Our Planet is a Wounded Healer
(( Earth Day special post ))
Since my Earth Day post last year, my relationship with nature has deepened. I’ve spent the time between growing native plants and sharing native seeds with community. Wildflowers took me by the hand this year and guided me to the wild nature within myself. I’ve been sitting next to old trees and bodies of water and opening my channel to receive downloads in the form of messages and songs and my nervous system is healing deeply.
Some days, I will start off on a path or sit down next to a lake totally dysregulated and within five minutes I will sigh and smile as my nervous system releases and my heart opens. There is nothing that makes me feel more peaceful, more centered, and more myself than nature, and it isn’t just me. Publications from Yale, Harvard and Stanford all point to the healing power of nature: reduction in anxiety, stress, and depression and improvement to overall well-being.
Our modern disconnection from nature—what Richard Louv calls a Nature-Deficit Disorder—is making us sick and we are waking up to this truth collectively. It makes perfect sense. We didn’t used to live around high-rises and highways. We weren’t inundated with screens and technology. We lived connected to our natural environment, our home: planet Earth.
We are remembering the pure amazement that we exist on this beautiful planet at all, and we are starting to heal our deepest wound—the loss of our connection to nature. As we heal we join a web of interconnectedness that allows us to understand the power of Earth who sustains us physically and also heals us spiritually.
Earth offers us the deepest love from a selfless well of abundance. As a part of nature, we are intrinsically tied to our planet, and remembering this ancient knowing allows us to feel safe, supported, and connected. In this kinship we also remember that we matter to Earth.
As we look into the chasm before us that holds all the systems that have decimated Earth and made us unwell, fostering a relationship with the ground we stand on is the key to moving forward. We must restore, protect, conserve, grow, but we must also take care of the spirit of Earth. When someone has been deeply mistreated, we understand that mending the body is part of healing, but we must also tend to the wounded spirit.
Earth needs a soul retrieval1 and because we are intrinsically linked with nature, because we are nature, because our collective of souls makes up a large part of the soul of the Earth, healing our own spirits could mean saving Earth’s life. Restoring our side of the relationship both heals Earth and heals ourselves and includes co-creation, stewardship, listening, honoring, reverence, and awe.
No matter how disconnected we feel now, we all have the DNA of present and/or ancient ancestors who understand that the relationship between Earth and self cannot be severed. We must wake up to the symbiosis we are already a part of, honor the ways our mutual relationship with Earth is beneficial, and cultivate that.
The spiritual is political and as we heal we begin to find our own gentleness. As awakened members of the web of life we want pollinators, birds, trees, wild animals, and ourselves to be well. We want to protect water, to protect life.2 We become engaged in land stewardship, conservation, eco-activism. The physical and spiritual acts begin to feed one another just as our caring for and honoring Earth literally sustains our lives.
To care for Earth’s spirit and in turn heal our own is to begin to transform the harm that has been done to Earth and ourselves.
Start where you are standing and let Earth guide you.
꩜ ꩜ ꩜
The Earth is a portal to the whole self.
Supportive practices in cultivating a healing relationship with nature are available in the Embodied Spirit 1:1 partnership.
Heal // Earth // Heal // Self
If you feel inspired, I am looking for people who are interested in joining and/or co-stewarding Rewilding ~ an emergent community practice in reconnection with Earth. Let me know and we can talk possibilities!
May we heal Earth as she heals us.
xo,
Emily
Shamanic practice aimed at recovering parts of the soul that may have been lost due to trauma or emotional distress.
I want to honor and give credit to indigenous people who have been stewarding the land, protecting the water, and caring for the spirit of Earth since time immemorial.