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As we are all so fully aware, our lands are increasingly under duress in ways unprecedented in recent human memory. At least here in the USA, the systematic pillaging of every resource these lands have to offer continues unabated. And within this context, many individuals have recognized a problem and have taken up spiritual paths focusing on the earth itself in various ways. The question becomes–what can I, as one person, do? We are going to delve not only into physical land healing through things like permaculture, but also the frameworks of druid magic and ritual to understand the different kinds of healing that can be done.
When we think about “land healing” this is a very wide category, and in it, I see a number of potential practices, some of which are direct physical healing, some of which are indirect, and some of which are energetic.
#1: Regenerating Land: Direct Physical Healing. This is the healing of the physical land on the material plane. These practices include a wide range of things: replanting, regenerating, tending the wilds, cleaning up toxins, river cleanup, converting lawns into food forests or organic gardens, conserving and restoring wild lands. Lots of people are doing various things on this front, and certainly, permaculture design, as well as restoration and conservation activities fall into this category. A number of my recent posts have been in this area: my series of posts on refugia, weeds, healing hands, permaculture practices, etc. Of course, the land has to be in a damaged state, in the process of healing, or in need of healing for this kind of practice to be effective. I think that this kind of healing, combined with energetic healing, is one of the best things you can do to heal our lands–if you are able and if the situation warrants it.
#2: Healing human-land connections. An indirect method of healing the land, which can lead to work in these other areas, is working to build your own relationship with the land and to help others do the same. This includes everything from herbal practice to earth ambassadorship, creating community, or advocacy work. So here are two examples of this: a series of classes I’ve been recently teaching in herbalism, for example, not only empower people to take care of their own health, but reconnect them with plants immediately in their landscape and help restore that human-land connection (and I also teach them the three permaculture ethics as part of herbal practice). A second way I’ve engaged with this work is by co-founding a permaculture meetup where we brought people together each month to talk about sustainable practices and reconnect with the land. Is this direct healing of the physical land? No, but it is working directly to heal the disconnection that has happened between the land and her children, and so I also consider this healing work. Its extremely important to heal these connections for long-term viability and stability.
#3: Energetic healing work. Now we move into direct healing that can be done on the non-physical planes. This kind of healing is a fantastic compliment to the two areas above (and ideally, healing of the land should include all of these firs three areas), but can also be done independently of direct physical healing work. Performing healing ritual and engaging in magical work to help heal our lands is a particularly useful tool where recovery and regeneration is a top priority. You might see this as a way to restore the energetic drain of a long sickness or weakened state–you are raising energy to help it recover. Lots of possibilities for this kind of energetic healing work exist. You might performing various kinds of ceremony, which can take place and connect to the etheric or astral planes, working with various currents of energy for healing work. You might engage in energetic healing like reiki, which works on the etheric plane.
#4: Energetic Palliative care. As an energetic land healer, its critical to understand the difference between healing and palliative care. Palliative care what we do to help sooth the suffering, to help the land sleep or be energetically distanced from what is physically occurring. Think about someone that you’ve known who is really, really sick, and who is in for a long illness or battle with a disease that is ongoing. You see them suffering, and the best you can do is try to soothe the wounds, let them rest until the worst is over. If you try to raise a bunch of positive energy on lands actively being damgae for the distinct purpose of healing, it can be like waking up that sick persno. In fact, the whole reason I was motivated to write this post was to identify this distinct difference. In my experience in working on a variety of distressed landscapes (logging, toxic streams and waterways, strip mined land, poisoned waters, oil pipelines) I know that healing can only take place where there is opportunity for physical regeneration. The whole idea of healing is to restore and regenerate–you can’t do that if there is active destruction taking place. You still can do energetic work, but you do not want it to be directed towards the purposes of regeneration or recover, but rather soothing the worst of the suffering.
