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

Mushroom - Sandra
Wood Sorrel and Mushroom

I can easily engage my full sensory awareness and imagine wandering through the landscape of a forest floor filled with thousands of clover plants. I can feel an inner smile forming as I come upon patches of Wood Sorrel. I can feel the joy of the plant itself, and I can see the visions of the faerie folk shimmering and dancing. Opening to such a deep experience reminds me of the magic of life, and I sense excitement and passion rising through my body.

After reading what Llyn wrote on Wood Sorrel, I reflect on which nature being excites me, makes me laugh and smile, when I visit with it. What reminds me of the pure magic of life?

At first I tried to come up with a plant that would be similar to Wood Sorrel, but as I sank into my own truth, I kept being brought back to my magical relationship with Mushroom.

Yes, there are plenty of mushrooms in the desert, and I will get to that.

In Speaking with Nature both Llyn and I encourage you to open up your imagination to connect with the nature beings that call to you where you live. You might connect with the nature beings in the wilderness or in the waters. Or you might connect with the nature beings in your garden, or in a park in the city where you live.

There is so much life and wonder in nature! No doubt some of you were surprised by various nature beings Llyn and I chose to write about, such as Glacial Silt and Sand or Banana Slug and Earthworm. We typically limit our connection to certain nature spirits that are spoken about in popular culture and collective associations, so the important teaching to embrace is that all living beings are part of the web of life. Our survival is based on the health of all the living beings in our Earth community, for whatever happens to one life form affects the entire web of life. We are not separate from other living beings; rather, we are all connected. All nature beings are to be honored for their life as well as their contribution to the health of the web of life that connects us all.

There are seemingly unlimited numbers of living beings sharing this Earth with us, and when you spend significant amounts of time in nature, you come across animals, birds, insects, reptiles, fish, sea mammals, invertebrates, algae, plants, trees, fungi, moss, rocks, minerals, and even microorganisms that call out to the depths of your soul. They might not be living beings you normally anticipate when you look forward to time in nature.

As you walk in the outdoors, you may suddenly find yourself drawn to a being that makes itself undeniably present to you. You might find yourself surprised and awed as you are drawn to explore an area caught out of the corner of your eye. Or you might even be drawn off the path by a feeling that tells you to look down or up, turn left or right. A scent or sound might call you to explore its source. As you sit by the ocean, a river, or lake there might be a nature being who lives in the water who attracts your attention.

When you are attracted and called to a nature spirit, it could be that this being is an ally for you. An ally calls to you in the visible and invisible realms to befriend you. It can actually feel like kin.

These allies might not vocalize a message. You may hear a telepathic message, be shown an omen, have a dream, or feel in your bones an invitation from your ally.

When I see saguaro cactus on trips to Arizona, I always remark to people that saguaro and I come from the same home in the stars.

I feel the same about Mushroom. I don’t know what it is and I cannot explain this rationally, but when I see a mushroom in nature, I feel joy pulsing through my body. I am simply entranced with mushrooms. I rarely cook or eat mushrooms, so my affinity is not associated with the taste of them as food. It is a spirit connection I feel; Mushroom and I have a deep soul connection. I love them unconditionally and refer to them as the “mushroom people.” They are family. Being around Mushroom not only brings me joy, it also gives me a comfort and peace that I do not always feel in my life.

When I come across mushrooms in nature, I take photos of them. I probably have more photos of mushrooms than many people have of their loved ones.

In the Santa Fe high desert, mushrooms grow proud and strong, and most are edible. Many species of mushrooms seem to appear overnight, and some grow and expand very quickly. This is where the expressions “to mushroom” and “pop up like a mushroom” originate.

My husband and I once had a friend visiting from California who happened to be a mycologist. Imagine my excitement! He picked the white button mushrooms growing outside of our house and made an omelet with them.

White button mushroom is a fungi with a stem that grows out of the ground, wide top cap, and gills on the underside of the cap. The spores are produced on the gills and fall in a fine rain of powder from under the cap.

