Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

Foreword

What 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 don’t 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 one’s 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. It’s 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.

Earth Spirit Dreaming is deeply needed medicine for our times and a true gift to the world.

Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D.

Author of Dark Night, Early Dawn and

LSD and the Mind of the Universe