Relaxing
into Landscape
- Intimacy and Pain in
the Environment
Written
by Patrick MacManaway
I drove the hour and three-quarters over to High
Reach Farm last Wednesday morning, leaving the
house a little after six am. A beautiful morning
to take a delightful drive, and knowing that I
would be working on the farm the next two days,
staying overnight and not returning until the
following evening, I was able to relax into the
anticipation of spending time with my friend
Steve, visiting and exchanging new ideas and
developing old ones whilst spending long days
out of doors engaged in the practical and
satisfying work of tree farming.
In a way, these visits - weekly when I can
manage them into my busy schedule - are an
escape for me, an escape from the office, from
computer and telephone, an escape from the
responsibilities of my geomantic practice and
the focus and demands of working with clients,
an escape from the bustling urbanization that
spills southwards towards my office from our
nearby city of Burlington.
Sometimes too my farm trips can offer themselves
as an escape from domestic concerns and from the
difficulties and struggles that offer themselves
in the growthful and challenging arena of
marriage.
As I headed east down the interstate, the sun
rising between Vermont's green mountains, a
heavy, steamy mist was rising all down the
valley from the ponds and from the rivers
winding their way to lake Champlain, and I felt
my own spirits lighten and anxieties and
emotional burdens lift from me like the water
vapor rising up and dispersing into the morning.
The road to the farm is for me an almost
mythical journey into a rural innocence, passing
gradually into more and more beautiful and
sparsely populated landscape, on smaller and
smaller roads until the last nine miles
from the nearest grocery store become unpaved
dirt road through the ubiquitous regenerating
forests that cover eighty percent of Vermont's
landscape, dotted and interspersed with the
dairy farms that keep the
remaining twenty percent of the land open and
grazed.
It strikes me very much on this particular
morning that the nearer I get to my destination,
the more my body relaxes. No office worries or
anxieties of outstanding papers to push around
my desk for sure, and of course I am aware of
the pleasurable anticipation of seeing my
friend, but I also know that we are now late in
the season for the harvest of native trees that
Steve digs from his woods and sells wholesale to
landscape architects up and down the state, and
the work is likely to be heavy - some of the
trees in their burlap root-balls weigh three
hundred pounds, and we will be digging and
moving these around by hand between the two of
us. Heavy, sometimes grueling work that can
leave muscles exhausted and aching and bring a
person to be happy just to sit motionless for an
hour at the end of the day and then take an
early night.
Even knowing that the work today may be hard and
heavy, I feel a peace and serenity move through
me as I arrive on the farm, and realize that it
is a familiar feeling, and not one that can be
put down simply to putting myself beyond the
reach of my fax machine.
I recognize it clearly as the gradual deep
release that comes when I am working with
geopathically stressed land or buildings.
My work as a jobbing geomancer both in Scotland
and New England is a delightfully varied
practice working with places very large and very
small, domestic and commercial, public and
private, pre-design and post-build. Labyrinths,
healing sanctuaries, shops and schools, estates
and gardens, energy mapping and balancing in
buildings sick and sound, and in homes both
happy and sad.
The bulk of my bread-and-butter work is with
Geopathic Stress, working with places where the
energetic relationship between people and place
has become toxic, often with a great deal of
associated emotional trauma and dissonance held
in the energy field, with or without the
presence of disturbed and disoriented spirits.
This energetic soup of trauma and dissonance can
be very disturbing to attune to, as one must as
a dowser and healer of place, and I typically
know how bad the problems are by how tightly I
feel myself contract and tighten as I arrive on
the site. The tension that develops in my body,
most noticeable in and around my gut and
abdomen, gives me a feel for how the people
resident in that building feel most of the time.
As my work proceeds on site and the healing
process goes along however - earth acupuncture
easing chi flow and restoring vitality, psychic
intervention allowing the release and easing of
long-stored hurts - the pain, dissonance and
trauma are gently brought to a harmony of peace
and balance, and a state of grace often descends
upon the place. The way I generally notice that
my work is taking effect is that my body starts
to relax and my mood to lighten. This is for me
a most interesting phenomenon, and one that is
so repeatable that it has become predictable. I
never know which stage in the process of healing
is going to bring the energy field into peace
and balance, but I know that creeping feeling of
ease that accompanies it, almost like the
relaxing warmth of easing into a hot bath.
The piece that has caught my attention this
morning, is that while I am intensely aware of
the tension and contraction that occurs when
arriving at and entering a disturbed energy
field, after quite a short time my attention
shifts to interacting with my client and then
beginning to assess the nuts and bolts of the
situation and commencing on the work of the
healing process. I am no longer conscious of the
tension as I go about my job, only of the
feeling of relaxation as the atmosphere actually
lifts. Although no longer conscious of it, my
energy field and accompanying emotional
availability in that situation are literally
"held back".
For Steve, his farm is a shamanic landscape.
Intimate with each of his eight hundred acres,
his farming strategy is to balance the human
ecology with a thriving and vital land ecology.
Logging is performed in a fashion that improves
the habitat for deer and songbirds. His organic,
ecological and environmental practices have
brought him state-level award and current status
as "tree-farmer of the year". Much more profound
than these outer practices however, is the
intimate relationship that he has cultivated
with the spirit of the land through meditation
and inner journey, and through mindful presence
in every minute of his work. It is this which
guides his outer practices, and it is this level
of intimacy and consciousness that has led him
to engage in a deep healing of the spirit of
that land.
Although I have been visiting his farm for
fifteen years and talking healing and geomancy
with Steve until long after the cows came home,
I had never quite put those two pieces together
for myself - the relaxed intimacy that I felt
when on that land and the fact that he has given
it so much healing attention at the level of
pure spirit as well as in outer, material forms.
His is a landscape without pain. A landscape
without either an underlying note or chord of
dissonance buried deeply, or of pockets of
trauma and woundedness to stumble into. It is
literally safe to allow ones spirit to
expand there, knowing that the edge of ones aura
will not suddenly encounter psychic razor wire
or emotional land mines.
How rare this is, and how little we notice - so
much of our time we are in landscapes of place
and of people that are woven with pain and fear,
anxiety and hurt. We may notice the initial
contraction, but once pulled in to
ourselves, we no longer notice how small we have
become - we have simply adapted to our
environment, and in our adaptation, defined
limits to our energetic and emotional
availability - literally limits to our
preparedness to be intimate there.
When encountering a new environment, our own
subtle energies naturally expand outwards -
until they meet trauma or pain - and then they
contract a little, and stay there. The further
out they go before meeting such pain, the more
relaxed and alive we feel, and the more intimate
we become - the more open we are, literally to
the energies of that place and the other people
who are present there.
The healing of pain and trauma in place allows
the experience of intimate invitation and
enchantment that draws us out of ourselves to be
rewarded and fulfilled, rather than leading to
the disappointment and disillusionment that we
all too often experience, and that leaves us
feeling restless and unsatisfied.
For enchantment and intimacy and expansion to go
on and on and on, we need to create safe
landscapes for ourselves, landscapes without
pain and hurt to our subtle senses just as we
would create a playground for small children
without broken glass to create pain in their
bodies.
I have realized that anywhere in my life that I
feel contraction is calling for my healing
attention, calling for me to re-engage with
compassion and intimacy.
I have arranged therapy for my fax machine.
Whole Earth Geomancy
Dr. Patrick MacManaway
4076 Shelburne Rd., Suite 6
Shelburne, VT 05482-6676
802-985-2266
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