A Druid’s Primer on Physical and Energetic Land Healing, Part I

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?  As you’ve noticed, a good deal of my time in the last year of blogging (or more) has been exploring this question from various angles and details. And so, I want to share a bit today of the different angles from which we might consider the answer to this question both energetically and physically–providing a roadmap for this kind of work and specifying its dimensions. This means 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.

This is the first in a larger series of posts.  Please continue reading the series here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, and Part VIII.

The Idea of Healing

Its useful to start by defining the thing we are undertaking before actually undertaking it. And so, we begin with definitions of the word “heal”, compliments of Merriam Webster. For the word “heal”, we have three definitions:

• : 1 a :  to make sound or whole <heal a wound> 2b :to restore to health; 2 a :  to cause (an undesirable condition) to be overcome
• 2b :  to patch up (a breach or division) <heal a breach between friends>
• 3 :  to restore to original purity or integrity <healed of sin>.
  

All three of these definitions are directly applicable in different ways to the idea of healing the land.  So, in definition one, we can identify that the land is in a damaged state, and we talk about that damage in various ways: its physically wounded, in ways we can directly see. But its also energetically wounded in ways we can sense. The land is in a damaged state, both physically and energetically (what I mean by energetically, I’ll get to in a minute), and in need of healing. This is really no different than thinking about a person who has been the victim of a violent crime–there are physical wounds you can see, but there are also mental and non-physical ones. The physical wounds have to be treated in a much different way than the non-physical ones, and treating only physical wounds will not make a person “sound and whole.”

This leads us directly to the second definition: to patch up a breech or division.  With the maiming and exploitation of the land comes a loss of trust, a division between the earth and humanity on a systematic and large scale. We are certainly the earth’s children, but we have lost our way and in that process, violated the sacred compact between humans and the land that achieves balance and ensures everyone’s continued survival. Trust, then, is something that needs to be rebuilt. This can be done through a number of means, and I’ve found the best combination is working both physically and energetically.

And now we come to our 3rd definition, which is that healing is often about restoring something to its wholeness and completeness.  That’s the ultimate goal of land healing, but its not necessarily something that we can do in every place at this time.  This third definition is important to keep in mind as we consider the different types of healing we are able to do, given our challenged circumstances.

As Above, So Below: A Consideration of Planes

To understand fully how we might heal the land, and the options for doing so, we need to have a framework that accounts for the different levels of reality, commonly referred to in the western magical traditions as “the planes.” Nearly all spiritual practice and magical practice is based on the understanding (explicit or implicit) of the fact that realities and energies exist outside of what we can perceive with our five senses. This is, of course, something humans throughout time understood clearly, but something that has been lost and squashed in modern Western Society by scientific imperialism, materialism, and disenchantment in the western world). Understanding a bit about the nature of these different levels of manifestation, or what as known as “the planes” can help our healing work along quite a bit. However, just within the western esoteric traditions, the idea of “the planes” is complex, with a number of different models describing different kinds of planes. Each model we have for these different realms of perception and experience is an attempt to simplify and explain more complex phenomena–and so each model is with its limitations, but all are still useful as an illustrative tools. I’m going to use a fairly standard one in magical practice in the West to frame my discussion today. Drawing from Greer’s, Circles of Power, we can see some of these planes in this way (note that Greer presents a 5 plane system; I’m drawing upon the first three here for the purposes of this discussion):

• The Physical Plane (outer): What we can experience through our 5 physical senses. This is the physical reality of our existence. When we think about land healing, this is the physical nature of reality that we can see: cut trees, poisoned rivers, dead bees, starving polar bears, toxic waste, and so on.
• The Etheric Plane: Often, when people talk about “energy” in a room or space, they are sensing the etheric plane. The etheric is also experienced through our senses, but not the same senses that experience the physical plane. The ethieric is very closely connected to life on earth; Hindu Yoga would identify this as “prana” while Asian martial arts would call this “ch’i” or “ki.” From a land healing standpoint, our senses of the etheric helps us say, “wow, there is a bad feeling here” or a “heaviness” or “stagnation.” Its on the etheric that a lot of the “energy” work can be done.
• The Astral Plane: The level of our consciousness that transcends matter and although they manifest as imagination, emotion, memory, will, or intellectual facilities. This level, of course, also transcends what is inside of our heads. Much journeying work (whether its called astral projection, shamanic journeying, or pathworking) happens on this plane.

Both the etheric and the astral are considered “inner” planes (for a variety of reasons) and there are planes other than those as well.

The reason I present the planes here is that they are critical to framing any kind of land healing work.  Part of this is because healing works along the lines of the hermetic adage, “As above, so below. As within, so without” (I’ve discussed this before, for example, my discussion of it in relation to waste streams) The principle of this adage is the basis of many spiritual practices and religious observance throughout the ages–and the adage is simple. What is on the outer reflects inward to the other planes, and likewise, what happens on the inner planes and within us reflects outward. This means, of course, if you are to do physical healing on the land, that healing work can work its way within and have an energetic healing as well (even if all you are doing is physical work). But even if you aren’t able to do physical healing work, you can do other kinds of energetic healing through ritual, energy work, setting standing stones, and the like, and you can have this more positive energy trickle outward, manifesting on the material plane and providing one of the tools for the land to heal. Understanding this principle is the key to understanding the entire framework of land healing that I am presenting here.

The Ways of Land Healing

Examining the above definitions and levels of existence has given us a roadmap of the kinds of healing that can be done on different levels. 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, and 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, especially if we go back to the definition 2b under “heal” above.

#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.  You might journey inward to speak with the spirits of the land to understand what physically or etherically needs to be done. I’ll be talking about these practices more in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!

#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 soothe 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 damaged for the distinct purpose of healing, it can be like waking up that sick person. 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. I’ll take a whole post to explore this subject in more depth in next week’s blog post.

#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, 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).

Of course, this list doesn’t include the work the land itself does to heal–and its doing that all the time.  But here I’m focusing on the relationship between the land and humans–what we humans, as druids, as permaculturists, as people spiritually attuned, can do, here and today to heal our lands.

Readers–I invite you to help me develop this framework.  Is there any kind of basic land healing strategy that I’ve missed in the above?  How do you enact these or see these enacted?  Thanks, as always, for reading!