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

Portals to Guides in Vibrational Reality
Spirit-Connecting: Working with Light and Vibrational Reality
Spirit-Connecting Practices

From sitting in circles of rocks over months and years, with intention, song, creativity, movement and prayer, I now know these circles as portals of shifted space that allow communication with other-than-human beings. The first time that I felt this kind of portal, I knew in a softly bubbling flash that rocks hold the original dream of the Earth; they hold space for us to find our way back to the intention of life: to love, relate, create, fall away, become. As this awakening continues to unfold for me, my profound love of nature all around me shifts the air and the air shifts me. Sacred circles, as I now experience them, are a field, a portal and gateway, a channel, a river, of shifted vibrations that alter my perceptions of time and space, and everything about reality that goes with those structures. These shifts in frequency — a limited word that doesn’t capture the reality of portals very well — develop over months and years of fostering sacred relationship with specific places. As these vibrational portals grow and develop in relationship with us, they open channels to speak with beings of light that support us in our lives and work as humans. They become contact points, expanded and catalyzed by being a place to invite contact with spirit helpers, nature spirits, benevolent ancestors and the body memories of the Earth.

I know this to be true as others feel the difference when they enter the field of these circles, the shimmering at the edges of perception and the waves of difference in what we feel and know in these sacred Earth-based spirit-doused spaces. Entering a cultivated sacred circle feels like entering a “room,” or crossing a threshold into another perceptual field. In this way, I learned what people mean when they say “medicine” wheel; the medicine is the magic that happens when we love life in a sacred way with ancient symbols of wholeness and connection. I found this through decades of working with mandalas, another form of sacred circle and representation of our relationship with the cosmos. Medicine wheels, prayer circles, labyrinths, henges and other forms of sacred circles are cosmic symbols seemingly so simple, they are medicine for humans on a genetic and soul level; these are magic gateways to feeling, knowing and dreaming new dreams; these are maps bearing messages from the Divine on how to navigate the challenges of life on Earth.

Recently, in my teaching as a shamanic ecotherapy practitioner, a planetary guide, named Joseph, has been joining me often to teach, to speak through me and to guide my class.⁶¹ Though I have interacted with spirit helpers and planetary guides in shamanic journeys, this is the first time that I am hearing and feeling one so palpably in a room with me while in a “normal,” not trance or just a very light trance, state. And all of my students, some able to sense “energy” and some not, immediately feel him, too. People who have never had shamanic experiences feel Joseph enter the circle. When he enters the room, the quality of his vibration as a being is on such a strongly different frequency that we all feel it. I move around the room working with my students’ energy bodies to help them balance their own personal vibrational imprint with Joseph’s so that they can remain relatively comfortable and join in in the best way for them. Connecting with Joseph is always a personal choice, and I ask everyone’s permission for him to join us. Joseph joins us with respect, a sense of humor, a palpable personality, a commitment to be a part of our circle as a participant. He also comes with a pressure to share his message, which he describes as the transmission of his soul group for the planet and our species.

Joseph says things that none of us can possibly know or imagine from the limits of our human experience. I didn’t expect this to happen when I taught Earth Spirit Dreaming for the first time in an immersive context. I always set an intention that my spirit helpers come to help me teach and hold space in alignment for the healing of the world. I sing and play a personal spirit song on a clay flute inviting light beings to come down with wisdom. Apparently, Joseph heard me and took up the invitation. Once again, the results of my intentions to connect with the Earth and spirit realms took me to places far beyond reason and my own expectations. Joseph showing up was never in my mind as a possibility. When it happened I did not want to go there for about two minutes. Then I told my students about Joseph’s presence, outed myself as feeling “so weird”⁶² to be sharing this completely unexpected experience in this moment and went on with the class.

With a sense of humor, Joseph enters as a “co-teacher” with respect and admiration for the work that we have done to allow him to directly communicate with us. Joseph is funny, intense, powerful, sexy and friendly. Now, Joseph sits with me to help me find the words, often his words, so that I might help my students understand the essential nature of working with light. How this work is so quick, simple and soft compared to functioning or creating in physical reality; how this work is instant, outside of time and space; how the healing light work that we do now can extend behind and before us in time and throughout history to alter things in the present for the world. When I move from visioning through vibrational work to shamanic reality, Joseph moves gently aside to allow other guides to work with me and through me. Supporting humans in shamanic journeying is not his area or his spiritual mission. He respects the other guides and steps aside.

As Joseph works with us, we all move gradually into increasingly intense trance states. My students say that they feel different, and I tell them that we are moving into altered states of perception. It is gradual, and they know that they feel different but they aren’t sure how or why. For people who have never experienced this kind of thing, most feel surprisingly comfortable and safe. Joseph is an excellent teacher, able to work with the group and meet all of us where we are. What I don’t tell my students is that while Joseph is there, we sometimes experience time slips. He gives me things to do in the last half an hour of class to finish our work and bring everyone back into “this world.” I know that we don’t have time to do these things. After 30 minutes of work, I look at my timekeeper and see that four minutes have passed in our world. We had entered Joseph’s world, where time is fluid.

So, what began as a meditation practice of watching nature and listening to the Earth is now a daily awakening to a level of wildness and magic that surprises me and pushes me beyond my expectations, and out of my mind, more and more each day. This is possible because, together with many others, I am creating a new culture and a new story; we are re-indigenizing. It is through love of place, through caring for our ancestors, through speaking with the Earth, through storytelling within initiated communities of awake adults, that these things happen. This is the result of work with vibrational reality; our bodies shift through working with light so that we can hear voices that we never imagined existed.