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

Raising Vibrations: A Full-Time Job
Spirit-Connecting: Working with Light and Vibrational Reality
Spirit-Connecting Practices

Keeping our vibrations attuned to love feels like a full-time job, yet it is essential in order to come to understand our creative capacity. We are creating our lives and the world in every moment. What I now understand, through my own practice and experience, is that any time we don’t maintain a loving, peaceful vibration — when we get caught up in the fears, anger and frustrations of our world — we are supporting thought forms that are damaging. I know deeply the pain and woundedness of the world through my own traumatic early life, through sensitivity to others’ pain through a sometimes crippling level of empathy that I’ve learned to manage and channel as a healer and teacher and through social justice and environmental activism and scholarship. I’m not saying not to see or feel these feelings, but to live deeply into them with love in order to transmute them. By embracing all of ourselves with love, we can call our spirits back from many things that pull us outside of ourselves. In this way, we can learn to embrace our full power as often as we can. When we send our “spirit,” our energy, into a situation, it pulls our spirit body away from our center and limits our creative capacities. So, we can acknowledge pain and have compassion, then pull back our spirit and embrace our power to transform these situations through working with light in vibrational reality.

For me personally, Joseph offers the vision of a river. My work with the spirits of rivers comes from many lifetimes ago when my entire meaning in my community was to relate to the river for my tribe. Joseph shows me to be the river when I encounter addictive thought forms. As the river, I touch these thought forms lightly and keep moving, glide past, let myself press the banks when I need to, to get through the tight places and white waters. The Earth will hold me as I create my path to Lake Erie, near my home, and eventually to the sea, the sky, into the web of Gaia, the consciousness of the biosphere.

Still, I get annoyed at my husband, crabby at my kids, sick and depressed, but now I know that I have to not suppress these experiences but hold them in light. I know from 25 years of therapy that suppressing my feelings will do no good. The work is to love completely my sadness, anger, illness, shortcomings and the people who hurt me, abandon me and let me down. This love and work with light allows me to call back my spirit and let the Earth and the light beings all around us transmute that energy through the fire of light back into my source of power emanating from my heart. From the Buddhist perspective we might understand this as a softness and compassion toward all things rough in the world, but also there is a vibrational level of reality through which we can actually transmute these energies into something else. My lifetime trauma with my mother is now transmuted into a new energy and power to heal through the great feminine energies of the planet, and to begin to understand and incorporate the healthy masculine energies as well. To be on the planet in a new way is a new choice every day. I am often tempted into old patterns and stories. The work of the rest of my life is to inhabit this vibrational wisdom, a great gift from enlightened beings, for which I am grateful beyond all else.

Karmic Eddies

One day, as often happens while I am meditating, a new awareness came to me. I received an image that has helped me to better support my goal of raising my vibrations and bringing light to the world for healing. I did not come up with this idea: it is a gift. This gift helps me unwind many of the discordant, unbalanced, trauma-induced matrices of my body, heart and mind. The idea is an image of karmic eddies.

As I often do in gifts from the spirit wisdom moments, I received this image while gazing at a river. I am intimately connected with the intelligence of River. For this reason, I was especially open to and inspired by this new way of seeing River as a guide. In the karmic eddy image, I see my life as a river of light flowing through a quiet wood. Along the sides of the river are eddies where my energy flows, swirls and sometimes stops, circling around and around on issues that are mine to work through and resolve in this life. Some I brought with me, and some are pains and puzzles I carry to grow my soul on this particular journey to Earth. Though the work of a certain eddy might be done, I still find myself spinning around and around in these offshoots of the river of myself. Karmic eddies can pull me from my work of fulfilling my spiritual mission with my full and present self. The gift of this image is to help me find ways to work through and release these issues in my life. In the next chapter, I will describe specific practices that I have discovered through meditation to relieve some of the hold of these spinning pools. I don’t force myself out of them, but seek awareness of them; they are often unconscious. As I work over time with my karmic eddies, I become increasingly aware of the ways in which they pull me away from my task of remaining mindful of my vibrational state.

