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A
Genesis Myth That I Think Helps Understand Why
Energy Healing Works.
The oldest myth about the creation
of the universe says that the world comes into
being when the two primordial elements, earth
and sky, come together and wed. It is a genesis
myth that poetically explains how everything that
exist is generated by this love making and continues
to exist as long as earth and sky continue to
wed. The most obvious sign of the fullness of
their love was said to be rain. I have found this
myth in the earliest art dating from 30,000 B.C.
It exists in Ancient Greek literature and philosophy,
variations are also well-known to most indigenous
peoples like the Maoris, and it would be easily
understood still today in rural China for example.
Canadian Northwest Pacific aboriginals believe
that water is a third element that exists between
earth and sky. Indeed, water seems to show most
obviously how it contains both earth and sky and
in equal proportions: the buoyancy, flow, speed
and stretching of the sky and the perpetual
gathering together and downward sheltering direction
and inward turning motion of the earth.
The myth holds that everything that
comes to be belongs to the world, ‘the Between’,
which is that realm defined by its being between
earth and sky. Each entity is constituted by being
a unique variation on this coming together of earth
and sky, and each holds the Between from its own
unique locale and perspective. This generation of
everything manifests the generative energy that
we call life (and love); and every kind of living
generativity is the result of this constant and
interactive marriage between earth and sky. Such
cosmic generativity is reproduced in miniature by
our own generativity whether sexual, reproductive,
economic, playful, care giving or creative. Energy
healing reactivates this generative energy in each
of us insofar as we are a particular and unique
knot tied off by this wedding of earth and sky.
The Between, the be-twined world, is the place wherein
all these knots of love keep turning round themselves
and knitting themselves generatively together, for
example in kinship and social relations and material
productivity. However, with
the coming of city states 7000 years ago, the sky
started to gain a disproportionate and oppressive
status. States need speed, progressive extension,
assertive dominion, top-down organization, religious
order and brute force to keep the populace under
control and functioning efficiently. As our culture
is starting to become aware, with the ascendancy
of such an over-accentuated sky came the dominance
of a similarly distorted and extreme masculinity.
For example, 2500 years ago in Classical Greece,
Apollonian religion gained ascendancy and was centred
on Apollo, who was a god of pure light (sky), straight
and true.
The Apollonian genesis myth tells of how Apollo
expelled or killed off all creatureliness and femininity
in the divinities of earlier Greek religions, such
as the Dionysian that was much closer to the earth.
The West, with its religions, especially took up
this mission of increasingly suppressing the earth
in order to accentuate the sky and thus lost almost
completely the understanding of the body, nature,
generativity, femininity, social spirit and empathy.
The latter eventually could be justified only as
mere sources of energy mined to empower ever more
sky-like social organizations, cultures, economies
and technologies.The result is that our contemporary
societies have become fixated on the uppermost levels
of the Between world, those as close to the sky
as possible, but have lost almost all of the earthy
and middle levels of life and nature. We live all
a buzz at light speed, on dangerously high precipices,
business risk-taking is our guiding duty and our
mission is perpetual expansion and ever-increasing
efficiency and power. Even most of our meditative
practices take us to sky-high states in order to
make us better able to contribute to this buzz and
to making our work energy more efficient and productive.
We only access the generative, loving and creative
in order to improve our heady and bloodless systems
and unearthly domains. As a result, this overbearing
and extreme sky became as distorted and un-natural
as it made be the earth, and their marriage almost
destroyed.
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Photos by Tiffany I. Smith |
Energy healing is a practice
that reconnects us to the earth and reintegrates these super
high levels of sky-oriented energy. "Grounding"
helps bring our obsessive skyness back into an increasingly
balanced entwining and enknotting with the earth, restoring
both sky, Between and the earth. It accesses once again their
wedding and our own resultant generativity.
Generative energy has nothing
else to do but generate, regenerate, produce love for one's
own life and for those who come into its sphere, and for nature
and the world as a whole. It only wants to heal, regenerate,
be gener-ous or help grow. In contrast, mere physical energy
forces change from the outside, pushing, pulling and imposing
external shapes. Grounding shows us how to bring this generative
energy more fully into ourselves and others by reconnecting
to its source in the marriage of earth and sky. Part of this
breakthrough was to see that for us sky-obsessed peoples,
concentrating on our bodily base, what has been called the
first two chakras, centre of gravity and pelvic core can help
us rebalance all the excessive and maddening sky-energy that
surrounds every part of our current lives. All that needs
be done to let this perpetual love of earth and sky become
central to us again is to continually draw it back into our
own mid-bodied ground. This technique focuses our energies
into the Earth, reawakening the generativity of the body,
helping to allow the earth to rise up to the sky and regenerate
the living knot between earth and sky that wants to be centred
there. Grounding restores the knot of earth and sky into which
we are born and that we try continually to reproduce in miniature
throughout our lives.
Earth localizes us while sky extends our reach, one condenses
while the other expends and expands, one gathers us back in
while the other stretches and spreads us out, one shrinks
into its own thickening and sheltering depths while the other
into the ever-thinning and extending extensions of height
and breadth. We are most generative and when we are able to
spread ourselves with ease while remaining anchored and rooted,
fold our being into others because we stay gathered in and
solid, expend ourselves because that same movement feeds back
into itself strengthening our ground like a tree's roots do
its spreading limbs. With grounding, the earth comes forth
as a cool thick dew, or a moist and plasma-like medium and
background to meet the sky’s airy brightness and the
spread and diversity of its powers and lights.
Grounding is as simple as learning to bring the sky energy
that wants to brighten everything under the sun down to meet
the earth energy that wants to only to rise up and gather
everything into itself. However, it takes constant practice
to make this generative core of our life central again because,
with each grounding meditation, we have to learn to work through,
soften, and rebalance the extreme modes of
sky-high life to which we've been habituate in order to survive
in our current worlds. Because we have been permeated by our
culture, each of us has had to habitually help carry forward
this historical over-stress on sky, and, as a result, we have
had learn to dominate ourselves and others by repressing our
own earthy and loving traits. Not only has this led to suppressing
our generativity but to our torturing and maiming ourselves
by forcefully disciplining and over-controlling every part
of our earth-connected bodies. It's not surprising that this
self-destructiveness can lead to unnecessary sickness and
degeneration, nor surprising that it can be reversed by the
regenerative love and health of earth and sky.
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