As I tune in to mushrooms growing here in Santa Fe, I immediately feel a quality of earth that is different from what is found in the desert. I have been writing about the dry sand in the arroyo, but Mushroom needs moisture and grows in the shade. As soon as the summer rains come to Santa Fe, mushrooms pop up everywhere on the forest floor.

Then when I close my eyes, I smell the fragrance of moist, rich earth in contrast to the dry-air smell of the desert. I might forget I am in the high desert. I can imagine elves and faeries dancing under the shelter of the mushrooms.

Mushrooms are such special beings, with so many varieties, and many are nature’s healers. Mushrooms are used to shrink cancerous tumors and boost the immune system and to consume and transmute radiation and chemical pollution. And there are mushrooms that communicate with and teach initiates on a spiritual path. These mushrooms might provide initiates with healing, prophetic dreams, visions, and the ability to communicate with the spiritual realm. Eating psychotropic mushrooms can lead an initiate into a numinous state.

There are also mushrooms that are deadly to anyone foolish—or ignorant—enough to eat them.

The practice of shamanism teaches that we dream life into being, and Mushroom is one of the nature beings I associate with the power to dream into being what we desire to create for the planet and ourselves. In the essay I wrote on Snake, I encouraged you to practice enlivening your senses. In order to be a conscious dreamer, you must be able to be in touch with all your visible and invisible senses.

Our destiny is to be dreamers. It is how we birth spirit into form as the creative forces of the universe created form from spirit.

I am passionate about teaching people how to dream. We all daydream and use our imaginations with every thought we have and each word we use and send into the collective. Most of us are not aware of the chaos, destruction, and violence we are dreaming into being. We must wake up to our innate creative power. With intention, concentration, and focus, we can create a good life for ourselves and for all in the web of life. If we stand strong together as a global community and use the power of focused intent, we can dream a new fabric of reality into being, because the fabric that no longer serves life continues to unravel. We can dream into being a world that embraces love, light, peace, joy, good health, abundance, and equality for all.

The paradox of stepping into our role as dreamers is also to learn to let go of our attachment and surrender the outcome of our dreams to spirit. Most of us are walking the path of ego versus the path of spirit, and spirit has a different perception of what might lead us to our highest level of healing and evolution.

To move from the path of ego to the path of spirit takes a tremendous amount of personal work, for we really must devote time and energy to exploring how our personality tries to run us. We must examine the unhealthy behaviors we learned as children to help us cope with life and feel safe. I advise people who devote themselves to spiritual practice to add work that focuses on exploring and working through emotional and behavioral issues. It is also important to strengthen the physical body to create a strong, healthy, and vital vessel of radiant light for delving into spiritual work.

Some people shy away from dreaming work due to egoic fear that they will create a dream that does not result in the best ultimate outcome for their highest good. This fear is valid, because from a personality level we often do not know what is for our highest good. As we engage in personal work, we learn to identify what is desired from ego versus Spirit.

At the same time we do dream our lives into being with our every thought throughout the day. Why not focus our daydreams on creating the vision we want to see? We must have a vision for ourselves and the world for life to continue. The key is to establish a dreaming practice with intention while surrendering the outcome. But we must do the work.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with the process of creation and manifestation—how we can manifest a life filled with joy. As an adult I’ve read many esoteric texts and performed an abundance of shamanic journeys exploring the process of creation and manifestation and had spontaneous visions over the years that provided great insight into the work. What I learned has become a focus of the practices I write about and teach.

We are experiencing so many challenges in politics, the economy, and the environment that it is important to hold a healthy and positive vision for the planet. To do this we must be able to imagine the world in which we wish to live. We must engage all our senses—seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting—to be able to fully imagine ourselves living in a world that embraces love, light, harmony, beauty, peace, abundance, and equality for all.

Take a few moments to imagine what our experience would be if people around the world focused together to use their imaginations in a way that created a return to a harmonious way of life.

What would that world look, smell, feel, and sound like? Imagine the scenes you would see.

See yourself living in a world filled with love, peace, and abundance for all. Open to a wealth of images, colors, people, and other life that inhabit the landscape along with you.

Listen to all the sounds of life and nature coming from such a joyful bright state. Listen to the sounds of children laughing, the birds singing, the wind, and any source of water.

