Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020
Changing Our Stories
Conclusion: Re-Visioning the World One Dream at a Time
Dream-Connecting Practices
I grew up with an abusive mother. From many years of struggle, I now know what the pain of not being truly mothered gave me: a profound ability to connect with the Earth. My wound is now my gift. As we tell our stories again and again, we are sifting and shifting; we are creating. We can create new realities, and a new world, by re-visioning our stories, just as I’ve worked over decades to re-vision mine. Often, this requires gratitude and forgiveness in the face of trauma, betrayal and loss. Our experiences on this plane, in this body, are often bumpy and painful; being in our bodies on Earth is often strange and isolating. However, from a spiritual perspective, without denying our true and painful feelings (I’ve had 25 years of therapy to process and grow from my childhood!), over time we can find the growth and spiritual silver lining. I know this can sound Pollyanna-ish, and the skepticism of our world often berates this view. But spiritually, shifting in these ways is essential to raising our vibrations and dreaming a new dream for our lives and for the Earth. We can only find light with light. Not by pushing away darkness and pain, but by bringing it with us to a new story in a transmuted form. The energy of my pain has transmuted through my own process of healing into energy that can be shared with the world through my work as a healer and teacher. In this way, we can all “compost” the pain of our lives and the world to grow and create new visions.
It’s taken me many years to transform my personal stories. My body remembers pain quite well, and will remind me of hurts, slights and real wrongs done to me through memory triggers that can rapidly awaken paths in my brain and body from the times when these events were occurring. Because of this, it has taken a lot of conscious shifting of my stories over long periods to create new body memories and emotional states.
I know as an energy worker that things can shift in our energy bodies very quickly, while it may take time for the grooves of our physical bodies to adjust to the new reality. This is the same with changing our stories. Because our bodies can have entrenched pathways of memories, it takes mindfulness to catch ourselves when we fall into the ruts of our past stories, and when we are creating future stories through stress, fear and longing. Vibrational work helps us shift our bodies into new modes of experience. Connecting with Earth and Spirit on a regular basis provides a platform for new ways of experience that can gradually replace old ways of being and remembering ourselves and the world. This is a long process that requires commitment: it is the work of a lifetime. Still, regular practice can be short and built into the cracks. Below is a simple method I use to change my stories:
1. I set the intention to notice whenever I am running over painful memories. What are the triggers? What are the body memories? Places, seasons, certain times of the year can trigger old stories. First, just notice. This requires sitting with discomfort. Often, when we start to become aware of these painful stories we are annoyed with how often they pull us in, and we want them, and their pain, to GO AWAY NOW! Loving kindness, gentleness and patience are required while building awareness. And returning to awareness is an ongoing life practice. If I am tired, overwhelmed, sick, stressed, if it’s cloudy, if I’ve had too much coffee or unhealthy food: bam! My mind can return to the old stories.
2. Develop a reliable image that helps you shift the story. While this seems simple, it can take profound contemplation to find ways to feel love in relation to very difficult or painful stories. Some stories seem impossible to hold with love: the Holocaust, slavery, decimation of the environment, killing of indigenous people ... these are examples of times when I turn to spirit helpers to help me see in new ways and with new images. We cannot transmute painful personal or global stories on our own. Sometimes, all we can do is hold them in light from our hearts, and ask the Great Spirit of the Universe and our spirit helpers to guide us toward new ways of being with these stories.
3. Attempt to catch your mind and body running over the painful stories and replace it with the new image and accompanying emotional signature. This can be a split-second thing to do, and will probably need to be done over and over again. Just catching ourselves and shifting is huge and profound work.
4. As often as you can, take time to immerse yourself in the visualization of the new story, so that when you are going about your daily routine and have to make a shift, the feeling and images are more readily available to you.
Begin with Love
We create healing stories when we start with love. Large portions of Western thought and beliefs are now reintegrating the ancient truth that everything is connected. In the pageant of the cosmos, with us in everything, and everything in us, we are never alone. We no longer have to figure things out alone, or just with other humans. In fact, this is how we got in this mess to begin with. Instead, we start with active love and let the new dreams and visions for our lives arise within the matrix of this connection. It is through love that we find the imprint of the underlying energetic fabric of life, allow this to permeate us and vision from this expanded and amplified understanding far beyond our human limitations.
