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

Reading the Oracle
Dreaming with Mandalas: Journeying with Sacred Circles
Dream-Connecting Practices

Interpreting symbolic wisdom from our visioning work is a tricky business. Our rapid information culture, and addiction to linear and reductive ways of knowing, can short-circuit the process. Complex spirit information can be mystifyingly symbolic and non-linear and take long periods of time to unfold as meaning and purpose in our human terms. This is because the information that we receive from contact with the cosmos comes through our wisdom selves.

This information does not fit well within the limits and confines of our brain-minds. To be effective dreamers for the Earth we must relate to symbolic knowing with our larger heart-minds. Much of the knowing that comes to us as visions and dreams may never make sense to us, except in small, sometimes very strange-seeming flashes. Rather, we engage these visions with our heart-minds, embracing them with gratitude and love and accepting that we can only find a path back to the Divine with much help. We come to feel deep in our bones that we truly are never alone. And while visioning with the Earth and spirit realms helps us feel more at home and loved than ever before, the trade-off is that we again and again release control of our separate ego selves to allow communion with the embedded nature of our true selves.

Through dreaming and visioning we develop a broader capacity for paradox. Allow yourself to be with the discomfort of not knowing in your head what the symbols that come to you in visions mean. Let your heart feel the support and love, and deep wisdom, shared with you from the spirit and nature intelligences. This form of visioning is a relational process that unfolds over time and with practice.

If you are really eager to understand, and your desire to know with your head is creating a block for you, you can begin learning the common meanings of symbols as a step toward understanding. Reading mythology, dream symbolism, animal meanings, spirit and animal cards may help you begin to feel oriented in a sometimes confusing and overwhelming sea of newness. Eventually, the best approach is to meet each symbol or being on their own terms. An excellent way to proceed is to ask the symbol, picture, whatever emerges, to express its meaning and purpose to you. Ask for a dream, spend some time taking shamanic journeys to this image, symbol, feelings or being. Draw it, doodle it, picture it and send it light from your heart. In all things, send gratitude for this supportive vision and to the beings and guides that have sent it to you. Love, light and gratitude are the most effective means for deepening relationships to and understanding of messages and messengers.

Also, look for similar images popping up in your life. I had an oracular dream with an image that came up in my life repeatedly at pivotal decision points as I was choosing to follow a spirit path that my personal self resisted quite fiercely at times. This was an image of two faces together, and it popped up in my life in many different settings. The when and where of these appearances helped me understand where to go and when, on an otherwise opaque path to a new way of being in my life. Eventually, this one image unfolded into my spirit guides giving me a spirit name in the shamanic realm. River Light eventually emerged from these two faces.

I first had the dream the night before attending a healing dream workshop led by my friend and colleague, Christopher Reynolds. He suggested that we invite dreams before arriving. I had a long dream where I was leading people into the Earth. Some sort of symbolic alphabet greeted us as we moved in, in long lines. I realized that we had lost the ability to understand this language, and that it was my job to help us return to this understanding. I was then standing on an earthen mound covered with grass and I had a two-sided face. This felt so important at the time, but I had no idea why. This image led me continually as I made many difficult and challenging choices to move more fully into my spiritual mission over the next few years; and it continues to guide me.

Letting new dreams and stories come forth from our connection with the web of life begins by learning to work with symbols and visions through ceremony and ritual. Extrasensory experiences to seek and create visions of healing begin with opening the gateway of the imagination, through revelatory art forms that teach us a language of symbols and imaginal reality. In the next chapter, we see how the imaginal and symbolic realms are reached through creating conditions for extrasensory perception through guided meditations and shamanic journeying. With careful preparation from previous practices, we learn to spiral further into altered states step by step. We then can communicate with nature “spirits,” or the energetic imprint of nature beings, and relate directly to our personal spirit helpers and the higher planetary guides orchestrating the shifts on consciousness happening now all across the planet.