Feel the joy flowing through you as you live in a world filled with love, peace, and harmony. How would it feel to walk on the earth and touch all that is alive? Feel your feet connecting with the earth.

Place some of the earth in your hands and feel it. Touch plants and leaves and branches of trees. Feel the bark of a tree.

Run your hands through the soft fur of an animal you have befriended.

Feel your heart beating and the quality of your energy flowing through your body. Notice any sensations in your fingers, hands, toes, and feet.

Smell the clean fresh air. Take a deep breath in and smell the scent of plant life, the earth, or any water in your surroundings. On your exhale, share the energy of your love and joy for life.

Imagine eating food that was grown with love and without chemicals and pesticides. Taste the clean fresh food cooked with love. Lick your lips. Fully engage your sense of taste as you drink and swallow water.

Connect fully with the beauty of the elements as you daydream. Imagine yourself swimming in an ocean, river, or lake. Feel the water playing with you. Place your fingers in the earth and experience yourself interacting with it in a loving and joyful way. Run and skip in the wind and feel it playing with your hair. Bask in the power and beauty of the sunlight, starlight, and moonlight.

Experience yourself living a life filled with radiance, love, joy, and peace right now.

To project a new vision for the planet, you must be able to engage the depth of your senses, thus fueling your imagination and creative abilities. You also must be passionate about what you desire.

You need to step into the dream fully and live from the dream, occupying and fully inhabiting the space. You want to experience yourself fully alive and living in the dream you are creating. Do not project your creation into the future. Experience it as your creation has manifested now.

The key to doing your dreaming work is to be able to engage your strong inner senses with your own vivid images, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings. You need to be able to create your own powerful movie by living in the movie, instead of simply watching it. And you need to fuel your senses with intense enthusiasm. Stop allowing the outside world to write your script, and let your new script be created and birthed from your inner world. Use the depth of your senses to make your creations real.

If you cannot get in touch with the true power of your own vivid images, your own internal songs of creation, the beauty of the fragrances you wish to smell, the taste of healthy food grown and cooked with love, and the feeling of touching the beauty of life, there is no power in your creation. If your creation is not fueled by passion and enthusiasm, there is no power in what you project into the world. If your creative work is superficial and lacks depth and power, the world will reflect superficiality back to you.

I feel so strongly that this is a vital missing piece. So much of our creative work simply lacks passion and depth, but we must nevertheless experience compassion for ourselves and be patient with this process. We live disconnected from nature and surround ourselves with continual input from TV, computers, DVDs, CDs, and a myriad of other distractions that mask our ability to get in touch with the depth of our inner senses.

We need to have the patience to awaken the depth of the wealth of our inner senses. We need to revive our passion and remember times when we felt passion that fueled our lives.

Continue the practices I shared in Snake, but now add your imagination to open to your inner sensory awareness. Find times in the day when you can go within to bring up your own vivid images and your own songs. Focus on smelling fragrances that you love and tasting foods you enjoy. Imagine yourself walking around and touching different textures that feel good to you. Practice before you go to sleep or when you awaken. The intensity with which you can experience the senses in your inner world will directly affect your ability to create what you desire in the outer world.

When I engage in practices to get in touch with my inner divine light, I experience the void. The void is the territory prior to creation. In Buddhist teachings the void is seen as empty, yet full. The void is a powerful territory to experience. It is the place from which form and light are birthed.

While in the void one is surrounded by complete blackness filled with unpotentiated energy. Anything can be created from this place. Once visiting and working with the void, it becomes obvious that scarcity is a human-made concept. Only unlimited possibilities can be manifested from the void.

Spirit is birthed into form within and through the void, and many people experience the void when they transfigure into their divine light. It is powerful to work with the void during dreaming work. If you would like to visit the void, you’ll find instructions in the practices below.

It is important to keep up your spiritual work and hold a good vision no matter what you see happening in the world. We are living in a time when the fabric of reality is unraveling. As we continue to examine unhealthy behaviors in lifestyle and ways we mistreat other humans, nonhuman living beings, and the environment, our dreams can start to create the new healthy fabric of reality. Instead of imagining the worst outcomes, let us use our imaginations to embrace a positive vision.

