Last month, I wrote that when our lines of connection to other living beings are dimmed, our access to understanding the connections available to us in nature becomes limited. Inherent in connection is the possibility for reciprocity, and thus, for mutual enrichment, enchantment, and healing.
There is another aspect to reciprocity, and that is rest. I recently gave an online workshop as part of a program called Seven Days of Rest. Dr. Shelley Ostroff, co-founder of Ecogovernance, meditated to ask our Earth what we could do to help in our current crises. What she received was, “Seven days of rest.” It makes sense. There are billions of us humans emanating negative energy—restless, worried, competing for resources, fighting—and the air is full of various kinds of waves and electrical fields pulsing everywhere.
Reconnection Ecology® offers a path to return to our true place within an expanded community of all Life, and it is there, in the connection with other living beings, that we can rest and heal. We are supported by the flow of fresh energy and sense of companionship that courses through the connection. In the process of exchange lies renewal and the possibility of profound joy through communion.
Also inherent in connection is the concept of relationship. In the wonderful book, We Are the Middle of Forever, authors Stan Rushworth and Dahr Jamail interview 20 indigenous leaders who offer their perspectives on how we got into our current crises and how to get out of it. The overall theme was reverence and relationship to our Earth and all living beings—the loss of it, and the need for reinstating it in our ways of living.
In order to do this, first we need to rest, developing an inner quietness so we can tune to nature.
One way of cultivating reciprocity, reverence, rest and relationship with our Earth is a practice common to indigenous peoples: to walk over her surface at the pace of the Earth. Then we can feel her resonance (7.83Hertz, sometimes called the Earth’s heartbeat), close to the resonance of the human body. Rest comes from vibrating in harmony with her resonance rather than hurriedly skimming over the ground on the way to somewhere.
To deal with our crises we need to make a radical shift in how we’re living, our values, what we need, and what we attend to. While seemingly difficult at first, this can lead to real fulfillment as well as a thriving Earth. The beginning of that radical shift is to rest, tune, and listen to a wisdom greater than ours in which we are embedded.
