Speaking with Nature: Awakening to the Deep Wisdom of the Earth - Sandra Ingerman, Llyn Roberts 2015

Artesian Spring - Sandra
Artesian Spring and Mist

I walk out the door of my adobe house on a beautiful day in the high desert. The sky is bright blue and no clouds block the sun. I absorb the warmth and light as I walk down a narrow path surrounded by piñon pine and juniper trees.

After a short walk I come to a marsh. It is not common to find abundant natural water sources in the desert, and I have the privilege of living on land where there is an Artesian Spring bubbling up from deep within the earth. Marsh grass, cattails, and willows grow here in abundance, nurtured by the water. Even during times in the year when water is not visible on the surface, it is still plentiful deep in the earth.

When the water flows above ground, it attracts a variety of life. Colorful dragonflies appear only when there is standing water. Birds and animals not typically seen in other areas of Santa Fe come to drink from this sacred place.

I live on the Old Santa Fe Trail. With my imagination I can see the horse-drawn wagons of the past coming through and weary folks grateful that they have finally arrived at a source of water.

Where water flows is sacred ground. Our planet is mostly water and all of life depends on it to thrive. Water is precious and we must always honor it as a living being. When we sit with water, we are in awe of its beauty. We find deep inner peace when we watch ocean waves, experience a deep state that allows our inner wisdom to come forth as we sit by a river, and experience stillness as we reflect while gazing into clear lake water.

As we experience times of extreme drought in the Southwest, I find myself turning to prayer to give thanks for the rain that will come so that all life might thrive. Giving thanks and knowing that the spirit of the land and the elements will provide what is needed for life to continue is crucial.

When I journey to my spiritual teacher, who is the Egyptian goddess Isis, and ask her about the drought, her response to me is always the same. First she tells me that if I believe we will not have water and rain, we will experience a scarcity of this precious resource, for our belief and perception creates our reality. Living this teaching is a work in progress for me. It is not an easy process to disconnect from the collective trance that supports the belief in scarcity versus abundance.

She also tells me that it is time to embrace the feminine principle of recognizing that all that we desire in the outer world lies within us. Isis says to me, “You are always looking to the sky for the rains from above to come. You need to call the deep waters in the earth to bubble up and feed the trees, plants, and all of life.”

This is a powerful teaching on a metaphorical level, for in the Western world we look to the outer world to give us what we need. We try to amass material goods and money to feel wealthy, yet true wealth lies within. And when we stop looking outside and embrace the feminine, the gems—the inner knowing, inner health, inner peace—bubble up and create true joy. This is the reflection of the sacred well that lies deep within the earth waiting to be experienced, acknowledged, and called up to feed and support all of life.

In the late 1980s I had a powerful experience of Isis while on a vision quest in the high desert of northern New Mexico. Isis came to me in a vision and told me that she would be my teacher in my spirit world journeys and would guide me in teaching how to bring healing and balance back to the Earth.

Then in the late 1990s one of my students asked me if I would bring a group to Egypt to visit the temples and sacred sites. I have always felt a connection to Egypt and its history, so this idea intrigued me. And of course, as Isis was my spiritual teacher, I was even more drawn to accepting the invitation.

I journeyed to Isis and asked her for her guidance, and she answered me in a metaphorical manner. Speaking and teaching through metaphor is the way the spirits communicate.

I had asked her, “Should I bring a group of students to Egypt?” Her answer was, “The power of the land is the water that runs through it.”

I interpreted her response to mean that the land in Egypt holds great power due to the Nile River running through it and that her answer was yes. Thus I did bring a group to Egypt, and we had special and profound experiences during our time visiting sacred sites and temples.

Over the next year I thought about Isis’s response to me that the power of the land is the water that runs through it, and I reflected on this in terms of the places I’ve lived. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, near the ocean, and then I moved to San Francisco, where I lived for many years until moving to Santa Fe. In the coastal cities where I lived, I found the energy of growth and also the personality of people to reflect back the effervescence of the ocean waves.

In contrast, Santa Fe is high desert. Beautiful trees and a wealth of plants grow here, and there is a deep silence in the land that supports the spirit of creativity. Growth in the desert is slow, but the land supports deep growth, because roots must grow very deep to find the water needed to thrive.

In my workshops I started having participants meditate or journey to connect with the land where they live and experience the water running through the landscape. I asked them to notice if the people who live there reflect back the qualities of the waters, and this has been a valuable way for all of us to learn about the land where we live.

Water reflects the nature of our soul. It symbolizes the principle of “as above, so below, as within, so without.” When we examine how our inner toxicity is reflected in our environment, water is a great example of this.

