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

Karmic Eddies: Personal Vibrational Healing
Spirit-Connecting Practices

My spirit guides gifted me the concept of karmic eddies, a powerful metaphor for actively working with light in vibrational reality. My guides taught me that karmic eddies are certain places that I go to with my body-mind energy. An eddy in a river or stream is caused by rocks, or other formations, that hold water — swirly, still, sometimes fetid — in place instead of moving with the flow. My karmic eddies hold my life force. Sometimes these flows are integrated with my soul path, and sometimes they are blocking my spirit from moving forward. Certain eddies pull my energy from the more essential work of presence to the world in each moment and awareness of the stories that I create in each moment.

Some of my karmic eddies are older than others, but all of them keep parts of me in certain habitual places, some supportive, some limiting and hurtful to the “flow” of my life and spiritual growth. Many karmic eddies are made by our own choices, whether these are conscious or not. Some are programmed into our experience by higher beings to support our learning. All require attention and awareness to call our spirits back to us when needed to connect fully with the Earth, work in vibrational reality and vision through awake dreaming.

Karmic eddies are places of important learning. We move our life force into holding patterns along the stream of our river of life to attend to hurts, complexities, sacred missions and growth opportunities. Often, karmic eddies are unfinished business that we brought with us into this life, or things that happened to us that are out of our control. Sometimes they are memories that we bring from past lives, or that help us gain skills and grit for the tasks of a future life. Karmic eddies may bring us to places in time or out of time.

Often, even after completing the purpose of a karmic eddy, we return to them again and again, through memories, reflections, resentments, fears or repetitions of patterns and stories that form our identity. While karmic eddies have an important place in our development as souls, it is also important to learn to complete them and call the energy of these eddies back into the river of our lives.

EXERCISE: Karmic Eddy Mandala Drawing

Purpose

Many of our karmic eddies are out of our awareness, or such a usual part of our consciousness that we don’t notice them. Drawing a mandala of the eddies in our lives can help us develop awareness of the places that pull our spirit. We use the ancient symbol of a circle to place our karmic eddies in a symbol that consciously or unconsciously brings attention to our place in the larger community of life and the cosmos. We use a circle to feel the balance or imbalance that karmic eddies bring to our lives.

Description

Begin by gathering art supplies to create a drawing. You will need paper and a pencil, pen, crayons, colored pencils, markers or paint. Keep it simple. This exercise is about increasing your self-awareness, so try to release any fears or pressure to make “art.” Using simple materials may help you release expectations and return to a “child’s mind” about your karmic eddy mandala.

To support this simplicity, I use children’s Crayola markers or crayons and any piece of plain paper. You can also do this exercise on a page in your journal of on a piece of scrap paper. The karmic eddy mandala drawing is something to do again and again, as the currents of our lives are constantly shifting and changing. Remaining aware of our stories and patterns requires reassessing on a regular basis.

The task of creating a karmic eddy mandala is simple, while the realizations and feelings that emerge are often surprising and intense. Begin by drawing a circle on a piece of paper of any size. Draw symbols, images, words, or even scribbles and different colors that represent the karmic eddies in your life right now. When I do this exercise, I often use a spiral to represent each karmic eddy in my life. As I draw, the spirals might blend together or birth new spirals and offshoots. Your karmic eddies can be anywhere on the page in relation to the circle. Listen to your body and intuition as you choose situations to represent on the mandala. This is not a thinking exercise, but rather like free writing: let it flow. You can do it again and again, so there is no need to “get it right.”

Begin to draw images or symbols of things in your life that feel like they take up space or pull your attention again and again. These can be good things or bad things, or somewhere in between. As you draw your karmic eddies, you can include past hurts that you return to often, or attempt to keep from happening again, such as small and large annoyances with family members, friends and co-workers. You can draw important memories from your past that influence your present and perceptions of your future, major traumas and the best moments that you can remember. You can also draw habits of worry about performance, place, work, body image and money.

Many of my karmic eddies are shared, perpetuated by the consciousness of our Western industrial culture (some examples include: money worries, body shame, fear for the environment, political anger, many “isms” and concerns for humanitarian crises and wars around the world). You might draw life themes: things that you think about or have feelings about again and again.

Cultivate loving kindness toward yourself as you increase recognition of the eddies and paths in the river of your life. Each represents important and sacred work during your time on Earth. You can decide when that work is done, and you can retrieve your spirit from these swirls of energy in your life whenever you are ready. Many of our karmic eddies express patterns of our communities and cultures.

As I (gently) identify and remind myself to swim out of my karmic eddies for another perspective, I find myself more often experiencing the open flow of a beautiful, soulful life. Swimming more freely in the river of life, I find more space each day for joy, gratitude and magic. As we bring awareness to, feel into and unravel our karmic eddies, we also do this work for the world. As we change our stories we foster new dreams for the Earth.

EXERCISE: Karmic Eddy Clearing

Purpose

A karmic eddy clearing is an artistic and imaginal meditation for clearing emotional blocks. This practice can provide respite and relief from habitual body-mind patterns. Clearing these patterns can increase healing and connection in our lives, and open fresh paths for us in many ways.

