THE PLANET IS YOUR TEACHER: Raising our consciousness in a binary world

Many voices are speaking out on behalf of the planet right now, calling attention to the importance of saving her, of changing our ways, of conserving and protecting and understanding her better.

There is nothing like a global pandemic to wake people up to our interconnectedness on this planet!

The thing is, we’re not separate from the planet: we’re part of her. So in saving the climate, and learning to use renewable resources, and learning to stop burning fossil fuels, we’re learning to care for and heal ourselves. And by caring for ourselves, we’re saving the planet.

A lot of the illness that individuals experience arises from our collective failure to recognize our interrelationships and energetic exchanges with all life forms on this planet. This goes beyond the obvious issues: the malnourishment from foods that no longer carry nutrients and the illnesses that arise from pumping substances into our shared air space that aren’t meant for human or creature consumption.

Our refusal to see that we’re part of the collective whole allows us to act in ways that rebound on our own health, our own well-being.

We have much to learn from the planet, and when I use the term “learn,” I’m not referring to intellectual insights or ideas. I’m talking about the process of letting our energies entrain with the planet and allowing it to influence us in multiple ways.

I’m not alone when I confess to frequently falling out of harmony with cycles of light and dark. I don’t rise with the sun and rest when it sets. Instead, I read books on my Kindle and use electric lights to create whatever illumination I want, moment by moment. I guess I can’t complain if I suffer from eyestrain and my vision is myopic!

And I’ll confess that though I more or less pay attention to what time of year it is, I live in California, where the differences are subtle and it’s easy to ignore the seasons that are meant to help regulate my body. So I can’t be surprised if my ability to balance my body’s temperature has been iffy at best. And this causes my adrenals and thyroid and blood sugar metabolism to have to work harder. It makes sense that I’ve had to address issues with my earth element (digestion, weight control) and my fire element (adrenals, energy rushes and crashes).

In our culture, we’ve been taught to see ourselves as a species apart from the Earth. And because of that, we’ve deprived ourselves of our greatest energy medicine. As a kid who spent my childhood reading, preferably in bed under the covers, I had to make a conscious effort to get out and experience nature, love this Earth, listen to her, and most importantly, entrain to her and learn!

My greatest earthy teachers have been rocks, grass, cats and dogs. I’m crazy about all of them. If I sit in the grass, I can feel the interconnection of life forms. I can feel the separate blades and the collective root system. And I feel renewed.

That is true when I hold a rock. Its solidity renews me.

And cats and dogs—they absolutely reset my heart and delight my soul and heal my hurt ego. And make me sneeze, a form of gatekeeper (immune system) release.

So although I can get overwhelmed by all the ways I’m not a nature child, I’ve learned that each time I interact with something natural, it does something to heal and reset my own body’s rhythms. And it also allows me to rejoin the community of larger energetic exchanges. Every life form communicates with the larger weave of life forms energetically, via light, sound, vibrations and/or telepathy.

Scientists are rapidly identifying some of these natural communication networks. Have you seen the 2019 documentary Fantastic Fungi ? It’s amazing to see that the fungal realm has a visible communication web called the mycelium. Trees, too, though they appear separate, are able to share resources and information via their root systems and using the mycelium. Even bees, whales, wolves and other creatures all have similarly subtle and fascinating interconnections.

And that’s the point. We do too. Not just the linkages we create through the World Wide Web, but energetic connectors among members of our species and energetic connectors between our species and others.

The value of nuance in a binary world

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Part of the binary experiment in the yang era [pre-2000] was to flatten our perceptions down to what could be described with words and ideas, causing us to ignore those energetic connections. This whole long yang-era experiment was an exercise in souls coming into this earthly dimension and putting on blinders, so they couldn’t remember their root systems, their spiritual aspects, their inter-connectedness.

Yet there is bleed-through from those dimensions, and historically, individuals who saw the larger energetics of this world didn’t always fare well. Those who were wise in Earth magic, particularly women and indigenous people, were often put to death for daring to recognize their interconnectedness with all of life.

So now the blinders are slipping and opening, and even dissolving, and many individuals are recognizing larger patterns and connections. They’re recognizing influences beyond direct cause and effect. And our tools for healing and transforming our reality are growing exponentially.

It can seem like a huge job to heal damaged bodies and minds, to change our habits and behaviours, to clean up our act when it comes to being part of a collective reality. But it’s not: the universe is full of holograms, full of specific actions and connections and energy medicine that will heal you and make you whole.

It starts with being willing to transcend binary thinking and really question all of the supposed opposites:

• Are savoury and sweet really opposites? Or are they just flavours in a whole realm of possibility?
• Are dark and light opposites, or are they gradations on a circle of illumination that includes these two points?
• Are male and female opposites, or are they merely two socially assigned categories within a whole array of possible expressions of gender?

As I’ve mentioned before, our socialized minds have been trained to think in binary either/or terms. And what is erupting into our collective consciousness now is a recognition that those so-called opposites aren’t really binary at all. They’re culturally assigned meanings that flatten our understanding into limiting either/or options.

If I think in terms of a flavour being savory or sweet and ask myself if I’m craving a savoury or a sweet, I miss the myriad of choices and flavour perceptions that create a whole nuanced world of experience beyond those two categories.

Most people would say dark and light are opposites and belong at the far ends of a spectrum. We’re taught to think that way. Yet in a 24-hour cycle, light grows and grows until it turns, and then darkness grows and grows. Between the two assigned opposites, there are points of growing light and waning light, growing darkness and waning darkness.

If you see dark and light in non-binary terms, they’re two points on a circle that is characterized by gradual change. And that circle is part of a sphere that experiences most aspects of dark and light and everything in between, depending on where you stand!

Imagine that you live in a culture that isn’t so interested in absolutes but instead values nuance. That culture might speak in terms of waning and waxing moments, not darkest and lightest. Instead of declaring, “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” that culture might have a saying like “Life is seen best when the light shifts.”

The binaries of our world, of our thinking, are breaking apart as consciousness rises.

Take the categories of male and female. You may have noticed that more and more young people in these changing times are declaring themselves to be non-binary, neither male nor female. Our cultural logic would say: test the chromosomes to see what “they” really are. But X and Y are culturally assigned opposites. The science itself is still binary in its thinking.

Almost 30 years ago, my Councils [inner spiritual guides] told me that a new chromosome would be emerging: the Z chromosome. It would be neither male nor female, and I’d see it increasingly in clients who would be shifting away from these traditional identities in response to an inner makeup that didn’t fit the binary gender roles or understandings.

I don’t know if science has discovered this yet. But the cultural evidence is there in how young people are experiencing and expressing a fuller spectrum of gender identification. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients who appear to have a strong amount of Z in their makeup, which is neither male nor female, and they struggle to understand their physicality, inner truth and identity in a world that is so determinedly binary.

The reason this is relevant, beyond the humanity of letting our young people morph and create new definitions of what it means to be human, is that we tend to think of healing as getting “balanced,” and we tend to think of balance as binary. “I have too much of this, so I need more of that.”

When you add in a third chromosome, a third dimension, it shifts how you think about everything. Instead of “this” versus “that,” you find yourself combining them with other ingredients: shared, partially shared, more or less separate, somewhat here, occupying multiple spaces, sometimes relevant and so on. You bring in awareness of a spectrum that isn’t a line with binaries assigned to each end, but a circle, with positions that relate to one another in multiple ways.

images: Depositphotos