Radical Interconnection, Radical ‘Healing’

If we hold the Earth as sacred we revere her, nourish her and protect her, not pollute, commoditise and destroy.

If we remember we are also the Earth, we can revere ourselves and all life as sacred, and be guided to act in ways that only nourish, care for and protect ourselves and each other.

Cultivating this way of thinking – that we are nature and all interconnected – is a radical act in a society where we have learnt to ‘other’ and think and act from a place of separation. Radical reconnection to ourselves, each other, to all life on this beautiful planet, is what is most needed right now. It completely turns our conditioned way of thinking and being in the world on its head.

We are taught, whether directly or indirectly through our cultural conditioning that we are all separate, from each other and the rest of nature. The majority of people still think that nature (and in broader terms the universe) is ‘out there’ and somewhere to go to, to visit. We have been conditioned not to question our capitalist culture and society’s status quo with its commoditisation of the Earth’s resources.

For instance, our precious water – a living entity that we are utterly dependent on, whose health and purity is intrinsic to all life and whose health directly reflects and mirrors our own. It is the same water that has existed since the creation of this perfect, closed system that is our planet. Up until fairly recently we have generally accepted or have been indifferent to the view that it is permissible to commoditise water for extreme profit by a few multi-millionaire run companies, and also allowed to be polluted (by those same profiteers) to unimaginable levels.

Thankfully more and more of us are shifting our awareness and when we challenge these old views of separation that have allowed our societal conditioning to continue, we can realise a deep sense of interconnectivity to everything and have the surprising yet obvious insight that what we do to the Earth we do to ourselves. We are currently seeing that illustrated in the shocking discovery that microplastics are not only found in large quantities our seawater but are in our food chain, in ourselves and are present in new born babies.

For those of us who have already remembered our interconnections and ‘inter-being’ (as Thich Nhat Hanh calls it), this isn’t surprising at all as we know what we do to nature, the planet, we do to ourselves, but we mustn’t feel helpless or defeatist. Keeping aligned and acting in the world from the awareness of interconnectivity begins to make profound changes and filter out to others. As Gandhi said:

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”

Practices like drum journeying, meditation and mindfulness practice, seasonal rituals, ceremony and daily offerings, can all help to dissolve the illusion of our separation, and help us to honour our interconnection and oneness/wholeness with the Earth/Nature, our true nature.

It’s never too late to realign ourselves and gain the awareness needed make better choices that are aligned with love and compassion for ourselves, all others and our beautiful home, planet Earth.

This path of radical interconnection is a path of radical ‘healing’ – a path of coming back to a sense of balance, wholeness and greater well-being, despite what difficulties we might be facing with our physical health. This return to inter/connection and wholeness is a sense of healing for both for ourselves and the world around us, because if what we do to the Earth we do to ourselves, so it goes that what we do for ourselves, (for our own healing journey), we also do for the Earth.