A solution to our current ecological crisis is working with the feminine principle of being versus doing. I teach that it is who we become that changes the world, for we can be a healing force through our presence.

My love for water led me to the study of marine biology. I thought I would be spending my life working through a scientific model to look at reversing pollution in the waters of the world.

Destiny led me in a different direction, and in 1980 I was introduced to the practice of shamanism. As I learned about the power of spiritual healing work, I focused my attention on how we could use spiritual methods to not just heal the waters of the world, but to reverse all environmental pollution. Spiritual traditions teach that everything in the outer world is a reflection of our inner world, which means that from a spiritual perspective the toxicity we see in our environment is a reflection of our own inner toxicity. That we are experiencing severe drought in some parts of the world while other locations are experiencing extreme flooding is a reflection of how out of balance our inner world is. To support our environmental health, we must embrace this feminine principle: “It is who we become that changes the world, and not just what we do.”

In the practice of shamanism, it is understood that thoughts have substance. It is also understood that words are seeds and have the power to create. In its original Aramaic, the “abracadabra” famously used by magicians derives from abraq ad habra, which literally translates as, “I will create as I speak.”

In indigenous cultures the difference between expressing problematic thoughts or emotions and sending the energy associated with them is well understood. In our Western culture, where we do not validate what is happening in the energetic and invisible realms, we often find ourselves filled with toxic thoughts and emotions that we then send to ourselves and into the world. Without realizing it we can end up sending poisonous, dense, or heavy energies to others, the planet, and even back upon ourselves. We often end up polluting our water within and without, as we are not conscious of the impact of our thoughts and words.

The key is to learn how to acknowledge the depth of our feelings. Experiencing fully a range of feelings from joy to anger is part of being human. We do not want to repress or deny our feelings. The key is learning about how the energy we send out affects our personal health and the health of the planet.

Start changing that energy by taking some time to get centered and reflect on the nature of your thoughts and feelings. Once you acknowledge a feeling through the use of intention and creative inspiration, you can transform the energy behind your thoughts and words into love. Then you can send loving energies through your thoughts and words to yourself, loved ones, and into the world. In this way you can express what you are feeling while feeding yourself, others, and the planet with love and radiant light, which will bring you back to a state of inner peace and harmony that will be reflected back to you in the outer world.

In 1997 I had a powerful dream in which the Egyptian god Anubis appeared to me and told me that the key to the spiritual work of reversing environmental pollution is transfiguration.

On awakening from the dream, I had to look up the meaning of transfiguration and learned it means what is referred to in shamanism as “shapeshifting.” I had heard stories about shamans shapeshifting into animals such as wolves and ravens, but I could not at first connect that practice to reversing environmental pollution.

An important insight about this came from my neighbor, also a client, who was dying of liver cancer. One day Kathy and I were sitting and chatting as friends. When I told her about my dream, she became very animated and started to share stories about Jesus. A fundamentalist Christian, she knew quite well the biblical accounts of how Jesus had transfigured and shone with bright rays of light. While in this transfigured state of divine light, he worked miraculous healings.

Now I understood Anubis’s message to me: light heals and transmutes. This is true in various spiritual traditions that offer countless references to shamans, healers, and spiritual masters transfiguring into divine light while performing miraculous healings. Since we are essen-tially spiritual light connected to all of life, spirit is who we are beyond our skin. When we drop all that separates us from our divine light, everything outside of us mirrors back to us a state of divinity, light, and perfection.

For years I worked with groups of people on a community experiment trying to transmute pollution in the environment from a toxic to a neutral substance. We took deionized (pure) water and polluted it with ammonium hydroxide, which is a common pollutant in the environment and is a strong base. It is easy to check its presence with the use of pH strips that measure alkalinity.

Our ceremony involved letting go of egoic states that separate us from our divinity and achieving a state of union with the power of the universe, the divine source of light and universal love. We worked with the understanding that water will reflect back to us our state of inner harmony. As we radiate our light, everything around us reflects back a state of health and luminosity. I have presented this ceremony to many groups, and every time the pH of the water has dropped one to three points toward neutral. The actual ceremony lasts about twenty minutes and the pH changes within this time frame. From a scientific perspective this would be seen as impossible.

Since these initial experiments I’ve started using a gas discharge visualization (GDV) camera that can capture the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energies emanating from a person, plant, liquid, powder, or inanimate object and translate those energies into a computerized model. In other words, this diagnostic camera measures and evaluates the energy of the auric field and integrates that information into a computer-generated report with pictures.

The camera enabled us to document the change in energy of the substances present in our circle. And time and time again, as we experienced and radiated our divine light, we saw the field of light of the water in the middle of our circle increasing.

