Reclaiming a spiritual birthright

(First posted on the Caroline Myss Facebook fan page 1/13/10)

Happy New Year everyone! And a special heartfelt thank you to Caroline (and David Smith) for offering me this forum to write about what’s happening on our beloved planet and how it affects our spiritual lives. My thanks as well to all of you who emailed me after my first newsletter. I appreciate your many kind comments, questions and support.

In the last newsletter I talked about how our first chakra, located in our tailbones, is the fundamental base of our energetic consciousness, the very foundation of what we could call our spiritual skeleton (what Caroline refers to as our “energy spinal column”). It is through this “root” chakra that our physical, social, emotional and immune systems merge with our primary connection to the earth and nature itself. When we objectify the earth and its creatures as mere things put here for us to use up, we shatter that connection. We are then out of balance at a very basic level and lose a vital sense of our relatedness to one another and the earth. We also shut ourselves off from an ancient capacity to see the earth clearly and understand it in ways we once could, automatically and intuitively. We feel the loss of this “second nature” keenly because it is a part of our spiritual birthright to be one with, in tune with, our earth. As the visionary ecologist Paul Hawken says, “We are nature.” We are it and it is us. When we find ways to reconnect to the earth—when we awaken to this truth—we also connect more fully to our spirits, gaining a deeper understanding of not only the earth but our own humanity.

“If you think of ourselves coming out of the earth,” said Joseph Campbell, “we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.” It has always been so, and we are taught of our earthbound connection in some of the earliest stories we hear. In the book of Genesis, for example, the first human life form is created from dirt. The first two human beings set up housekeeping in a garden. It doesn’t get any more basic than that. We eat and drink the products of the earth. We breathe its oxygen. We sleep under its skies. We return to it when we die. There is no cycle of our lives that does not include it at every second. To be so disconnected from it as to have no sense of its presence everywhere in our lives is to lose one of the most primal balancing components of our bodies and spirits. And reconnecting begins with simple acts that teach us how to listen to and appreciate our intuitive brains, the invisible piece of us that once showed us how to work in harmony with the climate, the land and the resources of our planetary home. With our “earth consciousness” pointing the way, we can find these opportunities for awakening right in front of our faces and often they land in the cultural consciousness at just the right moment.

It’s no cosmic accident, for example, that it is during this period of the year that Native Americans call the “looks within” time—when we are both beset by alarming headlines about the state of our climate and the earth’s health and already craving the sight of green grass and the feel of warmer air—that a film like Avatar arrived on the world scene. As an eye-pleasing and exciting fable that uses advanced 3-D technology to literally deliver its brave new world into your lap while you watch, its initial success (it broke records by becoming the first film to gross over $1 billion in its first 17 days) may come from a deeper appeal.

Avatar’s director James Cameron sets his story on the planetary moon of Pandora, a place where the first chakra and its cosmic truth of All is One is intact and fully operational. It’s a bucolic world where rhythm, balance and symbiosis are fundamental, its inhabitants live in harmony with their planet, each other and all its life forms, and their most sacred spot is a giant tree not unlike one of our own giant sequoias (just MUCH bigger). This, the filmmaker seems to be saying, is what a conscious Eden looks like, what a true garden feels like, what congruence and connection with your planet means. Indeed, every life form on Pandora has a physical “connector” that lets it bond to other life forms. When the film’s hero leaps aboard a horse and connects the end of his hair braid to the animal’s, he’s jolted by the sensation that makes his eyes snap. This is what connection to their web of life feels like and how intimate their spiritual connections to the planet and each other are—and he likes what he feels. When interviewed last summer, Cameron said the fictional Na’vi people of Pandora “represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are." In the film when the characters say, “I see you,” they model this higher self and its heightened level of awareness, where “see” means more than what their eyes are capable of capturing. They mean seeing through to the soul of the other, to the piece of something they both belong to and understand, their common connection to the planet that gives them everything. (As if to underscore the importance of “seeing,” it’s no accident that the film begins and ends with moments of awakening.)

