joined together with plants that are already growing, or that you want to plant as a part of your project. You can create temporary or more permanent nature art with plants in pots or in and around a garden.
Another approach is to create a nature art ritual structure that is more permanent, such as a spiral or a mandala garden for vegetables, herbs or flowers. I will give a personal example.
This spring, I am in the process of building a healing mandala garden. The mandala is built in relation to the four directions, with medium stones anchoring the mandala at north, south, east and west. Smaller stones anchor the intermediary directions: northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast. The middle of the mandala is another, smaller circle of stones. The intention for the mandala is to support a personal healing journey of my own, as well as to offer healing for others who visit or add rocks to the garden, and to support healing for the world. Another purpose for the garden is for my children to have a nature art ritual and a garden that they can be a part of creating and caring for. The outer ring of the garden is planted with greens, some small vegetables and herbs, while the center circle of the garden is planted with bulbs that will bloom at different seasons.
I invite my children, neighbors and visitors to add a rock to the center circle, making a wish, setting an intention, or making a prayer. Recently, my children and I began painting little rocks in many different colors and adding them to the garden. What a fun and creative way to continue to relate and grow with the garden! The rock rings change in feel and form as the seeds sprout. The art and the energy transform as the plants grow. It is a living entity.
We balance on the small paths to place the rocks, finding a new sense of our own balance with life. This relationship to balance is an unintentional learning and healing of the mandala, as we are all on tippy-toes trying not to step on the tiny, new plants. When anyone steps toward the center of the garden, they appear to be dancing as they maneuver along the little walking paths. Not surprisingly, this balancing dance with the garden comes more fluidly and easily for the children than it does for me. I watch children move in the garden to learn their ways of walking to the center of the mandala and out again. It is their own labyrinth of learning and growth and it is for me as well.
From earth-connecting, we move next into the spirit-connecting portion of the Earth Spirit Dreaming method. Once we develop the means to increase our ecological consciousness by slowing down and connecting with nature, we create the ground, literally and figuratively, to begin working with vibrational reality. Our newly developed Earth senses support the focus needed to increase our vibrational and spiritual awareness and begin to use them for personal and planetary healing. The next chapter will help readers understand why and how we segue from earth-connecting to spirit-connecting practices at this stage of Earth Spirit Dreaming. As a natural growth from one to another, vibrational awareness evolves from and constitutes part of our perceptual natural senses.