The teaching Isis and Anubis encouraged me to share is how we can heal by our presence. In the work I share on this topic, we do not pray for the water or send light or healing energy to the water. We simply radiate our spiritual light in the way that the sun or a star shines. When we allow our light to shine, our outer world reflects back to us our divine nature.

Our bodies are mostly water. As we experience our divine light, the water within us is transformed into a state of harmony and health. As we transform our negative and defeatist way of thinking and consciously work on our thoughts and the words we use throughout the day, we heal our inner water as well as the waters in the world around us.

Practices

Find a body of water—either a beautiful place in nature or a nearby park that has a lake, pond, or stream—and sit near it. Moving water, such as a river, stream, or waterfall, can help to transport you away from ordinary concerns so that your inner wisdom can emerge. Watching the waves in the ocean creates a state of opening so you can listen to the messages of your soul. If you sit by the ocean, feel the waves welling up inside of you. If by a river or stream, drop into your sensory awareness of the flow of your inner water. A lake or pond might put you in touch with the stillness within you.

Listen to some music you find relaxing and expansive or to a drumming track. Lie or sit down, close your eyes, and hold the intention that you wish to experience the waters that run beneath and through the city where you live. Experience the waters and learn about the qualities of the water that runs through the land where you sit. Open to your sensory awareness and notice what you feel in your body as you do this.

Reflect on the people, trees, plants, animals, and other nature beings that live in your area. Meditate on how they reflect back the qualities of the water.

When you feel you are finished, return from your meditation. You may want to take some notes. Take a walk outside and tune in to the feel of the water running beneath the land. Even in a city there is groundwater in the land.

In some places the mighty rivers and oceans run strong. In other locations there might be gentle streams and still lakes feeding the land. Sometimes there are deep pools of water beneath the land that sustain the life that grows roots deep enough to find the water below.

Merging with water is a wonderful way to experience becoming one with the flow of life. Water flows in a natural and graceful way. It is a reflection of the divine feminine and reflects the nature of our soul. We can learn about the power and nature of water by merging with it. When we merge with an element, the teachings we receive go beyond mental understanding to have a physical impact on us as we become one with the energy of another living being.

In the natural world, when water is allowed to flow without restriction, it flows in the same form as a snake. Snake medicine teaches us about flowing and becoming one with the heartbeat of the Earth, with which we are all connected.

Listen to some drumming or relaxing and expansive music. Imagine becoming one with a source of water, such as a still lake, river, waterfall, the ocean, rain, or mist. Go deep within and experience yourself losing your own boundaries and becoming one with this water source. Learn about water by becoming water. Once again open your sensory awareness and notice all the feelings in your body as you do this.

Relax into being water. This is such a powerful and regenerating practice.

When you feel ready, disconnect from the water source you are merged with and gently come back to yourself and into the space where you physically are. Feel revitalized from your experience. Feel yourself grounded and present.

If you need some help with feeling more grounded after such an expansive practice, imagine deep roots growing out the soles of your feet into the earth. Or imagine sitting by a tree and leaning your body against it.

Make it a daily practice to honor water. As you wash yourself, the dishes, and so on, connect with water and give thanks for the way it sustains life. It also heals and cleanses us. As you drink water, give thanks to the life and nourishment that water brings to you. As we give thanks and bless water for all it shares, water will bless us in return.

We need to be conscious about what we put into water and not pollute that which gives us life. We can all start helping to clear it by radiating love while in the presence of water.

Listen to a piece of music that creates an expanded state of awareness. Set your intention to travel within to experience your inner light, your inner sun. Some people find it helpful to imagine merging with a star. A star does not try to shine; there is no effort involved. Nor does a star choose where its light shines. A star simply radiates light and brightens all of life. You can also meditate and simply imagine yourself stepping out of the coat of your body and sinking into your inner light.

Allow your divine light to nurture all the cells in your body. Absorb this light deeply into your cells and luxuriate in this light.

After about fifteen minutes of experiencing your divine light, return from this experience without disconnecting fully from your true spiritual nature as a luminous being.

Now drink a glass of water, and notice as you radiate and experience your light how smooth, fresh, and sweet the water tastes. It is the same water you drink each day, but as you allow yourself to experience and live from a state of light, water will always reflect back your luminosity.

Stay connected with your light as you function in the world. Notice if your perception shifts about others and the world as you experience your light shining through you. Go outside and observe how everything in life has a glow to it.

Incorporate a practice of lighting a candle in honor of your inner light. The flame of the candle will reflect your luminosity back to you.