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

Sacred Rituals: Pathways to Re-Dreaming the World
Dream-Connecting Practices

Through rituals, we encounter the Divine Mystery, and journey to the inner core of human consciousness. Rituals are basic expressions of humanity as we move through the complexities and challenges of life. They express reverence and intention and create a sanctuary of presence to connect with an underlying shared awe of moments in life that are the most essential yet the hardest to control and understand. Rituals mark shared human experiences across cultures and throughout time: birth, death, marriage, growing up, marking the seasons, honoring our stories of creation and the rhythms and patterns of nature as well as cosmic and divine spirals of being.

Many of us sense when we are experiencing a ritual as they share common elements: shared meaning-making among community members, a specific order of ceremony, repetition of beliefs, prayers, sacred stories and objects, laments, honoring life cycles, and often elements of smoke such as incense, the burning of herbs, candle lighting and fire. Rituals are often held in places that are sacred to the culture in which they are embedded, and take place in those locations again and again, imbuing these sites with immense and readily felt imprints of the sacred. Sacraments vary widely by culture and tradition but share the role of expressing the fundamental message of cultural belief systems through ceremonial repetition. Sacraments exemplify essential beliefs and tenets of a religion and/or spiritual tradition. All rituals also contain sacred creativity through a variety of art forms: music, dancing, visual art, beautiful and awe-inspiring clothing of many kinds and, in many cultures, body painting and mask making to represent spirits and beings from nature that are revered. Rituals in any tradition tell the great stories and myths that capture the movement through struggle to power and strength for the people. Rituals all connect us to the feeling that we are part of something larger than ourselves, and that this connection with something larger gives meaning and some element of safety to our lives and communities.

As a convert from Christianity to Judaism, and a purveyor of eco-spiritual traditions across cultures, I’ve noticed that many traditional rituals, among many cultures, include elements that create entrainment among participants and can also encourage trance states, either light or intense. These actions change brainwaves, moving participants into shifts of consciousness, often so subtle that people don’t realize it’s happening. They may just feel a “connection,” a surge of feeling or fluctuation in the space.

For many Christians, the primary sacrament is communion, which uses bread and wine to represent the body and blood of Christ. This sacrament expresses the central belief of Christianity, that Jesus died for our sins. In the Jewish tradition, the central sacrament is the Torah, and the rituals of the Torah service culminate in taking the Torah from the ark in a very sacred way and reading from it with great reverence. The Torah captures many beliefs of the Jewish people, central among them that while their temple was destroyed over 2,000 years ago, and they were expelled from their holy land, the people will continue to survive because they carry their stories and traditions with them in the form of the Torah.

All religious traditions have sacred actions and beliefs that can seem implausible, or even outlandish, to outsiders, but are very normal to life-time adherents. I’ll use my own experience with Judaism as a primary example, as my move from one religion to another heightened for me the elements of rituals that in Christianity, which I grew up in, are the norm for me. In Judaism, I noticed right away traditions that seemed obviously connected to indigenous practices at some point and that directly encouraged shifts in consciousness: the long periods of chanting and rocking while praying (davening), wrapping of the arms seven time in thick bands of leather (tefillin) and blowing large sheep horns in a variety of rhythms (shofar). Jews also shake four species of sacred plants while honoring the four directions during the holiday of Sukkot.

It is just the same in any religion, as my Jewish friends and family remark about the seemingly bizarre beliefs of Easter, the most important Christian holiday. It seems incredibly strange to most of them that anyone could believe that Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, went to hell to face Satan, then rose from the dead and, as God in human form, then ascended into heaven, essentially leaving Earth without dying. This seems nonsensical to outsiders, yet can inspire Christians and move them to the depths of their souls. Everything that I’ve described can be understood in a shamanic context, and undoubtedly harkens back to a time when experiences that we now call shamanic existed in the realm of normal, sacred occurrences.

Western religious traditions all maintain elements that are shamanic in some way. Most of these “magical” elements in more progressive religious groups are now considered myths, and things that couldn’t have really happened. In the Hebrew Bible, some examples of shamanic experience are Moses speaking with a burning bush, miracles of healing, bursts and flashes of divine light, direct honoring and communication with ancestors and angels, great prophetic and guiding dreams and visions, and so many more.

In the New Testament, these shamanic elements include a belief in particular spiritual gifts, “given by the Holy Spirit,” most identified by the Apostle Paul. A few of these gifts, as listed in 1 Corinthians 12: 8—10, include: the gift of healing, miracle, prophecy and praying in tongues. And, the story of Jesus is essentially shamanic: he was a divine being, a part of God, that overcame death, moved between worlds to encounter different spirits and faced the greatest malevolent spirit on Earth, Satan, returning with a great healing for the people by vanquishing the most negative consciousness known to humankind, just as the great shamans and medicine people move into the spirit realms to face the darkest elements in individual lives and communities, and to release the power and influence of this darkness and these destructive forces.

In Earth Spirit Dreaming, and in general as Westerners finding our way back to individual connection with direct revelation, and a religious orientation that honors the Earth, there is a search for sacraments and new kinds of rituals that hold the central tenets of the emerging story of Earth-care. These central tenets include the truths of visionary environmental thought: that everything is connected, that Earth is sacred and that we can each speak directly with helping spirits, elemental nature energies and ancestors. Further, visionary environmental thought assumes that we can each experience revelatory and numinous states.

All of these aspects of Earth-honoring rituals can be found buried deeply — or quite close to the surface — in traditional Western religions, and there are large swaths of religious communities across the Abrahamic traditions that are seeking and activating the Earth- and Spirit-connecting elements for healing the environment and our connection with nature within the sacred texts and structures of these religions.⁸⁸

The best rituals of any tradition take us beyond the limits of our minds, into collective knowing, and utilize many means to do this. They tap into our senses and powerful emotions and bring us into contact with our ancestors, our angels, the cosmos and the Divine, who wait to receive us as we float and move among the stars within and without. Step by step, we move beyond the limits of our minds into the Divine Mystery.

Our heart-minds take us where our brain-minds cannot go. Soon our heart-minds instruct our brain-minds, instead of the other way around, and we are making the world anew through the yearnings of our soul and the working of our spirits. It is through creating rituals for re-dreaming the world that the Earth Spirit Dreaming three-step method comes into full fruition. The form of these three steps comes together in rituals that support creative visioning. Carefully prepared rituals activate visioning in alignment with the original dream of the Earth, and the consciousness of a new story emerging among people on the Earth at this time.