Inspiration for Shifting Consciousness

This month I want to talk about ways of deepening our connections to places and beings in nature, and using those connections to strengthen the web of life.

Our bodies "know" connections to nature when we hike, garden, watch the moonrise, collect stones and shells. Our hearts remember our own and our children's joy in climbing trees, swimming in creeks, catching polliwogs. Yet we've mostly forgotten, in our minds, how to sustain our relations with mountains and trees from day to day. And we are culturally hesitant, being drawn to indigenous people but not fully believing we are relatives of earth and sky, deer and snake, mosquito and fish.

Even when we love the earth, our personal and cultural separation from nature can be a major source of dissonance and alienation. Working with intention and focus to strengthen connections and repair wha's broken, just as in any relationship, can be empowering, energizing, and exciting.

How can we shift our thought patterns? We need models for changing our consciousness, bringing our hearts and minds together, leading ourselves back into our indigenous souls.

A Different Cosmology

The Inca peoples believed that bridges to the sacred, pathways between the physical and the luminous, could be created with intent. Priest-shamans are said to have emanated brilliant rays of light that shone from windows in a building at Machu Picchu to the surrounding mountaintops. These lines of connection, called ceke lines, are a powerful part of Inca practice still carried on in the Peruvian Andes. Where ley lines are magnetic field connections that can be felt within the earth, ceke lines are human-and-earth created. As humans use intention and focus to visualize luminous fiber/light connections with natural formations--mountaintops, lakes, springs, and so on--the consciousness of those beings responds and reciprocates. Energy goes back and forth. For example, before an Andean person ingests cocoa leaves, she acknowledges this energy by naming and thanking each of the sacred mountains; then she chews. "We do not have much," one of the Q'ero shamans said to me, "so we get our energy from the mountains."

Connecting with Place

We can turn this ancient model into an easy daily practice, making conscious connection with places we love, places of power, places of childhood joy.

Here is one method: visualize a place you love, letting images of your various experiences there flash through your minds' eye, drawing invisible lines of heart connection between you and the place. Remember to gather energy as well as to send it. Experience the connection. Repeat with another place you love, perhaps a childhood haunt or a mountain you work with. Repeat with a third place. Begin to feel the vibrant web that interconnects you and these places, that interconnects us all. Repeat this every day, observing how your experience changes over time.

Another method is to incorporate this practice into the Earth-Cosmos Meditation, aligning yourself with earth and cosmos as well as your sacred places.

Where Can This Practice Lead?

In a park behind my house, there are two ancient Valley Oaks with whom I frequently make heart and well as physical connection. When the older of the two, estimated to be 350-400 years old (meaning she was born as Pilgrims were arriving in Jamestown!) sprouted a spongy fungus indicating rot a few weeks ago, I acted on two levels. One was the mundane, contacting various agencies and talking to the gardeners to make sure everything possible would be done to cure the tree. The other was the spiritual: journeying to the spirit of the tree to find what she needed, and gathering my journey group to honor her, do a ceremony, and make offerings to help her heal. I don't think I would have had the courage or the focus to make all this effort had I not been developing relationship with these two trees for years.

Similarly, the daily energetic connection I make with my places of power and source--four of the mountains around the San Francisco Bay, Mt. Shasta at the head of our bioregion, and several mountains in the Andes--have created a sense friendship and relationship that I rely on in my healing practice.

I learned recently that a dear friend will be bearing witness with Joan Halifax and others at Los Alamos in New Mexico on the upcoming 60th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I drew on my relationship with the mountains to plan my own witness, prayers, and contribution to healing the deep grief, fear, and suffering that have entered our world since those bombs were dropped.

I visioned a stone mandala, created by people everywhere, holding both personal and collective intent for peace, harmony, and consciousness-shifting. The mandala would be an anchor for all of our filaments to join in witness. Now two groups I belong to have begun this process. Holding a stone or a shell, each of us has connected with the places we love, imbuing our objects with the filaments of connection and intent. Our stones and shells will remain near Los Alamos, creating a web of energetic connections that we can continue to work with.

I invite you to join in this witness from wherever you are. Work with your own stones, make your own mandala if you will, and explore this practical application of spirit to matter and heart connections to healing the earth.