One morning recently I woke up to a lovely Earth embrace, sensing a large concave bowl under and around me. I felt held. Supported. Gratitude for being able to receive like this.

      Like many of you, I have had a difficult time learning how to receive. Feelings of not being deserving, not being enough, or “it’s my job to take care of everyone” mentality means we block everything from compliments to support from the more-than-human world. We put barriers up, unconsciously. We try to control everything rather than living in flow. Or we forget to slow down and listen.

      Receptivity is one of the four pillars of perception necessary to shift your consciousness. Writing about this in Weave the Heart of the Universe Into Your Life, I explain how animist people, in their innate culture of reciprocity, assume a flow of giving and receiving because we are all part of each other. Our interdependence, or as Thich Nat Hanh called it, inter-being, means that we inter-are. But in our Eurocentric, colonizer mentality, we are trained to think only of getting for ourselves (individuation not community) and extraction of natural resources.  So it’s work to decolonize our minds and dwell in our hearts.

      Imagine your favorite tree speaking to you, calling you to sit and exchange energy. Imagine the place you love embracing you and walking your path with you. Imagine being—channeling—the mountain when you speak for the earth! Imagine letting unendless grace flow through you. It takes time to learn. It’s worth it! 

The Eternal Song

      I am thinking about receptivity after being completely inspired this week watching The Eternal Song. It’s an amazing and beautiful film, along with a collection of live interviews with indigenous people from around the world, sponsored by SAND. 

      The interviews have helped me to understand my own journey. For more than half a life I’ve been searching for both mindset and lifeways to replace the one that our culture focuses on—extraction, exploitation, scarcity, individuality, and an ideology of contempt and envy. In the US we are seeing the resurgence and imposition of this mindset, personified by “Drill, Baby, Drill,” narratives that other and belittle all of us, and efforts to enhance wealth at the expense of the most vulnerable. 

      As I write my memoir I’ve been exploring how I was drawn to the Earth, indigenous wisdom, and shifting consciousness. Listening to indigenous wisdom keepers and activists has have deepened and broadened my understanding.

      I was lucky to meet the Q’ero, who lived in joyful and easy interconnection with clouds and condors, mountains and glaciers, and each other. Descendants of the Inca in Peru, they had largely escaped being colonized, so did not carry the trauma and heavy soul wounds that most indigenous peoples do. Learning with them was heart-filled.  It freed me from many cultural constructs that weighed me down with grief.

      I was blessed to learn from them energy alchemy, ways of releasing density and filling with the light and energy of the cosmos, along with their practice of ceremony and making offerings. And slowly, slowly, I learned both ceremonial giving and subtle ways of listening and receiving. 

      All this meant that I could bring my experiential learning and perception into my workshops, healing, and writing. I’ve become the bridge they invited me to be.

Diving Into The Eurocentric Mindset Will Help You Understand What Is Happening Now

      Shifting your energy and consciousness is way easier if you have a model to follow. Hearing perspectives that may feel uncomfortable or be new—like the effects of the Eurocentric, colonist mindset—your receptivity helps. I’m trying to give a brief summary of contrasts here. Not dualities, but attitudes to reflect on.

Extraction 

      Anastacio Peralta, Guaruru from Brazil, said in his interview, “Our mountains are sacred and we take care of them. The white man came and wanted to put the mountain in his pocket.“ He described how the white invaders wanted to make money and extract gold and other precious minerals, dam the water, excavate the mountain. He saw them doing everything they could to get the resources without giving anything back.  

      Wanting to extract is a very, very deep, embedded feeling in us. It’s a banner for the current US administration. Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery have come back in full force.

      In Peru I was witness to different ways of seeing. The first time I visited the Andes my teacher Americo took us from the Hacienda at 13,000 up higher into the treeless mountains with rocky, dry, sere, soil, looking down at an incredibly deep river valley and up at the sacred Mountain Ausangate. 

      One of the men from the village told us the story of the mining company that used Lidar infrared technology to take pictures of the inside the Earth, finding gold just beyond where we stood. When the company sent an exploration team, the people who lived nearby just came and stood, held their ground, rooted to their mountain, rooted to their land, resisting and refusing the invasion of a company that would dig, pollute the rivers, and make the villagers sick. They knew that both their land and they would suffer, while others got rich. 

      Destroying mountains is equivalent to destroying the bones of the mother.

      This is, of course, the same story that has repeated all over the world. It is why Standing Rock happened, why we join indigenous resistance of Big Oil and LNG pipelines, why we are showing up to say No Kings, no ICE, no genocide.

      An indigenous mindset means living in right relationship with the more-than-human-world. It means being in connection with trees and hawks, oceans and single-celled creatures. It means having the river running through you, rather than outside you as it does when you feel separate from everything. It means loving your land so much that you stand up to protect it and renew it. You teach each other people about, it taking them to your sacred mountain or your special place. When we’re deep enough into connection we can receive the hug of the mountain and hear the call of the Grandmother Redwood as we walk toward her. These are great blessings. 

Individualization

      In our inherited colonial mentality, part of the land theft in the Americas, India, Asia, Australia, and Africa meant destroying community, collective practices, and culture. We forced our own ideas of me-first onto people around the world. The thinking that goes “What can I get for myself? How much money can I earn? How can I move ahead of the other person?“

      In our world now, this thinking is so embedded it’s usually unconscious. We don’t even notice that we’re putting ourselves first, with an ideology of contempt and envy, or that our natural habit is to feel competition with everybody else, believe there are not enough resources, and feel like we’re not enough unless we get more.

      One example is the work being done now to uncover cultural trauma. Pervasive everywhere due to ancestral and land loss, severing of connection, war, and genocide, it inhabits our stories of soul loss, depression, and loneliness. Embedded in our psyches, it feeds conflict personal and national. 

      But in the Western model of the individual, therapy is seen as personal. The therapist rarely thinks about the effects of community or the larger world on our mental health. Your depression is your private hell, not due to the state of your country or the way your ancestors were treated.

      In contrast, community reciprocity, celebration, and healing are built into the social fabric of indigenous cultures. They heal in community—not just with the human community, but with the lands, waters, and ecosystems they inhabit. A despacho is an example—created outside, calling in the mountains and spirits, being offered back to fire or earth. One of the pleasures of being a shamanic practitioner is learning the ceremonies of many cultures and experiencing how they shift big energies!

      It’s kind of obvious when you think about it, but trying to heal all those traumas in isolation from each other and from community doesn’t get us very far. It is a different mindset, being heart-guided and healing in community, resisting in community, building community, and living in a conscious relationship with everyone and everything around us. We have to work hard to learn as we unlearn our own selfishness and step out of isolation into the whole.

Links:    Weave the Heart of the Universe Into Your Life

              The Eternal Song