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The Energies of Sacred Place August, 2010
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Greetings!
A few weeks
ago I walked along the wind-swept ridge of one of my favorite mountains. Fog
obscured familiar canyons, the ocean, and the bay below. A steep moss-covered
hill below the ridge offered protection and I sat in silence, listening to this
mountain teacher once again. Her deep peace filled me. Our slow breathing
together, and being together, became my world.
It
is possibilities like these I want to share with you in writing about sacred
place this month. The direct experience of the sacred through the natural world
is the essence of shamanism, and of European pagan traditions as well.
You
social media users can now share this newsletter on your favorite sites! See
link at bottom.
And a note for the computer challenged: any word underlined in the
newsletter is a web link to further information. For example, if you wanted to go
to our website, you'd click on Earth Caretakers.
As always, I welcome your feedback and look forward to
hearing your experiences with shifting your own consciousness. May your days be
full of wonderful connections with sacred place!Meg Beeler
Earth CaretakersAncient TanBark Oak, Mt. Tamalpais  |
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The Energies of Sacred
Place
"We do
not have to learn the language of Mother Earth. We are all born with it, we all
carry it and we all know it,
we only
have to remember it. Then we can listen and then we can respect what we all are
a part of." -- Morten Wolf Storeide
"Nature
is a mirror of the Sacred: it includes us, but also transcends us; parts of it
are perceptible to our senses, but as a whole it defies comprehension." -- Andras Corban-Arthen
"One
form of meditation is listening to the silence. When you listen to the profound
silence of the stone or the voice of the tree you are hearing the voice of the
spirit. When you finally hear the silence you will find out that your heart is
an instrument of music...and the silence of the night of time makes it possible
for the spirit to come to you and make this instrument
play." -- Americo Yabar
"Miracles
occur when there are no boundaries." -- Sandra Ingerman
What makes
a place so special that humans feel the energy and notice the power? What is it
that draws us in, opens us up, lets us access deep wisdom and our own spiritual
reverence in places of power?
Our own
ancestors and indigenous peoples worldwide responded to landscape: mountain,
river, or butte in the middle of the plains became places for ceremony. The
home place became the "center of the world" in story, practice, and spirit. Our
ancestors listened to earth energies, locating places of unusual physical
magnetism and remarkable geologic formation that we now call places of power.
Some
civilizations made simple cairns or paintings to honor the sacred, at places
like Ayers Rock in Australia and Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Other civilizations
built amazing structures, as at Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo in the Sacred
Valley in Peru and the Potala Palace in Tibet. Teotihuac�n, Chartres, St.
Peters, and most Catholic cathedrals were built on top of the sacred sits of
conquered civilizations, dating as far back as Neolithic times. What's
remarkable about all these earth centers is the very long use, by successive
cultures, augmenting and building the energy and power of place with reverence,
ceremony, and relationship.
Honoring
the Sacred Where We Live
It is
wonderful to feel the palpable power in such places around the world,
especially when it opens doorways into our own visionary experiences. And it is
equally important to find and create sacred place in our own lands. We sustain
both ourselves and our earth when we honor the sacred where we live, feeding it
and letting it feed us.
I often sit
at the top of the small woodland hill above my house, looking south down Sonoma
Valley to the San Francisco Bay, west and east to the mountains that rim our
valley. It is, as you can imagine, a wondrous and beautiful landscape. Before
these recent times of ownership, my tribe or band would have gathered in a
place like this, roamed the mountain for food and medicine, named the sacred
rocks and peaks, had special places for ceremony, initiation, and gathering.
So spirit
guided me, a few years ago, to create a medicine wheel on my hill. It was to be
a place especially for "visioning the future" and a place for people to gather
and share in the beauty. As the wheel took form, a portal for exploring
personal and collective "dreaming," as the Aboriginals call it, emerged. I
watch the power grow and the energy becoming more palpable each year. We are
creating a "sacred hoop" of people, earth, and spirit, a field of
consciousness. We are learning once again that the earth responds to us in
reciprocity when we take the time to give to her.
A Mountain Speaks
Often, internal silence and stillness let us hear deeply:
I am the mountain. I grow Yerba
Santa and Yarrow out of my dry hardscrabble soil. I am warm inside, deep,
bone-connected to the other mountains. Hidden springs course through my bones,
flowing into the water that covers me and surrounds me. The bay lies across my
body, filling my curves and crevices.
I receive those who lie upon me,
who breathe with me. Our veins merge in the letting go.
I am the old mountain, rising and
falling through the eons in great breaths. I breathe in with the sea, heave
with the tides. My breath is deep, my rhythm is deep, rolling across the whole
earth, displacing continents. Stars burn my great breath as I exhale.
I am dry, parched: disrupted on
my surface, skin ripped into by bulldozers, roots torn asunder and replaced by
foreign plants. Fog bathes me, cooling my surface. Feeding my growth. Bringing
my spring water back to me on my breath.
I am solid. I am moving. I am
mountain, I am bones. I am surface, I am deep. I am hard; I am soft, receptive.
I am quiet, I howl. I see far, I am enshrouded. I breathe deep, I am
suffocated. I am old, I am starting again each day. I have seen generations,
and everything is new: each moment, each breath; each moment, each breath; each
moment, each breath.
Portals and Energetic Openings
The ancients believed that physical places and astrological
moments can create portals, or openings, that help us make shifts in our
perceptions and our lives. Wisdom and energy is sometimes "sealed" in a place
to protect sacred knowledge (both Incas and Tibetans did this) until it is time
for it to be revealed; many prophesies say that this is such a time. Long use
of a place by ancestors (indigenous or otherwise) can be felt, heard, tapped
into when we listen carefully.
