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

Slowing Down
Introduction: Waking Up to Earth
Introduction

An important first step to finding our way back to our Earth-connected, ecological selves is slowing down. We need to slow down. Do less. Be less. Make less. Produce less. Throw away less. Burn less. In the growth mindset of the industrial paradigm, more is believed to be better. The outcome of beliefs that press us to be and do more are that we are often sad and sick, disconnected from nature, our souls and each other. Many of us feel harried, trapped, lost and anxious on a daily basis.

Not only are we struggling to find health and balance in our overproducing world, we are also quickly eating up the resources of our finite planet. As Jennie Moore and William E. Rees put it in their article “Getting to One-Planet Living,” we are in “ecological overshoot — requiring the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the renewable resources we use and to absorb our carbon waste.”⁶ These authors ask, how do we get to one-planet living? They offer a variety of “in the world” solutions. The question often arises among environmental thinkers: why is it so hard to make these kinds of changes? Is it the force of habit, culture, overwhelm, the media, the human tendency toward laziness? We know what we need to do, yet we don’t seem to be able to do it. We need to shift our underlying meaning systems to revolutionize our habits.

Attempting to slow down can bring up many profound fears as we break away from values and belief systems that have guided our nations, communities and even families for decades or, in some cases, centuries. One current and powerful underlying motivation is to organize our lives to make money. We could change this to growing food, to healing, to being together. Often, many of these other things are made to fit around our need to make money: the primary medium of exchange in our culture. While it is difficult to imagine, there are alternatives to living within a linear economic mindset.

What we need are methods to retrain our ways of being in the world; but the level of change required can only occur with an accompanying spirituality. All civilizations have had systems of ritual that support and perpetuate beliefs, and underpin the courage needed to act for these beliefs under duress.

A regenerative civilization requires a system of ritual, a spirituality, as well. As a global movement, this spirituality must be applicable across diverse cultural and religious beliefs. Dolores LaChapelle, in her now-famous article “Ritual is Essential,”⁷ points out the following regarding Earth-centered cultures:

Most native societies around the world had three common characteristics: they had an intimate, conscious relationship with their place; they were stable “sustainable” cultures, often lasting for thousands of years; and they had a rich ceremonial and ritual life. They saw these three as intimately connected.⁸

This book focuses on methods to achieve the first and third elements that LaChapelle suggests are required to live in balance with the Earth: a conscious relationship with our place and a rich ceremonial and ritual life. Earth Spirit Dreaming is a manual that offers methods for reanimating our intimacy with the Earth by filling our personal lives and communities with nature-focused ceremony and ritual.