Cameron and his vast technical production team used a technical process called stereoscopic filmmaking that enables a hyper-realistic science fiction story (“animation” doesn’t begin to describe the film’s look), in which scenes of the devastation and horror being wrought on the planet are so disturbing that I heard people groaning and even sobbing at what they saw. While film has always had the ability to transport us—and Avatar is certainly a great visual feast that’s just plain fun to look at—this film seems to have touched a significant chord. Perhaps it is the ultra-real vision of savage destruction of something as beautiful and benign as Pandora that hits too close to home. Or perhaps like Jake, the film’s protagonist—a hybrid being who straddles two worlds with opposing needs and values, we too long to exist in bodies that are more connected to our planet and a community that nurtures our souls. Like him, many of us are looking for our own individual path to that evolutionary rebirth that will help us recapture our own sense of belonging on the planet we call home.

What you can do
For those of us in the northern hemisphere January marks the real settling in of winter, the time to slow down, go within, cocoon and do our inner work. While many of us look out and see still, white, frozen landscapes, the truth is that beneath the surface, the earth is never busier, renewing itself in preparation for the riot of blossom and new life we call spring. It is now that animal young nestle and grow in the wombs of their mothers. It is during these months beneath the brown and snow-covered mantle of the earth, that life—much of it invisible—is in motion. But even in areas where the climate is milder and what’s visible changes little—as is true in the south and much of the west coast in the United States—this internal rhythm, set to the longer nights and shorter days, is part of the same cycle. Winter’s shift inward reflects more than mere temperature and weather. Rather it’s a recognition of an ancient sensual and internal pulse. January invites us to envision new beginnings and goals. With long periods of darkness slowly shifting to longer periods of daylight, it is the perfect time to pack in new sensations, to look at our relationship to the earth and resolve to deepen it by learning more about it, becoming more aware of its rhythms, and honoring its centrality to our lives.

There are many good, entertaining and useful ways to take advantage of this “looks within” time of the year. Here are a few suggestions:

o CATCH UP on some of the fabulous books available on every green and earth-based topic you can imagine. If you are interested in how to see the earth anew, check out Paul Devereux’s brilliant book, Re-Visioning the Earth: a Guide to Opening the Healing Channels Between Mind and Nature. If you haven’t yet heard of or read any of the books that Michael Pollan has written, start now while there are only half a dozen to catch up on. Pollan, who writes regularly for the New York Times is a biologist who found his calling in teaching us how to look at our food differently, as if our health depended on it, which it turns out it does. His most recent three, Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and his newest, Food Rules: An Eaters Manifesto have single-handedly changed the national discourse on nutrition. Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry is another good book written in celebration of good fresh food healthfully grown. If you want to think ahead to the fun you plan to have in your garden this spring, read Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
o WATCH a documentary. There are so many out there with new ones becoming available monthly. It’s so much easier these days to make a film about something you believe in passionately. While there are still a good many films being underwritten by the studio system, lots of gifted documentarians aren’t waiting to be signed by big studios or even independents. They’re following their passions and getting their own works filmed, edited and distributed in small venues if necessary. Some recent good films are Dirt, The Movie, which tells the fascinating story of the declining state of our soil in the world, Trashed, which describes one of the fastest growing industries in the world (what we throw away in North America is eye-poppingly disturbing) and Food, Inc., an examination of the safety and viability of the food commonly available for mass consumption in markets today.
o CREATE something. Take a pottery class and work with clay. Learn to knit or weave fabrics. If you know how (or want to learn), build a birdhouse or bird feeder from recycled wood. Feel the joy of making something with your own hands out of materials that come from the earth and its creatures.
o SEE what you see. Madison Avenue used to have a term for an awakening that happened to a consumer who had just bought something for the first time. It was called “target attraction.” Once you buy something you’ve never had before—a new model car for example—suddenly you feel like you’re seeing that same model car everywhere. There were just as many of those cars out there before you bought yours; it just means they weren’t on your radar. Target attraction works for other things that come into your life anew. When you have a child, it seems there are suddenly babies everywhere. If you shave your head, the world seems much balder than before. As winter progresses, what’s on your earth radar? What keeps getting your attention? What seems to be everywhere you turn these days?
o CELEBRATE. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” Every effort you make to understand the place you live in nature—however you make that happen—opens a door. Inside every door lies the gift of insight. Enjoy it and be grateful for it. Then go do something else.