The spiritual work we engage in supplies the power to create positive changes in the world. Let us join together as a global community to envision a healthy planet.

We can learn from nature how to join together from a place of cooperation and collaboration to thrive and to sustain life. Let us join together in the spirit of cooperation and collaboration with the power of focused intent to dream into being a beautiful and healthy world.

Practices

Take a walk in a park or in a rural area. Walk with “soft eyes” as you gaze into the beauty of the landscape around you. To walk with soft eyes means that you allow your gaze to drift—you are aware of your environment without looking intensely at your surroundings. You can also sit by a body of water and let your mind wander. Let your internal radar guide you toward something that catches your attention out of the corner of your eye, or be aware of an intuitive feeling that a nature being is calling to you. Notice if a nature being such as a bird, mammal, tree, plant, insect, reptile, fungi, rock, or mineral presents itself to you as an ally. If you are sitting by a body of water, notice if a nature being that lives in the water calls to you. Trust your intuitive knowing. Keep your heart open and engage in a state of true awe and wonder at the all exquisite beings who live on the earth, in the air, and in water. You might be pleasantly surprised at who presents itself to you as an ally.

Once you meet your ally, open up both your visible and invisible senses to begin communicating with it. Shamans learned from the trees, plants, animals, and other nature beings by sitting with them, observing their qualities, and communicating through deep listening. Learn what special qualities of life this nature being has to share with you. For example, a nature being might teach you about the power of stillness, how to connect in deeper ways to yourself and the Earth, or maybe how, with your invisible sense of sight, you can fly above your life to observe it from another vantage point, broadening your perspective. Learn which valuable lessons this ally has to teach you. Learn through your ongoing communication with it how it can be a support in your life and share its power and knowledge with you.

When you begin to experience your connection with the web of life, you will find yourself feeling more gratitude for your life and the life forms that coexist with you. Living from a state of gratitude is one of the most important elements you can bring into your daily practice.

Each morning as you wake up give thanks for your life. Give thanks to earth, air, water, and sun for providing what you need to thrive. Give thanks to your ancestors who gave you life as well as the gifts and strengths you inherited from them. Give thanks for the nature beings that live on the Earth with you.

As you continue to engage in spiritual work, your gratitude list will naturally keep growing. You will find that your life starts to move into a place of harmony as you do this. You will also feel better emotionally and physically, which will help you to ride out the challenging times from a place of strength and grace.

Listen to a meditative piece of music or a track of shamanic music. You can also find a nice peaceful place in nature where you can sit quietly without being disturbed. Imagine yourself traveling within to a hidden place that I call the Cave of Lost Dreams. Simply by setting an intention to do so, travel into this imaginal realm to discover and identify a dream or wish that you have forgotten. In the past you might not have felt confident about your ability to manifest this dream. Or you might have felt you did not deserve to receive the goodness in life that would come from dreaming this dream into being. In this place, discover a dream you would like to manifest. Retrieve this dream and bring it into the light. Find times in the day to perform your dreaming work as I described in this essay, to work on manifesting this dream. It is time for you to experience the goodness that life has to offer.

Continue to work with the dreams you feel inspired to manifest from spirit into form. Over time you will naturally weave this work more and more into your daily life. Right before falling asleep is a potent time to do your work of engaging all your senses to create the world in which you wish to live.

If you would like to travel to the void, it is easy to do. Start with some meditative music or listening to a drumming track.

I suggest that you set your intention to visit and experience your own inner void. What is without is also within you. Performing your dreaming and creation work from the inner void will fuel the power of your work.

Intention is the key to traveling into any spiritual territory you wish to explore. With your eyes closed, listen to the music and state your intention.

Travel within to your inner landscape. Experience the void—the place right before creation. Feel the pulsating of potential and possibilities that exist in that space.

Take a few minutes to experience the sensation of unpotentiated energy. And then begin to form your dream. Engage all your senses, feel the passion that fuels creation, put yourself into the dream, and experience the form birthing into the world. It is done!

Work with focus and full concentration as you continue your creation work. At the same time, surrender your outcome to spirit.