Of my awakening love for the earth
Author: Gerlinde Henritte Stark
Issue No: 95
“You wonderful Goddess, ancient wise Mother, Earth!
Your love is so full of power and meaning,
You fill unreservedly with life of beauty and form,
Only in trusting devotion to you
your unconditional holding and nourishing love becomes perceptible,
I feel my roots in You, I can grow out of You – grow up and create a gentle connection
be a gentle connection between You and heaven – one heart!”
The author leads us with sensitivity into her inner world, which on the one hand is characterised by a growing love for the earth and life, but on the other hand these experiences of harmony are pushed into the background by everyday difficulties and conflicts. In her descriptions, one can recognise oneself and embark together on a search for the supposedly forgotten that slumbers in our bodies and hearts.
I lie in bed, the day was dense and full. My feet have been in direct contact with the earth the whole time. They sing me a goodnight song; they sing of love for the earth and speak of all the experiences of today. The cells of the soles of my feet vibrate and sound quite alive; how powerful and awake they still are. It’s nice to listen to their stories and I smile inside. This power is bursting with sensuality and erotic longing. It flows through my whole body and celebrates me at the end of the day. I bathe in love, the Eros, what I am. Peacefully I fall asleep.
When the soles of my feet touch the bare ground of Mother Earth and my skin cells are saturated and warmed by the sun, there is no doubt, I am loved simply because I am. For this pulsating life force says nothing else but.
“You are – and just as you are, you are precious and beautiful, just nature”.
Under these conditions, the mind has no chance to tell me the old story that my worth is dependent on achievements or any limiting conditions on the outside. The moment my earthly-celestial parents can inform my body with their power and I set my sensory instrument body to receive and go into conscious skin contact with the earth, their love reaches my mind and heart. The feminine elemental force flows and pulses into me from below; it connects my lower pelvic heart with my upper feeling centre. Both dance in harmony with the heart of the earth. They sing of peace, of the love of life and the wild, creative-erotic procreative power that we all harbour in our hara. The taste is sweet, the smell like a flower meadow and the power lifts me far beyond my little self.
From this, however, one cannot conclude that Plato was hostile to the body: Socrates, the ideal type of the Platonic philosopher, has a wife and three children, two of whom he fathered at an advanced age (cf. Phaid. 60a, 116b). He drinks wine (cf. symp. 214a) and always relativises his renunciation of the body by numerous turns of phrase: “insofar as there is no great necessity” (Phaid. 64d), “insofar as possible” (ibid. 64e, 65c), “as much as possible” (ibid. 65a, c, e, 66a, 67a, c), etc. He is far from an ascetic way of life.
Security in nature
So when the tender, warming sun can sink through my sensual skin to the marrow of my bones, the feeling of security spreads – a held, safe and warm sinking into my own depths. Everything is welcome in this feminine love space, even the old heaviness. However, she is not in charge here now. It cannot determine who I am here. For it is clear, “I am honourable nature”: I am sun, I am made of the stuff of the dark earth; I am wind and breath that refreshes me and expands me as I blow; I am the fire of power in my veins of blood.
In the playful exchange of information with all the beings of the earth that surround me, it seems to me that we earthly beings do nothing but lustfully remind each other of who we are. This is what fulfils us in the exchange, what really nourishes us; this makes us happy and then we feel lovingly connected: The crucial point here is my receptivity, my presence and my willingness to take this information of the universe into my consciousness, to let myself be touched in my consciousness, to let myself be led into the one being. In that space we are all brothers and sisters. In this touch, remembering suddenly becomes very easy, thinking recedes into the background and the feeling of being touched regains its natural order in relation to the thinking mind. Infinite peace sets in.
That sounds very beautiful, but what is it like when contact between us humans leads to discord, to friction? Why do I avoid this contact under tension, I asked myself yesterday. I’ll get to the bottom of this question right away today, after I had a conflict with my neighbour yesterday. She wants the door in the hallway to be closed at all times because of rats, and she hangs up a note to that effect. I want to tell her that I don’t like these notes. After the conversation, I notice that we had an almost identical dialogue not so long ago. I continue to search for clues and bring the situation back to me internally. Just before I step into the common room with my neighbour, I prepare a few sentences that I inwardly let my higher judge ego sign off on. So there is someone who says inside, you are right.
