The call to Earth work

Earth work is a calling. It’s not something you decide to do in advance of beginning to carry out the work. You don’t decide to train for it either, though you may in fact be training (apprenticing) for it unawares. In Earth work, as in any form of healing, some higher authority — Nature, God, the Universe, the Deep Ancestors, label this whatever you like — choses you and, once you express your willingness to comply, usually by accepting the first assignment, the appropriate energies align and whoever needs your help automatically crosses your path at just the right moment. Doing Earth work isn’t regular — it comes in bursts, in flows — and you have to pay attention to the subtle signs Nature employs so you know when you’re being tapped for the next round.

I’ll use my own story as a case in point. By the late 1990s, I had trained sufficiently as an energyworker through teachers, reading, and direct experience to open a hands-on healing practice in my home for human clients. I set up the spare bedroom as a treatment room, advertised a little and let word of mouth percolate through the community, and began attracting clients at just the right pace. I kept a detailed confidential log for each client, for reference only. There was a beautiful reciprocity to the work: I both helped and was helped by each client, learning a lot in the process. Little did I know then that this experience was laying the foundation for a related but separate practice as a land and Earth worker.

In early 2001, my client load began to fall off. From my perspective, nothing had changed in my practice yet fewer and fewer clients were showing up. I pondered this. Was it just a fallow time so I could recharge? Or was change in the offing? And if so, for what purpose?

In late spring 2001, I started noticing a subtle shift in orientation, a movement toward something as yet amorphous. This was confirmed and clarified for me while attending a talk given by my Jin Shin Tara teacher, Stephania Mines. In discussing trauma and shock, the central focus of the Tara approach, she mentioned the amygdala, the part of the human brain that holds memories with strong emotional content. She said the amygdala rapidly and continuously scans the brain for trauma sites and can become fixated, stuck in a trauma-and-shock loop that’s difficult to break out of. The end result: we keep revisiting the same experiences through amygdala looping, reinforcing them and the patterns they create, effectively re-traumatizing and re-shocking ourselves over and over. Abruptly, unexpectedly, a new set of questions arose within me, questions fundamental to planetary healing: What is the amygdala of the Earth? As it scans the planet, is this Earth “organ” stuck in a perpetual loop that reinforces patterns of planetary violence? And, if so…how do we break this cycle?!

So began an investigation not only of the amygdala of the Earth but of other Earth “organs.” I realized there wouldn’t be a one-to-one correspondence between human and Earth parts — the Earth is simply too complex and Earth processes too nonlinear. Nevertheless the investigation proved provocative and moved me into proto-Earth work. The events of 9/11/2001, which I’ve written about elsewhere on this website (see The Shards and other EW Journal posts), solidified the change, and I’ve heeded the call to Earth work ever since. What I learned as a hands-on healer still applies; I work with energy in much the same way, though the “body” is different. I also use the same treatment room for most of my sessions (in a meditative state, collaborating with an interdimensional team), and I keep a detailed log which I revisit from time to time and from which I draw for this and other communiqués.

During 2011, the call has taken a different form — creating this website. But I sense a burst of new meditative/experiential work in the pipeline for me later in 2012 into 2013. That will surely produce a flurry of new posts here as well!

 

 

 

 

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