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

Creating Rituals for Earth Spirit Dreaming
Sacred Rituals: Pathways to Re-Dreaming the World
Dream-Connecting Practices

Separating visioning practices into individual exercises is challenging, and somewhat misleading. Many of these practices blend together in intuitive creative moments. Really, the delineation is only required to reteach our minds to let go. Everything that we need to vision is readily available. We need only to coax our minds to release the conceptual limitations so convincingly taught to us through Western civilization. While many of these practices flow easily into one another, I break them up to allow a slow opening of the mind on a comfortable linear path into imaginal senses and skills.

Before doing any of the dreaming practices, it is important to first move through Earth- and Spirit-connecting practices from previous chapters. Choose as many as you like, but at least one, from each section to prepare yourself before engaging in visioning practices. By now, you may have settled on Earth and Spirit practices that are the most comfortable for you; if so, use the practices that you like best. Do them in order, and always do each step, even if you only have a short amount of time to spend on each one. If you are short of time, focus on preparation and connection with the Earth and Spirit realms; the images you receive in the visioning process will expand through more grounding and clarity of intention.

The Order of Rituals

In any Earth Spirit Dreaming ritual, the following steps, done in order, will prepare you for clear vibrational and visioning work. Rituals can be long and complex, short and simple, or anything in between. Over time, you will find your way into the practices and rituals that work best for you. Until you are able to know and feel your way through shamanic experience, it is important, at the minimum, to always include the following steps:

1. Begin with gratitude

2. Set an overall intention by praying that your ritual and visioning will be for the healing of the world

3. Create sacred space: assemble your altar

4. Ground to the Earth

5. Connect with spirit helpers: call in your light guides

6. Set a clear intention for the visioning practice

7. Do your visioning practice

8. Receive and reflect

9. End with gratitude

For any visioning process, begin by giving gratitude and setting a clear intention. I always bask in gratitude at the start of any ritual. This does so much to welcome the helping spirits, invite the Earth beings and energies to support your work and raise the vibrations to connect all that you do with the Divine Spirit of the Universe. I count blessings as much and as many as I am able. I sing songs of thanks and gratitude. Then, I always ask that my work in this ritual, and in my life, will bring my life into alignment for the healing of the world.

That is my prayer and it works wonders. You can journey to find your own prayer and/or spirit songs. I have many spirit songs that are given to me, and that I give as gifts to my spirit helpers and to the Earth. This one prayer — that all that I do will be in alignment for the healing of the world — is central to everything right, in the highest spiritual sense, that happens in my life. Feel free to make it your prayer as well. It was a gift to me from the light guides of the planet, and I gift it to you with gratitude and blessings for your unfolding spiritual mission.

My prayer:

“Divine Spirit and Creator of the Universe, all of my helping spirits and the light guides of the planet, I ask that you bring my life into alignment for the healing of the world. I ask that you move through me so that all that I do will bring light and healing to the world.”

I always ask that my rituals and visions be led by the light guides of the planet or my helping spirits. I always ask that my visioning will bring healing. I ask that my life and work will fulfill my spiritual mission on the planet, release blocks, open channels of love. I ask that I will be led and supported to lead others to know the light guides of the planet. I often ask my helping spirits for guidance in setting my intentions, rather than limiting my visualization with my own, separate understanding.

After years of prayer and spiritual work, I now know that the spiritual possibilities of my life tend to be so much more than I could ever imagine or hope for myself. We often feel anxious and want what we want in the moment, which is part of the human condition on the planet. It’s normal to feel this way. Often, there is something that we can’t quite see, or that we only feel an inkling of, that would actually do more to progress our own healing and spiritual development than what we can think of or allow ourselves to want in the current situations in our lives. Reaching with intention into the unknown requires trust and surrender to higher consciousness, and the light beings that guide and support us on this journey. Asking for support from our helping spirits as often as possible is the best way forward in all things.

EXERCISE: Gather Your Medicine

Purpose

When we begin a shamanic dreaming practice, we gather “medicine” from the Earth spirits, the helping spirits and the ancestors. Gathering items for your own altar will help you more quickly bring your senses into the states required to access other realms by acting as cues to help you reach altered states more quickly. These items also become charged up with our gratitude and connection to beautiful entities that guide us on our path into the magical realms. Many items on our altar bring their own power, as well as representing moments of gratitude and connection, and special messages and openings.

Description

As you commit to a dreaming practice, create a “medicine basket” of things to build your altar whenever you hold your ceremonies, for yourself or with others. The simplest basket or bag of things will include all of the elements: earth, air, fire and water. Your sacred stones, from the exercise in Chapter Six, are an excellent way to bring in the earth. Also include candles: small votive candles travel well. Air is what we are always breathing and is also seen when we burn herbs and plants to honor their spirits and bring in the wisdom of these particular plants. I include a bowl for filling with water on your altar. Include one or more objects that are sacred to you and that bring you positive feelings, connect you to your ancestors and/or remind you of special experiences that bring forward heightened feelings of connection. Also, choose a piece of cloth that is beautiful to you that you can lay down wherever you are to build your altar.

