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

For my husband, Mattuck

Let the rivers run

Earth Spirit Dreaming

This precious book will help you rediscover, or perhaps uncover for the first time, your vital connection to our endangered, though still enchanted, Earth. Inspired by traditional wisdom, leading-edge science, and ecosophical thought, the simple but profound exercises lead one out of the spiritual wasteland of the industrial growth society and into an experience of the deeper ecological self, a self as ancient as the seasons and rooted in the nourishing cycles of life.

SEAN KELLY, Ph.D., philosopher, professor, and author ofComing Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era

Its almost clich to realize that reconnecting to the Earth is of paramount importance if humanityor some significant portion thereofis to survive and thrive into the next century. But an intellectual realization is only a first step. We need to practice having an ongoing felt sense of this connection. Elizabeth Meacham offers a dazzling, just-in-the-nick-of-time collection of practices to do just that.

BILL PFEIFFER, deep ecologist, teacher, shamanic guide, founder and director of the Sacred Earth Network, and author of Wild Earth, Wild Soul

As climate catastrophe forces us to confront a world dangerously out of balance, there is a vital need to reconnect with the deep wisdom of the Earth. Our common home is not a resource to be exploited but a living magical being who needs our love and attention. Elizabeth Meacham returns us to our shamanic heritage, awakening us to our embodied spiritual intelligence. With simple but powerful practices she shows how to bring light and healing to our suffering planet and become co-creators of a new dream for humanity and the Earth. Earth Spirit Dreaming offers valuable tools to re-vision a world both whole and holy, a gateway to the love and joy and truth to be found as we become more firmly rooted in the Earth.

LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE, Ph.D., teacher, author, Sufi mystic, and editor of Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

Acknowledgements

F irst and foremost, I thank the Great Spirit of the Universe, Divine Creator, Holy Spirit, Shekhinah, God, the Source of all Love, for my life and all that is good. Thank you to my husband, Mattuck Meacham, for making my dreams possible and for long discussions as we each imagined our books into the world together. Thank you to my children for bringing so much joy to my life and hope for a better world.

A special thank-you to my dear friend and colleague, Nurete Brenner, for helping me honor my earthy-spiritual intelligence, and for years of reflection and feedback on the ideas in this book. Thank you to Bill Pfeiffer, for helping me trust my path and for input on my book proposal and early chapters. Thank you to Christopher Bache for guiding me to Findhorn Press, for his lovely foreword and general support and inspiring conversations about our work.

Thank you to my dad and beloved stepmother, Terry and Nancy Elsberry, for their constant love, encouragement and support for my work; to my sister, Anne Warrington, for always believing in me; to my mother, Jan Sturgis, for birthing me, raising me and teaching me that women can be gifted and powerful spiritual leaders; to my dear friends, Heidi Abrams and Ellen Hoffman, for their patient emotional support through the process of writing this book.

I am grateful to Sabine Weeke, and the team at Findhorn Press, for capturing and expressing the essence of my book with grace and integrity. Sabines calm and steady hand made the editing process smooth and delightful.

Thank you, also, to my excellent and encouraging editor, Jacqui Lewis, and to Damian Keenen for the beautiful text design and layout. Heartfelt gratitude to Richard Crookes for a stunning and perceptive cover. Also, thank you to Jon Graham, at Inner Traditions, for sticking with this book.

Finally, a special thank-you to Jill Mattuck Tarule, for encouraging me to trust my own ways of knowing and to follow my star. May her memory and lifes work continue to be a blessing.

Foreword

W hat joyful medicine this beautiful book by Liz Meacham is. If there is a more important undertaking at this point in history than reconnecting with the Earth, I dont know what it is. Were we to make a list of the most serious challenges confronting us today, most of them would trace back in one way or another to a deep cleavage between ourselves and nature, between our mind and the mind that gave birth to the universe. If there is a core deficit that threatens to engulf us, it is that we have lost contact with the life that lives in all things and so feel ourselves adrift in the infinite expanse of space and time.

In many ways our self-estrangement is no ones fault. Some would say it was even inevitable that in exercising our burgeoning capacities we would push ourselves away from that which holds us. We have dethroned so many gods, outgrown so many visions of what is true that our isolation feels like the inevitable cost of our self-advancement. Perhaps it is. And yet, as we rush headlong into the greatest extinction of life on this planet in 65 million years, as we deplete the oceans, drain our aquifers and destabilize our climate, we know that something is terribly wrong. Somewhere in our magnificent development we have lost something that we desperately need if we are to thrive here.

The many social, political and technological innovations we must enact in order to change the destructive course we are on will likely fail if they are not grounded in a deeper experience of our connection to the life that surrounds and sustains us. But how can we rekindle our sense of place and presence? How can we re-ground ourselves in the sacred spirituality of embodiment? This is where Earth Spirit Dreaming is so very helpful.

Liz Meacham is well versed in environmental philosophy and religious thought. She understands how we got here and has internalized the insights of the great eco-visionaries of our time. But it is in the practical exercises she offers in this remarkable book that we see her true genius. Here we see the light touch of a master of her form, sharing strategies of embodied awakening. She has refined and polished these practices through years of application and assessment, first in her university courses and then at the Lake Erie Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, which she founded and co-directs. These practices change lives.

I have always envied people who come into this world with a natural transparency to subtle dimensions. Its not been my gift, so I enjoy being around people like Liz who have this sensitivity wired in. What I especially love about Liz is how she translates her sensitivity into exercises that everyone can do. Through these simple practices we can begin to remember what we have forgotten, to recover what we have lost. There is nothing paranormal about them, she says. It is simply a matter of grounding ourselves more deeply in the touch and sound and pulse of nature. From here our boundaries slowly open, and we begin to engage with a larger life, an older life that is both us and more than us.