So there must also be something in me that questions this right. In a matter of seconds, the social framework of this contact catapults me into an automated, conditioned programme of thinking, acting and feeling, which seems to be triggered without my conscious intervention.
This seems familiar, for the umpteenth time I end up in a room in which I control feelings, say calm words, justify myself, argue, as if it were a matter of finding out what is more right or more correct. Whereas my ego has already decided in advance that mine is more right than this fear of rats. The latter finds its needs more understandable and defends itself against those of others, all in a shell of apparent external respect. Rapid electric fire programmes speak words and sentences. We are both in a social programme loop: “Do not feel fear under any circumstances, do not let it enter your consciousness. You don’t feel fear of people, certainly not because of such a small trifle.”
Again and again I forget, I especially forget when I am with people, who I am and thus who my counterpart is.
Without being aware of it, I lose my consciousness, and by feeling my mind so big, I think I am conscious. The fear of rejection, of punishment, rejection, of not being loved, has such a grip on me that the nervous system takes over as the sole survival guide, and without me knowing it, and that for such a teeny tiny trifle. That’s really gross. So in reality I take refuge from fear – my neighbour might tell me that I’m not right – in thought programmes that do solve the conflict on the outside, so I close the door … but there remains a pale feeling of being out of touch, of distance and separation in the aftermath. We have not lived remembering, but cultivated forgetting.
The war within me
I don’t perceive my deep inner truth, the child in me is supposed to pull itself together, for the hundred thousandth time. In doing so, I confirm the old programme again and again. How can I get out, how can I find the anchor, the switch back into my consciousness? How can I remember to press the switch of consciousness directly? How can I embrace my inner child who is afraid, even if I don’t feel it at the moment, preferably already in preparation for the conversation? And then listen to my neighbour while my little one’s fear relaxes on my arm. I become receptive, I talk less, still hear, no longer feel attacked. The note from my neighbour has made something in me think I’ve done something wrong, and something in me wants to be heard, wants to tell her I’m right. So she has only made me aware of an already existing war inside me, which has nothing to do with her at all. I’m still listening, and there’s not much to say, in the end.
we are the door then falls into its fluid positions all by itself.
In the present space of our unconditionally open awareness, heaviness, fear and deep pain are also welcome. Here, no one needs to hide or be ashamed any more. Even shame has its place here. Everything is allowed to expand in a conscious, motherly space of “I am held”. If we mentally interfere in a non-judgemental way with the unfolding of our inner energy space, an expansion to the maximum takes place, like the inflation of a balloon. It bursts quite naturally as a result of the increase in energy: something ruptures, dies and at the same time something new is born. The untouched consciousness of all being flows back into the whole. A mystical, mysteriously alchemical process of change and transformation: in fire, light experiences redemption and thus restores connection and unity. So too the fire of friction, which ignites, causes the pressure to rise until the ego bubble bursts and the space now cleansed opens the way to connection. We often want to go straight to harmony and then end up in hypocrisy. There is no shortcut, the ego has to burst. The forms this bursting can take are very variable: from explosive totally externalised to tenderly gentle deep inside.
The way is not to judge anything, and then to awaken in awareness and be truly free to choose in thoughts, feelings, words and deeds.
About the author:
For many years Henriette has been calling people to conscious feeling. She guides you past your symptoms, whether on the outside or inside your body, to your root wound, past all fears. Gently and sensitively she holds a safe space for you in which everything is allowed to be. Traumas from the past can thus be released from their rigidity and flow back into the heart. The soul breathes again. Shamanic energy medicine supports the process of releasing the heavy energies in the depths so that the heart and the body open to receive the soul self that is now flowing back.
This article was originally published on the German website: Wieder erinnern lassen