When you place your medicine items into an arrangement for your ceremony, hold this as a sacred act of reverence. Feel the essence and beauty of each item and the energy of relationship that these beings create together as you build your altar. Your altar can be the same each time, or you can use different arrangements and items depending on what is calling to you. Feel your body and listen to your soul as you choose your medicine items and bring together your altar. This is deeply sacred work that is setting the stage for your Earth-healing practice.

Once you have these basic materials for your altar, find a bag or basket to put them in. It’s very useful to be able to take your medicine things with you when you go outside or go to various locations to make your ceremonies. When working with others, you can fashion altars together, blending your medicine items.

If you want to create a ritual at a time and place when you do not have your medicine bag or basket, you can use anything that you find in your environment. Ask your helping spirits to guide you to things that will help you build a healing ceremony. If you are outdoors, this is very easy to do. Feel in your body and ask to be led to any nature beings that want to be a part of your work. Always ask them before you pick them up to use in your ceremony. If you feel led to take something with you to add to your altar, ask the being if this is something that they want to do. Also, we do not own the things on our altars. Nature beings have their own path and will sometimes indicate that they want to be left in a location or sent with another person. While it can be hard to part with medicine things that are very important and meaningful, it is important to let them move on to where they belong and allow ourselves to open to new medicine. Always end any work with sacred things with gratitude for their help in your healing work.

EXERCISE: Listening to Your Sacred Stones

Purpose

This practice invites engaging your sacred stones, one at a time, slowly and with purpose as part of creating sacred space. Engaging body, senses and heart, this exercise deepens connection with our sacred stones while opening channels to dream with the Earth. To begin work with your own set of sacred stones, begin with the exercise Creating a Set of Sacred Stones, from Chapter Six.

During a shamanic ecotherapy workshop, as I put the processes of slowing down more fully into practice with the group, I developed this idea for meditating through our bodies and emotions with the sacred stones. This process deepened the connection for participants, and many finally said, “Now I get it.” Slowing down is essential for the magic to emerge. In stillness, shifting time, we can begin to “feel the magic.” After this simple exercise with your rocks, you may experience increased synchronicity, and a sense of “flow.” Rocks are the guardians and wisdom of flow: of rivers, oceans, beaches, pressures of the Earth, rhythms of decomposition and formation from decay. When we slow our flow to connect with the time sense of rocks, we enter time from a different angle, allowing the web of life to appear to us.

Description

Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. Plan to be uninterrupted for 90 minutes; this provides plenty of time to settle into your place, to welcome your stones into a sacred alignment and to complete and reflect on your experience. You can shorten the exercise if you need to; simply doing it is the most important thing. Sometimes, seeking perfection blocks our moments to connect, so do your best given your location and time constraints. I like to play soothing or meditative music while I listen to my stones. If it’s warm, you can find a place where you will hear the music of the trees, birds, a river or creek, or the ocean. Create a ritual for yourself that covers each step in order, adjusting to the amount of time that you have and to your location.

Choose a method to keep time. I do so by counting my breaths, but you can find and use your own method. However you keep time when you meditate will work. Spend seven minutes with each stone, gazing, feeling it, speaking to it, listening, reading the images and textures. Ask it questions; imagine where it came from and why it’s here with you now. Press it against your heart and love it; if it’s hard to feel love for a rock, imagine that you love it. But rocks can be very relational, which is often very surprising to people as, in Western culture, we perceive them as quite inanimate. They are ancient and know the original dream of the spirit of Gaia. They will speak their wisdom and guide us when we listen.

When you are finished, feel in your body the vibration of each stone and let them speak to you to find a correlation with the elemental energies in the chart below.⁹¹ If you feel a connection with a certain stone, but not a correlation between this stone and the elemental energies described on the chart, remain connected with that stone, but put it aside for now and seek another for your set of seven. Another way to more slowly let the stones open up their wisdom is to place them under your pillow, or near your bed, while you sleep, and ask for dreams from the stone to help you understand their energetic imprint and feel their relevance to your healing, as well as the healing of others that you might work with in ceremony.

Ritual Circles with Your Sacred Stones

As you continue developing your Earth Spirit Dreaming practice, creating and working with circles with your sacred stones, or any stones, integrates many of the essential ingredients of an Earth Spirit Dreaming experience into one activity. In the next chapter, we will move into visioning work with mandalas. For now, as you increase your comfort with creating sacred space for Earth Spirit Dreaming experiences, exploring ways to incorporate your sacred stones into your rituals will deepen your understanding of the stones. Allow the stones to guide you in relationship as you discover and create new forms of ritual in your own way. Doing this is an exercise in growing intuition and relationship with the stones. Trust yourself and feel into your body to find direction in working with your sacred stones.

In my personal spiritual work, and in the Earth Spirit Dreaming method, circle symbolism reflected in mandalas is a central feature of rituals, ceremonies and visioning work. The beauty of using sacred mandalas as an Earth Spirit Dreaming practice is that creating a mandala as ceremony contains every aspect of a visioning ritual. Mandalas are outer expressions of inner revelation and also create a map to discover flashes of insight and development. The next chapter leads from creating rituals quite naturally into working with mandalas, expressions of our self in relation to all of life and a representation of the cosmos.