So now, we come to the final practice of the book; the most important practice; a place to always start and finish. If we do only one practice each day, and this is always mine, we learn to love the Earth and dream our lives from this place. It is a practice that I have learned by loving and dreaming with the Earth that always shepherds me out of the maze of separation into the gossamer labyrinth of connection, where finding my way becomes a magical, spiritual journey of becoming in community. Our rational minds crave complexity of ideas while paradoxically minimizing the complexity of life, because the truth of how much we don’t know can be frightening. So, we too often find ourselves in a constricting cave of confusion instead of on a sometimes wild path of creation. As I’ve written before in this book, and truly and deeply believe, while we can never understand the Divine Mystery of life, we can always relate. It is our hearts that take us there, and often through means that seem too simple to be able to make true changes. This is the gift and miracle of love; so challenging to get ourselves there yet so simple once we are there. We can always touch the Earth; that is something to always go back to and begin with.
EXERCISE: Loving the Earth
Purpose
In Western culture, we are energetically oriented toward taking from the Earth. Just as we pull energy into ourselves, as discussed in earlier chapters, so we are in an unconscious habit of pulling energy from the Earth. We take from the Earth in every moment in our lives. As a culture, Westerners harvest the lifeblood of the earth and her family to feed our lives, often mindlessly, or when we become mindful, in confusion of why it is so hard to stop. One place to begin is by shifting our conscious orientation of our energy. We are always sending or receiving, as I share in Chapter Ten, and this is never more true than in how we orient ourselves energetically to the Earth.
We can become attentive to the pull of our consciousness on the Earth by intentionally loving the Earth every day. There are many ways to do this; I’ve described a couple of them here. As many of the practices in this book teach, we begin by using our imagination. Just like any loving relationship, our understanding and love of the Earth grows over time — we begin to find our own dance with the Earth through active love; the Earth will begin to express herself to you, to reach out to and into you and to gradually show more of herself through contact and deepening intimacy.
Description
Intentionally feel love for the Earth. If this feels strange at first, imagine a person or companion animal who you love, then transfer this feeling to the Earth. One way that I love the Earth, and encourage others to do so, is to imagine that I am sending love through my feet to the Earth, either through an intentional walking meditation or as I’m walking throughout the day. I imagine that I am breathing in divine light and love and breathing it out through the bottom of my feet to the Earth. It is in walking that we are most often touching Earth. Making this a conscious practice of giving energy means it becomes a walking mantra of love. When the weather permits, I put my bare feet on the ground to love the Earth through my feet. The more contact the better.
Another way to love the Earth is to imagine that you are holding the Earth like a baby in your arms. Loving and hugging the Earth. Just like for spirit helpers, the orientation toward love and gratitude helps us to hear the voice of the Earth. The heaviness of many human thought forms and states closes the channels of communication with Earth, her beings, spirits, elemental energies and body memories. The shift that comes to us through love opens channels for her to communicate her dreams to us. The Earth is joyful to have us return to her. Just as an infected limb would distract and hurt, so our species being unwell puts the entire organism of the planet into distress. Feeling us come back into alignment relieves stress and the pull of the energy that we take in our disorientation. As we come into alignment with the dream of the Earth, our own lives feel more fulfilling and life giving. We can leave offerings and loving art for the Earth. We can thank the Earth with every moment of what we do. The Earth and all of nature love to hear songs, to have us dance in joy with and about the creation, to drum with the heartbeat of the Earth, honoring her.
My personal and favorite practice is to lay hands on the Earth, to be an energy healer for the Earth. As I have come to feel the memories of this life and others backward and forward through time with my clients, I’ve realized that through the energy healing for the Earth I now move into a knowing of the body memories of the Earth, the memories held in the Earth’s body backward and forward through time. The first time I felt this, it was so big that I panicked and stopped my practice for quite a while. It would be a book in itself to try to describe this experience. Suffice to say that I can never understand, or even orient my mind, in these moments. It is a falling-into, a merging that obliterates my senses with smells, sights, emotions, images, spirits, happenings past and future. I know that this feeling with and knowing the Earth on this level cannot be done alone. While I still do this practice on my own, I also do it every time I am in a ceremonial group, usually keeping it to myself, to ground the circle and to honor the memories, the pains, the joys, the past and future stories of the Earth.