Portals are also created when human and earth energies are
combined with intent: in ceremony, prayer, vision quest, offering, and
celebration. The stronger a sacred site's continuous use, the easier it is to
feel the power. Our experiences at sacred sites come from this energetic
component, along with the beauty we see,
At places
of power, the energies held at the place make it easier to access other
dimensions and move outside the space-time continuum. We may be able to "see"
back in time, or feel human emotions from long-ago events. A simple meditation
may take us into deep knowing, or the place itself may transport us.
This
happened to me, spontaneously, at an ancient Inca power site which is still
used for shamanic encuentro (meeting). Instructed to meditate, I sat quietly
for a long time. Nothing happened. Then:
Eagle comes to sit beside me. A
second eagle arrives. My double flies up to the apu [spirit of the mountain]
with Eagle. Traversing the range alongside the Sacred Valley, soaring down the
Urubamba River past Machu Picchu, we travel all the way to the jungle.
In the dense jungle my body
disintegrates. I am frightened as my arms and legs fall off and my body decays.
I watch myself become compost along with rotting trees and vines. Working hard
not to run from or interrupt the image, I observe the compost for a long time.
Finally, I emerge a seed, fresh and new, like a phoenix, and return with Eagle
to Chinchero.
This apucheta (energetic opening, portal) allowed me to step into a different
consciousness, outside of "time." We might call this boundary-less,
all-that-is, or unity consciousness. What's important is that the dimensions
are fluid and the indwelling spirit of place is accessible to us if we listen.
Creating
Our Own
Weaving nature (the physical) and spirit (the mystical)
together, we can significantly empower both our actions and our connections. Thinking
at the forefront of quantum physics and biology affirms these possibilities!
Living not in relationship, but as relationship lets us open the
boundaries we keep around us.
Making
ceremony, we deepen connection and set our intention to feed the beauty of the
world. Making ceremony, we create invisible filaments to the numinous. We
create fields of consciousness which remain, and to which we can return.
It is my
hope to inspire you with these ideas and insights about sacred place. Find and
create your own place. Notice a beautiful and unusual landscape. Develop a deep
relationship with the land. Spend time in the space, experiencing quiet, open,
undisturbed peace; rest in the sounds of whistling bird wings, leaves shuffling
in the wind, bees searching for nectar; let your body sink into the earth. Make
offerings. Let the land become sacred to your heart. In our holographic
universe, what we do here reverberates everywhere.
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Star
Being Ceremony 9/19
In the
Andean tradition, star despacho ceremonies (ch'aska) are offered in times like
these to address major environmental events. Join us on San Bruno Mountain south
of San Francisco on September 19 to make this offering "to bring star energy
down to earth to assist us in the difficult times that are coming." This will
be the fifth of these star despacho offerings around the Bay in which we are
creating subtle energy links between our own meridians, earth's seqe (ley)
lines, and the star beings.
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Meditating on the Wild
Mountain
Explore
more about listening deeply and entering sacred space close to home (San Bruno
Mountain) in Meditating on the Wild Mountain.
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His
Holiness 10/12
His
Holiness the Dalai Lama will give a teaching entitled Eight Verses of Training the Mind: Awakening
the Heart of Compassion, in San Jose on October 12. Reading the Eight Verses is part of His Holiness' regular
practice, and he describes it as one of his main sources of inspiration.
Tickets and information.
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Bioneers
10/15-17
At the annual
Bioneers Conference, social and scientific innovators focus on hopeful solutions
inspired by nature and human ingenuity for people and planet. In San Rafael on
October 15-17 (or via telecast in many communities). Attend and discover
powerful opportunities and strategies for creating positive change in your
work, life and community.
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Earth
Medicine Conference 11/6-7
Ginny
Anderson and I will offer an experiential presentation, Sacred Mountains of
the Bay, with guided visualization, photographs, and participatory ceremony,
at the first Earth Medicine Alliance Conference in San Francisco, Nov 6-7. The conference focuses on deepening our understanding of and
relationships with the land, and wisdom sharing
between all of us with our diverse,
earth-honoring ways. Register here.
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Alchemy
of Light and Heavy Energy 11/13-14
All of us
are challenged to maintain our energy, power, balance, and connection in these
times of transition. Join us for this two-day experiential workshop to develop
your skills in releasing the heavy, gathering in the light, and transforming
your own energy and awareness on an ongoing basis. I'll teach you profoundly
simple and practical ways of working with the "living energy" of the universe,
based on 10 years of implementing these Andean energy healing practices in my life.
Nov. 13-14 in Sonoma. Register.
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Sonoran
Desert Observed
Wonderful
article on a man who has walked the same trail every week for 30 years,
observing and collecting data just because he was curious. Now climate
scientists are using his data to understand the complexities of plant and
animal response to increasing temperatures over these 30 years. "It's a hike of
12,700 miles. It's one journey. It's not a separate thing," he says.
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Leave
Oil Behind!
End the
era of oil and transition to sustainable sources of energy! Read and sign the
Gulf Declaration.
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Catch Up on Consciousness
You can find last month's newsletter, "Learning from Trees," and read other, previous versions of Shifting Consciousness News here.
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Consultation
Empower yourself and step into your radiance, wisdom, and wholeness with Earth Caretakers healing sessions. Meg offers shamanic consultations and energy healing, private instruction, soul retrieval, Munay-Ki
transmissions, workshops, and the Sacred Earth Shamanic Apprenticeship. You can also read articles relating to this work. Email or call our office at 1-707-939-7961 to make your appointment.
A client writes, "I really, really, appreciate your gentle, thoughtful, loving, knowledgeable kindness and guidance during this entire process. It has been life-changing for me."
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