In the Forest: Inner Consciousness
Imagine we are all plants in a garden, all self-gardening each other.
We are all the gardeners as well as the gardened.
The only stipulation for participating in this lively dynamic is that we must push ourselves up through the dark black earth we have been planted into.
As seeds we must sprout into the sun.
This requires the right environmental conditions, to be sure…
...other than by giving it the space to do so, and cherishing the world we are all flowering into.
As plants, we contribute to the flourishing of the garden we all share simply by being part of it.
A brilliant nature, already in the seed.
As adults, we may be standing tall or sitting up, walking and talking, breathing and being busy
looking like grown, important plants—which we are—but we are also still the seeds, hidden inside the hard darkness of our genesis.
It is so exhausting, believing we are these plants at their apex, wrestling to govern and grace a garden we have yet to grow into… a belief strengthened by very real memory of indeed being fully flown flora.
We are fledged by the unseen scaffolding of our potential at the same time as we are chewed down by it.
And yet we must grow.
The only way as a seed we can even begin to serve a garden is by casting out the shoots of our very being and owning the nature we are a part of.
We help each other in life, not by endeavouring to do everything for another, but by HOLDING SPACE as we all discover our own effortlessness to bloom.
Such is self-remembrance. We prosper in this world through this ‘simple’ act of inherent being.
…and yet.
Most crucial to our health as plants are our ROOTS. Our stability and our strength, winding and weaving through an unconscious sea of fugitive solidity that each one of us stands in.
We can never bust through that ground enough to actually leave it; in fact our freedom depends on this terrestrial substructure too ‘beneath’ us to see, and the assistants to our existence too competent in their jobs for us to notice.
Shamanic practice works through the roots. Through the soils.
The unconscious fabric of our deepest thoughts and feelings.
We develop our awareness for the operative intelligence of these levels,
the pervasive stamina of our roots that seeks sustenance in the dirt we cannot fathom even needing, whether or not we truly do… we are all so hungry…
Shamanism develops our faculties of gardening these everchanging underground layers.
When our root systems join us in self-remembrance, we become capable of helping the other seedlings, even other roots, who entrust themselves to this very special kind of restoration.
Most fundamentally, through our roots we perceive the health of the soils we all sprout from and exchange energetic fluids with;
we can even put some sweat into improving its conditions, seeing and knowing its potential.
Because yes, toxins in the soil serve to shroud our remembrance,
force possibility into a mask, a costume of some proponent role bearing hollow likeness of our heart,
coercing our roots into a bondage that forgets freedom not feeling like fear.
When harmful conditions begin to afflict us in our roots, then root-level is the place we have to work.
Where we have to remember.
And we remember who we are, in part, by accepting and releasing who and what we are *not*
so WHO WE ARE has the space to arrive.
Shamanic healing tends to the hidden and invisible.
It deals with the obstructions and contaminants within our jurisdiction to clean up, freshening and replenishing a seed’s soils with the nutrition and power it most needs,
to welcome in sovereignty, and known memories of the zenith.
We are all plants in a garden, self-gardening each other.
We all share the license.
The garden thrives when we all thrive.
Again: we have to be willing.