In our own lives too, we go through the myth of the Fall. We all do the same journey that begins in Paradise, in Utopia, a safe, secure, peaceful, loving environment. And then Fall into a world of pain, suffering where we are judged, where unfair discriminations are made, and illusions are shattered. It is the same journey for each of us, the Paradise followed by the Fall (loss of Paradise) and the desire to regain the Paradise. All starts in Paradise, in the darkness of the ocean womb where life is born. We are all creatures of the great mothering ocean. “The mystery of earthly life has its origins in water— in oceans. For two-and-a-half billion years on earth, all life-forms floated in the ancient sea of amniotic fluid, a womb-like environment — nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms. It was here, out of the primordial ocean’s swirling tides that the first vertebrate made its way onto solid ground some 360 million years ago.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds. And in the course of evolution, the ocean with its lunar-tidal rhythm was transferred into the individual female body to become the womb with its salty amniotic fluid and its menstrual cycle following the lunar-tidal rhythm. And there in the womb, we got our first experience of bliss. “The nine months you spent in your mother’s womb was the closest to heaven you have ever been in your current body.” Henry David Thoreau From the womb Paradise, a safe, secure, peaceful, loving environment, we Fall into a world of pain, suffering. Humanity literally fell out of the lap of Mother Nature when around 4000BC, in a strip (called Saharasia) that contains today’s most deserts including Sahara, Thar, Gobi, Arabia, the climate that was wet and warm began to dry to create today’s great deserts. With the Fall, humanity went through the Great Drying, a process of desertification. The landscape of the Fall is the desert where fallen out of the lap of the Mother, we become orphans left to fend for ourselves. To survive, the orphan goes through a phase of Ego development and becomes a warrior. In his book the Fall, Steve Taylor refers to the Fall as the Ego Explosion that brought dominator civilizations that are authoritarian, hierarchal, patriarchal (male dominated), and worshipping warrior gods. Not a coincidence that most desert cultures are dominated by the warrior archetype. In India, the dominant caste of the desert state of Rajasthan is the Rajput class or warrior class. The role of the warrior is to protect and slay the cause of suffering. But however strong is the warrior, he is not invincible. He also loses. “Deserts, accordingly, confront us with a vast horizontal edge, a horizon of emptiness into which we find ourselves absorbed and lost. The desert is intrinsically hostile to the ego, threatening to swallow it up in its endless expanse of nothingness.” Lane, Belden C "One initially enters the desert to be stripped of self, purged by its relentless deprivation of everything once considered important. Lane, Belden C.. And so, the desert is the place where we experience loss, and brokenness and go through the inconsolable human experience of death and grief. “We are brought to the bleached-bone terrain by the death of a loved one or another profound loss of some kind.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds. Today, humanity is journeying through the desert… No doubt, we are suffering of global warming and desertification… “The light of modern consciousness burns brightly, but the Earth was never meant to be bare of trees, nor our souls fully exposed to the light of reason.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds To make sense of all the pain we feel, we go in search of the higher truth. The ascent up the mountain is a metaphor for our spiritual journey. “One ascends the mountain, seeking illumination from the greater perspective its height affords.” Lane, Belden C. Our need for transcendence draws us to climb mountains. Whether Chinese intellectuals, European monks, Indian Yogis, spiritual seekers have always been drawn to mountain landscapes. Some of the famous Taoist and Buddhist temples in China, Tibet, Ladakh are located on high mountains. The early monasteries in Europe were built on mountainous sites. Even today, Uttarakhand, the mountain state of India, is a spiritual centre where people from around the world come to learn yoga or get initiated on a spiritual path. “It cannot be simply accidental that Tibetan Buddhism emerges from high places, where the everlasting silence of the snows invites a kind of concentration, a loss of ego in the enormity of the mountains.” Maitland, Sara. Zen Buddhism put the wisdom of mountains at the heart of its practice. A T’ang Dynasty Chinese poet spoke of the mountain as ‘the perfect place to get free of your name’. “To understand Thatch-Hut Mountain is to take on the nature of the mountain, to live outside the human realm of words and concepts.” Hinton, David. The mountain is not a landscape where we settle down. After wandering among summits and ridgelines, we must come down. It is interesting to note that spiritual journeys have been described by some as entry into a moonlit desert night, then movement to a fog-covered mountain and, finally, into the impenetrable darkness of a thick forest. The experience of the desert, the mountain, and the forest symbolize the three stages of the spiritual life generally described as mourning, insight and wisdom. So down the mountain, we enter the dark forest. The forest is the darkest of the landscapes where the dense foliage blocks the sun from view. It is time to withdraw and enter the dark mysteries. “Making our home in the forest, we embrace complexity and uncertainty. We learn to live from our wits and instinct. We leave the well-marked roads, the signposts, the straight path, entering instead the place of natural geometry, spiraling trails, rippling roots, tangled branches. We are less certain. But we are more alive. We awaken to something deeper.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds. In the darkness of the forest, among ancient trees and thousand years of dead wood and almost extinct beings, we are encircled by wisdom. We reconnect with our roots, with our ancestors and become whole again. © Muriel Anamika
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Muriel facilitates Reconnection Circles in which through guided meditation, stories, rituals, art therapy exercises, we explore the healing qualities of nature, the forest, ocean, desert and mountain archetypes.
Read more... Soulscape Journeys. Using archetypes, images, metaphors of the natural world (landscapes, trees, animal totems, moon cycles, seasons…) as well as myths and stories from indigenous cultures around the world, we discover the Sacred Circle of Life and how our soul journeys are so amazingly embedded into it. Read More... .
Explore the Forest Soulscape... Reconnecting with the Forest is regaining our lost Oneness with the whole creation… Read More...
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