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

Dancing with the Ancestors: Cultivating Shamanic Experience
Dream-Connecting Practices

Discovering magic happens through fostering gateways to mysterious encounters and feelings that intertwine with and exist beyond causal-linear reality. We are not taught to relate to and hold the deep magic and mystery that are hallmarks of fully actualized existence. Magical encounters and leaps of creativity into numinous knowing do not fit into accepted reductionist and instrumental concepts of what is “real” in the world. Our ancestors knew the ways of conscious dreaming: bringing forth each new day in communion with the ancestors and spirits of the Earth; speaking of visions and sightings across the veil; making dreaming the world into being a central and honored place in the circle of community.

We are all equipped with the tools needed to foster shamanic experience. The most basic things that any child likes to do are the means. Joy, play, dance, song, wonder, full feeling, complete presence: these are the ways to open the gates, and they are readily available to all of us. Music, art and dance are natural creative resources to express feelings and connection with the magic and mystery of the Divine. These basic human functions are a daily need and a wellspring of joy and relationship with each other and the cosmos in all her expressions. I play my clay flute, or other music, to start any ritual. A song that came to me in my giant meditation mandala in the woods behind my house calls the ancestors, and the spirits of the Earth and sky to me, and to those who join me in the circle of Earth-honoring reverence. In ritual circles — particularly the ones that I create and nurture regularly — I feel vortices of open communication with the memories of the Earth and the voices and visions of the helping spirits. Engaged through meditation with nature, listening and speaking with Earth and all beings of life, I open a doorway of divine love in my heart to raise the vibrations for pathways of communication across the veils of space and time. I engage in my daily Earth healing practices, hands on the Earth outside, or holding her in my arms in the eye of my imagination. As I shift perceptions, move deliberately through ritual into trance, eventually the ancient Earth wildness, ancestors dancing, body memories of the Earth, impressions of spirit helpers, entrée into quantum intelligence, reveal themselves to me.

I play my flute and sing a song as a gift to the helping spirits and the nature energies all around, giving the gifts of gratitude and joy for this life that is supported and possible in every moment because of the Earth and Divine Spirit that animates my soul. Listening to my heartbeat, I drum with the slow thrumming of the Earth’s breathing, the moving of water under and over her skin; the waves, the skies opening with wind and rain. Listening to the Earth, and the patterns of my own breathing as it works in rhythm with my heart, I enter the pulse of life.

In my journey, the rhythms and rituals of the sacred creativity of ceremony open my senses to the ancestors, the elemental nature energies and the spirit helpers. Drumming, singing and making art open my mind and I wander with intention across veils, into other realms. As in many journeys, I hear faraway drumming. Slowly, over time, I move through the woods in the middle world closer to this sound. I begin to see fire flickering through the darkness, beams breaking through the brush and trees where the ancestors inhabit the forest.

Each time I go there, I move a bit closer. Eventually, I am peering through trees. One time I take a step into the circle as my true self. They know me; they have been waiting for me. One day, I step into the circle to dance. No hesitation, no wondering, no decision, no mind. I am just one with my ancestors; my feet bless the Earth in a circle of my people. Joy, celebration, admiration, oneness of mind and purpose and consciousness with my family.