Gaia Blog

Gaia’s Blog: Seeds for a Resilient, Earth-Centered Future

Earth-Centered Practices and Ceremonies

Humans are innately part of Gaia’s enduring, ever-changing life-web. When affirming and celebrating this truth becomes central to our spiritual path, we can participate in a living harmony with the Sacred Land and with one another. Our practices and prayers, ceremonies and songs, are co-created organically with and for the great being of Gaia. Instead of resonating with the depleting vibration of the human-created world, we regain our capacity to attune with the rhythms and patterns of Nature.

Grounding Our Green Heart

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How can we humans live fully in our hearts? From a Gaia-centered perspective, what we need to relearn is this: Our heart is completely linked with the natural world. Thus it has a built-in propensity to connect and ally with all life, not just other humans.

The heart chakra isn’t green by accident. Our heart resonates not only with human beings, but also with the Earth’s forests, mountains, oceans and rivers, and the material and spiritual beings who live there. Our hearts are nourished by relationship, connection and generosity toward humans and equally toward the entire more-than-human world. This makes it very important to keep our hearts healthy, robust and grounded in Gaia’s totality. [Read more…] about Grounding Our Green Heart

Gaia-Centered Spiritual Practices–Part II–Smudging

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“Smudging” is using the smoke from burning herbs and resins to cleanse and purify oneself and one’s space, often as a prelude to spiritual practices or ceremonies. The burning of incense, flower petals, bark, resins and leaves for spiritual purposes is a universal ancestral practice, and indeed has an enduring tradition of being used even in mainstream religions around the world.

I recently read a disturbing article about people illegally harvesting white sage (Salvia apiana) to make smudge sticks. These are widely sold online and used all around the world, predominantly by people who have no idea where the plant comes from. As a result, wild white sage, which grows only in certain areas of California and Mexico, is dwindling, mainly due to depredation by poachers who then sell it to distributors. Local Native Americans quoted in the article say they themselves are the original users of white sage in smudging rituals. They bemoan the abuse and commodification of the plant; and also claim that the entire practice of smudging should only be done by Native people, and anyone else doing it is guilty of cultural appropriation. [Read more…] about Gaia-Centered Spiritual Practices–Part II–Smudging

Gaia-Centered Spiritual Practices—Part I

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What attitudes and practices can we cultivate in ourselves that will help us attune to our Gaia-nature? (Remembering that we already know deep within us that we belong to Gaia’s Green World.)

My sense is that the people reading this already lead a spiritual life of some kind. But let’s do a quick check to make sure our existing beliefs and practices are attuned with Gaia as well as they could be. (Read my previous posts to flesh out these ideas.)

Does your path/liturgy/doctrine focus solely on the direction Up, and disregard or even denigrate the direction Down? Hmmm…some adjustment may be called for here. [Read more…] about Gaia-Centered Spiritual Practices—Part I

Getting Seated in Gaia

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Why are we here?
To become ever more fully our truest, deepest, most authentic self, the unique person we were born to be.

What else could be the answer to this ages-old question? Only when we completely inhabit our real Self will we be able to consistently love, think, feel, create, and co-create with others in satisfying, life-enhancing ways. When we can really sink into who we fundamentally are, as an ongoing way of being, then the rest of our mission in the physical and spiritual worlds, whether grand or humble, can joyously emerge. [Read more…] about Getting Seated in Gaia

The Green Force

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The great, vast being of Gaia is continuously generating a force that creates and evolves life on all levels. I call this force the Green Force. It’s the force that brings plants up from under asphalt streets, that sets seeds growing on bare sand. It is, in Dylan Thomas’s memorable words, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

The Green Force energizes and expresses the entire organic continuum of birth, growth, flowering, ripening, maturing, declining, dying, decomposing and giving birth again—the dynamic, ever-renewing process that we call Life. As we know, plants get their energy directly from the sun, from photosynthesis that takes place in the plants’ chlorophyll, their green pigments. Then animals (including us humans) eat the plants, and/or eat animals that eat the plants. Even the strange and mysterious fungi and bacteria beings “eat” the remains of dead plants and animals. So each one of us, each living being on Mother Earth, literally partakes of Gaia’s Green Force as an intimate and basic part of our day-to-day survival. [Read more…] about The Green Force