EARTH
Welcome to Earth Element
The earth is your body; the earth is the solid ground that supports you. Earth is a path toward embodiment, not escape. This course encourages movement and connection to physicality and the body’s deep inner knowing.
Once I traveled all the way from Colorado to the Coromandel, New Zealand, to begin assisting my yoga teacher Shanti with a yoga teacher training. I had been living in a Tibetan Buddhist Center, where we did a lot of seated meditation practices. When I entered the room, he turned in his chair at the dining table, took one look at me, and bellowed, “no more seated practices!”
We need to bring our bodies along, and all their accompanying sensations and limitations, and pain and sweetness. As we befriend the body, as we source from its guidance, uncoil the tension caused by pushing, neglecting or avoiding its subtle persistent promptings, we enter into a relationship of trust like nothing we have known.
Matt Licata suggests:
For just one second, shift your awareness out of the claustrophobia and spinning of conditioned thinking and into the soles of your feet as they make contact with the earth. Root there, into the mud and womb.
It’s not so safe in those old patterns of thinking – enactments of intergenerational trauma and trance. Allow your attention to come up out of the earth and infuse your belly, your heart, and your throat, with compassion, holding, and breath. Holy data.
Renew your vow: I will not turn from myself and abandon my embodied vulnerability. No, not this time. I will no longer pathologize my emotional experience, the somatic narrative, the story of my nervous system.
The lion’s roar: Grief is not pathology. Heartbreak is not pathology. Sensitivity is not pathology. Not pathology, but path.
Two seconds. Then rest. Then three. More rest. As we send breath into the broken shards, into the lost pieces of soul, a new groove is laid down, new circuity is encoded. As we turn the light around, a new pathway appears.
Ask the earth to hold you, to share her soothing water, shade, and safe haven, and stay near as you open.
Find a friend, therapist, lover, ocean, moon, star, or holy roaring lion to bear witness as you turn into the raw alive somatic world.
The seen and unseen ones are always here to help us, to reveal the way home. To illuminate the pathways of darkness and of light, each containing a particle of the mystery, a strand of love seeking you as a tender vessel through which it can come alive here.
“The earth is the body of the Divine. Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth comes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered.”
— Sue Monk Kidd
Affirmations for the Earth Element:
I belong
I accept things as they are; there is nothing to transcend; divinity arrives in all my experiences
Pawanmuktasana Joint Freeing Series
We begin our movement with a sequence I found unutterably unsexy when I was young and mostly wanted to tone my muscles. Now, it feels like luxurious self care, hydrating the joints and promoting the flow of synovial fluid. It is a good series to practice regularly for a period of time at first. Then, you can choose a few movements to open and/or close your asana practice.
Earth Yoga
Long, slow, holds. Connect to the body and the breath. Send awareness into the lower half. We root and ground over and over again. The container we inhabit prepares for expansion. As we return to rooted movement day after day, we slowly notice that we can sense our truth, turn toward our longing, know where to go. We embody trust. As with any relationship, we are cautious at first. We keep testing the waters. We turn toward tenderness. We rest when we need. Our strength lies in surrender.
Earth Element Pranayama
Explore how the breath can anchor us to the present and to our bodies when we are triggered and deepen into the experience of the three part yogic breath.
Mudra for the Earth Element
Labyrinth Ceremony Introduction
Labyrinth Ceremony: Spiral into the Self
To take this journey, you are welcome to make your own labyrinth, three coils, of stones or shells or rope or twisted blankets.
When you enter a labyrinth for a personal ceremony, use this playlist or create your own with three songs for the three stages:
Release
Receive
Return
Gratitude Offering
The despacho is a gratitude offering to the earth. Gratitude becomes a superpower when we take time to alchemize everything that happens to us. We honor each experience as a gift from a benevolent universe. When we do this, the magic that results is a sense of partnership with life, weaving the tapestry of threads together, supported: that breakup was a way for you to learn your own beauty and to imagine a more fulfilling partnership. Losing that job put you firmly on a trajectory toward your soul purpose. etc… As we give thanks for each moment, we can hone in on the feeling we want and release attachment to the specifics. We get more free.
Rochelle Schiek, Qoya founder, says: Dreaming is tender because it reveals a fundamental belief system about your relationship to love and life. I think of the lyrics in the song "Glorious" by MaMuse when they sing:
“Oh what a day, glorious, it’s a friendly mystery.”
Of course, when we are in our trauma or trigger points, it doesn’t feel friendly! That’s real. Sometimes dancing helps, breathing helps, and looking at the light on the water helps.
To close the Earth Module, here is a poem by Joy Harjo, with specific instructions about how to heal, to live whole, in a good way, on this precious Earth.
For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
by Joy Harjo
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.
Open the door, then close it behind you.
Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
Give it back with gratitude.
If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.
Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.
Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.
Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.
Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.
Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
Do not hold regrets.
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
Ask for forgiveness.
Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.
Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.
Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.
Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.
Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.