I believe we have lost our way. We are in trouble. How do we right our ship? How can we all become motivated to right our ship?

What on earth are we doing threatening the extinction of our planetary home? What on earth are we doing threatening (and causing) the extinction of so many other species? What are we doing with our natural resources – slashing forests bare, drilling oil out of the depths of the earth in every spot we can find to attack her? What are we doing polluting some areas on the globe so that there is no longer clean water or clean air?

What on earth are we doing killing one another off in the hundreds of thousands? Why did we get so extremely polarized from one another that we can no longer find the Higher Good? Where did things go awry?

Seeking spiritual guidance, seeking spiritual connection – from the Shamanic perspective– used to relate to connecting with Nature, connecting with a power animal, at times even with a plant, at times a “teacher in human or angelic form.”

We used our senses. We might see, hear or even just “feel” a connection with a power animal, or see what they gestured to us, or where they took us. Perhaps we sensed some answer through our “6th sense,” but we humans connected with our own beings into the land of the Spirit. There was a relationship, a dialog. We sought guidance, and lived in communities where it was part of the community to seek guidance. However, the “guidance” was still connected to our beings, our senses, or communities and to the Earth.

Once upon a time we (as a species) identified as Goddess cultures, which were related to the seasons, related to the Earth, and related to our personal connection with Mother Nature or Mother Earth.

It seems that was the sensible arrangement. Mother Earth is a living breathing being, and if we worked together (Mother Earth and humans) then we could cooperate and collaborate: then we could see where plants might need watering, or where rivers could benefit from having higher banks, so that certain things would not be flooded every season.

Native peoples blessed the animals they partook of — for their clothing and/or nourishment — and took only what they needed. There was mutual honor and respect; there was mutuality and reciprocity. Perhaps we could not do as much for the animal world as they offered to us, but on occasion we could help a fallen bird, or help a wounded animal. At least we did not do harm. We could aim to be in an “I-thou” relationship with all other living things, rather than step into a “power-over relationship” with other beings, even other humans.

Then somewhere down the road it changed.

Humans do more harm than any other species is capable of. We have polluted waters. We have harmed the climate; we are causing global warming with possibly irreversible effects. We have felled trees – chopped down whole forests. Entire species are becoming extinct. We stopped taking only what we needed for our immediate needs. We became greedy, and we became less aware of, and less attuned to Mother Nature.

When and how did we lose our connection to Mother Earth? When and how did we lose our connection with other living things?

At some point in history, connection to spirit got stripped from being an intimate personal human connection, and all of a sudden there became “experts,” and “intermediaries.”

Organized religion came in, with written down dogma. Even in the written down dogma (in the Judea Christian tradition for example) there were warnings against being so rigid with the rules that we forgot the spirit of things, but it seems to have happened nonetheless that we have come to be run by rigidity and “rules,” rather than by connection. And our disconnection with Mother Earth seems also correlated with the advent of Patriarchy – which seems to have come to pass around the same time, historically, we as humans shifted from Goddess cultures to this more male-dominated kind of religion.

It seems that our natural connection with Mother Earth, as with other humans, and with other species have all deteriorated in some fashion highly correlated with the rise of these “experts.”

Finding Right Balance – Systemically

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