Some karmic eddies are old and ready to be released, some are areas where we are still working. Some karmic eddies are sticky and seductive and require that we return to work with them on a regular basis. Creating harmony with and among our karmic eddies allows us to sink with the “flow” of soul expressed as an integrated river of life source energy. My mind-body habit swirls are familiar: many so familiar that I am barely aware of them. Each is a place in which I have done important growth work.

Description

When you feel that your drawing from the previous exercise is complete, find a comfortable position for gazing softly at your karmic eddy drawing. Invite intuitive guidance using the “Opening Your Heart” Meditation from Chapter Eleven. Set an intention that you will connect with your karmic eddy drawing for healing. As you intuitively connect with your drawing, tune in to the sensations in your body that may show up in connection to certain karmic eddies that you’ve identified in your drawing.

Feel into the sensation in your body. If it helps, you can close your eyes and imagine that you’re floating above your body to “see” the sensation. What does it look like, feel like? Does it have a color, a shape, a texture? Ask yourself if you may want to change it in any way. If you feel resistance to this, don’t seek to make this change right now. Just be with the sensation. If you do feel ready to make a change, imagine a new color, temperature, shape, texture to this sensation and imagine this shift taking place.⁶⁷

Clearing karmic eddies with people and in the world: A variant on the karmic eddy clearing is to use light to clear or transmute situations with specific people, or in the world, that are pulling or blocking your energy. I am grateful to the planetary guide, Joseph, for this exercise, which I’ve adapted somewhat over time.⁶⁸ Again, this doesn’t mean that we block feelings that we have in relation to these situations. Instead, we suffuse them with light and bless them with an intention for the healing of the world. From there, it is not our responsibility to fix them or to manage our feelings, but to let our stories shift as the light that we bring transmutes these situations for and through us.

Often, we do this without sensing any immediate effect, accepting that our work may not show for many years to come. Interestingly, visualizing with light can influence situations across time, so that something might suddenly drastically change, as if we have gone backward in time to change the future.

To effect change with people and worries outside of your body, close your eyes and imagine the person, issue or situation appearing about an arm’s length in front of your face. Visualize the details of the karmic eddy with as much detail as possible. Once you have a clear image, imagine divine light coming in as a bright beam through the top of your head and through your heart. Picture this beam of divine light suffusing the image of the karmic eddy. Paradoxically, we must do this practice while intentionally releasing any effort to fix or change a situation. Instead, bless it just as it is; make a prayer that all involved will be blessed by Great Spirit in this day. Then imagine the person, issue or situation suffused in this beam of divine heart light, becoming brighter and brighter until it is glowing in white light.

Continue to suffuse the image with light and notice any shifts or blocks that you may have. Our attachments to karmic eddies become abundantly clear during this exercise. If you are angry or very resistant, do your best, sending a blessing of love, and intention, or a prayer to protect them and bring them joy and to help them fulfill the goals of their spirit and soul in this life. If you are angry at a world leader or feel that someone with power in the world is bringing destruction or pain, you can do this same exercise. Imagine people or places in the world in great pain and send light from your heart and suffuse them with love and light. I know that this can seem like we are doing nothing when so much is wrong with the world, but you will find with practice that light healing shifts your own stories, which will begin to flow into the world in concentric circles of action.

I also send light to people who I love and feel no conflict with, to situations, and especially to my spirit helpers and to the Divine Spirit of the Universe every day. We are not separate from anyone or anything, and as we share our heart light with others, barriers we might not have been aware of fall away and we experience deeper intimacy.

Close this meditation by opening your eyes, wiggling your toes and tapping lightly on the top of your head. Return completely to the space that you are in and notice your surroundings. Close with gratitude to yourself and your guides for engaging in this important work. Expect some feelings to arise over the next days and weeks as the shift that you’ve initiated begins to take shape in your body and mind. If you feel overwhelmed at any point, ground to the Earth through your feet and let any strong emotions flow through your feet to the Earth.

Send Light to All Things

Sending light to all beings, to all people, to all great and beautiful things, as well as to all worries, traumas, horrors and fears, is a powerful healing practice that anyone can do. As you send heart light to your body, your feelings, your thoughts, so too can you send light to people, places and situations all over the world.

This action may seem too simple to work, but amazing results can come from this practice. I have had entrenched conflicts and hurts transform in very unexpected ways from using this practice, and while it doesn’t seem to instantly change the world, primarily because of the limitations of our own collective beliefs, this practice does bring profound healing in ways that we often don’t understand. If we do this regularly, perceptions and feelings about ongoing struggles in our communities and the world begin to change.

In any moment, as often as we can remember, we can open a door in our heart to bring light into the world. In any given moment, imagine a ball of light moving softly from your heart and going into the heart of another person, a place or a situation. On my best days, I do this with every person I encounter. Walls fall down, people open up, feelings are shared, people feel seen. This can be very hard to do if I am distracted, angry, rushed or pulled into my own experience in any number of other everyday ways. Yet inevitably, giving love changes us and the world even in our worst moments and in our greatest pain.

For one day, try to see everyone and everything surrounded with heart light. This is a very quick way to find out how unconscious we can be, how easy it is to shift our reality and truly impact everything around us.