Creating Mindfully in Vibrational Reality

The longer I explore the vibrational web of life, the more I see the overlapping weave of the vibrations that our personal and collective stories create. Sometimes, I can remain aware for most of a day of my role in these vibrational interactions. When I am stressed and unconsciously living from old patterns, I pray that my guides will nudge me to remind me to pivot toward conscious dreaming when most needed.

Another gift of wisdom that I know from continuing to work on my vibrational presence in the world is that we are either sending or receiving in vibrational reality. Early in my life, I had taken a class on psychic boundaries to help me manage my intense level of sensitivity to the “stuff” of other people, energetic fields and entities. I know methods to “protect” myself from incoming vibrations of energies that seek to attach to and pull from my life force. The new image and understanding of karmic eddies teaches me something more useful and important. This new understanding surpasses the idea of protection with a responsibility to acknowledge my co-creation of story-making in and with the web of life in every moment. I now know that I am part of actively dreaming into being the fabric of the world. While it is okay, and even good, to protect ourselves, I have discovered that in every moment I can influence the vibrations around me. My spirit helpers have taught me that when I am neutral or protecting myself, I am essentially giving up my power as a conscious dreamer and co-creator of the story of the Earth. Instead of deflecting vibrations with my hard-earned boundaries, I can actively transform them by holding them in light with my open and authentic heart-mind. I can change the world in every moment, which is breath-taking, awe-inspiring and also intimidating. To be healers of the world, we cannot hide; we are dreaming the dream of the Earth — the story of humans on and with the Earth — right now, yesterday, tomorrow, into the past and the future, always.

Committing to a Path of Awakened Dreaming

Working with vibrations requires consciously birthing our stories in every moment, as the network of energy within and behind our “normal” reality is a collection of interwoven stories of all beings everywhere. If you feel called to heal the world, and take part in bringing our species back into balance with the Earth, I strongly encourage you to ground to the Earth, speak to the Earth and open to the teachings and life-altering shifts that come through this potent practice. The sudden shifts in awareness and feelings that arise when changing our stories to shift our vibrations can be intense. Grounding and learning to watch our own mind by developing connection with our spirit selves as witnesses and guides of our Earth body selves helps support this process of change that shifts every aspect of our being. Simultaneously, our Earth body selves guide our spirit and call forth our reason for being on the planet at this time.

Often in Western culture we want to rush to new experiences, new spiritual realities, new levels of consciousness, without building the ground to make these activities safe and effective over time. To shift our inner and outer worlds is a profound commitment that requires personal transformation on the deepest levels. Because Western culture does not support development of these abilities throughout life, we must understand that we are children in this realm compared with many indigenous cultures that maintain these kinds of knowledge through their daily personal and community habits and rituals. Committing to building skill, strength, grounding and awareness is essential to doing the work that is healing for ourselves and the world.

After 20 years of Earth-connected spiritual practice, I am now just a beginner in my work in non-ordinary realities. I am deeply humbled by my experiences in vibrational and spiritual realities (these are not separate) and move with great respect and gratitude through this work, asking for direction, protection and support, and giving great thanks for these, on a regular basis. I know more than ever that this is a profound work, a Great Work, as Thomas Berry says, the work of lifetimes to change the course of humanity through desperate challenges.⁶³

Vibrational awareness and energy-shifting techniques are effective in changing your life and the world immediately. It can be astounding to experience the changes that can occur by merely shifting the direction and quality of our stories, beliefs and energetic engagement with the world. Take it slowly as you move through the vibrational awareness exercises in the coming chapters of this book. Remember to connect often with your body and the Earth to ground the expansions and sometimes rapid changes that inevitably come.

In the upcoming chapters, I share methods for raising vibrations, bringing healing light to all situations, big or small, working with karmic eddies and transforming situations through continual conscious creation of our stories. The next series of practices guides readers through the preparatory stages for working in energetic and vibrational, and eventually shamanic, experience. The next chapter gives clear guidelines for utilizing the Earth-connecting practices, from the previous section, to support the expansion into vibrational and spiritual work safely and effectively.