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

Dreaming as Co-Creation
Dream-Connecting: Creating New Stories in Vibrational Reality
Dream-Connecting Practices

The process of dreaming into a healing story for humans and the planet originates in our imagination. We are profoundly creative beings and what we see and feel in our mind-heart-bodies is what we create in the world. This understanding of our role in the co-creation of reality does not fit with currently accepted notions of an objective reality “out there.” For a conceptual schema to help our minds release into this experience, we can rely on the perspective of scientists who support a holistic and participatory understanding of reality. One example is Ervin Laszlo’s view of the expression of the two realms of reality, the inner subjective and the outer objective. Laszlo identifies consciousness as the “internal aspect” of the connectivity among systems.⁶⁹

Ontologically, in a relational view of reality neither outer nor inner experience holds more merit than the other. Access to the spiritual realms through the gateways of our inner selves is no less “real” than the shared reality of an outer, objective world. Communities that honor the internal relationship to the “dream” realms share the experience of illuminated and magical experience in the outer “objective” world as well. As Laszlo elucidates in his book, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for our Time, our imaginations are a subjective experience of the interwoven systems of life and the cosmos:

The phenomenon of mind is neither an intrusion into the cosmos from some outside agency, nor the emergence of something out of nothing. Mind is but the internal aspect of the connectivity of systems within the matrix. It is there as a possibility within um, and evolves into more explicit forms as the matrix differentiates into relatively discrete, self-maintaining systems. The mind as knower is continuous with the rest of the universe as known. Hence in this metaphysics there is no gap between subject and object.⁷⁰

The Earth- and Spirit-connecting practices of the previous chapters are intentionally oriented toward finding integration with the more-than-human world. The lens of creative thoughts and imagination is then interconnected with the dream of Earth and cosmos, through which we become mindful of other beings in the fabric of consciousness through relationship with vibrational reality.

Through shamanic experience, the result of portals into vibrational reality, we come to relate to beings that we know in our hearts are “real”: elemental nature energies, ancestors and spirit helpers, among others. In relationship and authentic communion with these beings our new dreams of reality are kindled. From this place of nested participation, the lens of our primal creativity opens onto a landscape of shared abundance and rejuvenation embedded within an ethic of care for the Earth and all of life.

Visioning for healing begins from our heart-minds; the dreams that we bring into the world are drawn directly from what we think and experience in each moment. Experience of separation creates stories and dreams of anger, fear, anxiety and greed; an experience of relationship creates stories of interrelatedness, love and a blended flow with the processes of life. Tragic and painful things happen in the world; loss and grief are part of the processes of life. Our co-creation comes from how we greet these moments. Owning our co-creation in every moment does not mean that we are in charge of everything that happens, but rather that we become aware of our profound impact in the world by how we relate to all that happens in the world.

It is both scary and empowering to discover on a visceral level that we are, in every moment and through every conscious or unconscious thought, engaged in creating the world. We evolved with power, to transform and illuminate all happenings and experiences by greeting them with open hearts. Dreaming our experience from a place of conscious and authentic openheartedness is joyful, exhilarating, raw and wild. This is the condition of “awake” humans on Earth; we are swimming in the wild flow and emergent spontaneity of relationships; the interwoven vibrational reality of the universe.