#5: Shifting Actions: Direct and Indirect mitigation of damage. The last thing I’ll mention today is shifting actions. Shifting your actions to consume less and create less of a burden on the land is not a method of land healing, but it is a method of mitigation and prevention. You might consider this a kind of “preventative care.”This shift is the kinds of behaviors and actions that we do in order to mitigate further damage, to reduce our impact on the land, and so on. This typically happens through various kinds of “sustainable” practices and earth-centered living: a lot of options presented to us by mainstream society fall in here (and many of the not-so-mainstream).
Energetic Healing vs. Palliative Care
Energetic Land Healing implies that you are raising some kind of positive energy to help enliven, awaken, and rejuvenate the land. One way to think about this energy is like giving someone who is has had an extended sickness some good chicken soup and herbs that are restorative and energizing in nature, and helping set them more firmly on their path towards healing. You may help someone who hasn’t walked in a while get up and take a few steps and encourage them in many ways. This energizes them, it enlivens them, and it allows them to more quickly heal from their illness. Energetic land healing functions in much the same way, with the goal being to raise positive energy for the land to help it regenerate physically and spiritually.
If you go to a place in desperate need of energetic healing, you’ll often feel a deadness there, a wrongness, either stagnation like nothing is moving, or other energetic problems. It may be very closed off and skittish, like an abused animal, withdrawing and staying far away from any sign of new potential abuse. I usually feel these feelings in the pit of my stomach. Our English language lacks good terminology for how this feels, but its that heaviness and sadness you feel at a site that has been severely damaged and is struggling to heal, and doesn’t want humans to enact any more damage. The longer the abuse has gone on, and the most serious the abuse, the more you’ll feel it using whatever spiritual senses you have (heck, even people not very attuned usually can feel it at strong sites). The site, as it regrows and heals, eventually resonates differently, feeling healthier and happier as the land can regrow around it. But you’ll also see the first signs of regrowth and life at these sites. (Most of my experience in this area, by the way, is from logged forests and poisoned rivers returning to health–its possible that different kinds of sites would resonate differently than I’m describing here!)
Palliative care is a very different thing. There are places on our physical landscape that do not need a jolt of healing energy–they need the opposite. They need to be put to sleep, to be reduced in vibration and awareness, because the pain is just too great. Sites where active pain and suffering on behalf of the land, the animals, and anything else there are good examples: and as I’ll demonstrate in the latter part of this post, poisoned waterways and fracking sites are two of those sites.
Energetically, sites in need of palliative care often feel differently than those in need of energetic healing. Usually, sites in need of palliative care feel like they are actively suffering. They are awake through a horrific experience, and they actively suffer and mourn. For example, once I was driving to a friend’s house on a new route and I was struck with this awful feeling–suffering, pain, misery, all through my stomach. I had to pull over, and as I did, I got out of the car and climbed up on the ridge to see what lay beyond it. There was an enormous strip mine that was stripping the land for gravel–hundreds of acres, horrible pools of chemically treated water. It felt utterly horrible (nearly all of these kinds of mines do, I’ve found in the time since). I uttered a short prayer for the land, promised to return, and went home and decided my next course of action (I didn’t feel prepared that day, and I had to meditate on what to do for the mine). This was a site not in need of energetic healing (as it was actively being destroyed) but palliative care.
Actively destroyed sites aren’t the only ones in need of palliative care, however. The most tragic, perhaps, are the sites that are fine at present, but are destined to be destroyed or stripped in the near future. These are the hardest cases, in my opinion, because you are powerless to stop what is going to happen and the vibrant, living beings there are trapped and powerless–fear and mourning often radiates these sites. But here, you can do something, and that something is palliative care. You might think about a forest that is about to be logged or is in the process of being logged, but the loggers haven’t yet gotten to the area where you are at. The last thing you want to do is inject this space with healing energy and light–you want to put it to sleep, to soothe the wounds, to try to provide some energetic distance between the forest and the chainsaw.
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