Healing the Heart of the Earth: Restoring the Subtle Levels of Life

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Summary: Poweerful & Profound
Review: JUST AS THE HUMAN BODY IS PREY TO VIOLENCE AND trauma (both physical and psychological), and manifests that trauma through illnesses in certain parts of the body; and just as it is possible to heal that trauma by releasing the blocked energy locked inside the area where the violence has manifested itself-so the Earth's body has sites where human violence (both to the Earth itself, other human beings, and other animals) has led to trauma that needs to be healed. The knowledge of the Earth's bodily energies is present in Asian cultures through feng shui-a science where objects are located to harmonize with the natural energy patterns of the environment around them. In the West, this knowledge is expressed through the practice of geomancy-a wisdom tradition that argues that our planet is crisscrossed with energy lines. At the nodal points of these lines, human beings have constructed sacred sites (such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Sedona, Arizona) that reflect the powerful energies that meet there. Marko is a Slovenian artist and healer who specializes in visiting sacred sites and places where enormous suffering has taken place, and trying to heal the wounds. He does this by what he calls "lithopuncture." Just like acupuncture, which recognizes that the body is an interconnected network of energy channels called meridians and tries to release the energy blocked by trauma or illness, so lithopuncture involves placing monoliths-effectively large acupuncture needles-in key places to release the blocked energy of the Earth and revitalize the environment, both human and natural. "To the inner vision," writes Marko in his book, Healing the Heart of the Earth, "an acupuncture point looks like a sort of energy vortex penetrating vertically into the earth. Within itself it collects information on the properties of the specific subtle phenomenon with which it resonates. These points can be detected at very specific spots on the ground. There they hand over the information they hold to whomever attunes to their focal point." Marko has performed lithopuncture in Northern Ireland, where in 1992 he was invited by the county council of Derry-scene of some of the most violent encounters between Catholics and Protestants in the ongoing 30-year conflict-to revitalize certain places that the council felt had continuous problems. He placed an acupuncture bronze plate in the sidewalk of a Derry street and a lithopuncture stone on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Sometimes lithopuncture is neither suitable nor possible. When this is the case, Marko uses human beings-both residents and visitors-literally to harmonize the natural environment. Groups gather in a circle and sing certain notes, which vibrate with the natural harmonies of the landscape and retune the discordant wavelengths of the area. "Musical sound has a strong power for breaking through and enabling access to a place, no matter how heavily blocked and suppressed it is," Marko writes. "Music can serve to cleanse and revitalize power points and also to regenerate a space completely. In the same way that spring revitalizes the forces of nature, music too carries within itself the energy that reawakens life; therefore, sound can bring a place that has, for example, been put to sleep by destruction, oblivion and the like back to vibrating, awakening, and reactivation. Its pulse beings to beat again, its currents to flow." Marko used singing when he visited the site of the former Berlin Wall. "When viewing the site with my inner vision," he says, "I noticed to my surprise, a deep black canal inside the no-man's-land where two energy lines run alongside each other, a thicker yellow one and a thinner red one. As my intuition interpreted it, this was a 'rope' made of two 'strands' with the help of which West Berlin was to be choked on an energetic level." "Our work consisted of two kinds of acupunctural singing," he continues, "coupled with color visualization and guided imagery. From what the participants related to us afterwards we were able to reconstruct the whole grueling process of 'alchemically' transforming the Wall's energies at that place." The result was startling: instead of a black tunnel, Pogaĉnik saw a white band at the same place on the surface of the earth, which reflected the colors of the rainbow. This was a sign that the transformation had been successful. Marko confirms the descriptions given in detail by Rudolf Steiner of the elemental world and its main beings - gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, discussed by Rudolf Steiner in his book "Man as Symphony of the Creative Word" Marko feels that more and more people are going to awake to the sensitivity of the Earth and what should take place on it. Pogaĉnik echoes James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis in arguing that the Earth is a living organism, an organism we have to be responsible for. In both his works, including his first book Nature Spirits and Elemental Beings: Working with the Intelligence in Nature, Marko suggests that we all have to wake up to what this planet really is, and act on what we can do to make sure it is healthy. ¨