Sensing The Round Planet
by Stephan Harding. An excerpt from The Song of the Earth, Gaia Education’s Worldview Key
Lie down on your back on the ground in your Gaia place. Relax and take a few deep breaths. Now feel the weight of your body on the Earth as the force of gravity holds you down.
Experience gravity as the love that the Earth feels for the very matter that makes up your body, a love that holds you safe and prevents you from floating off into outer space.
Open your eyes and look out into the vast depths of the universe whilst you sense the great bulk of our mother planet at your back. Feel her clasping you to her huge body as she dangles you upside down over the vast cosmos that stretches out below you.
What does it feel like to be held upside down in this way — to feel the depths of space beyond you and the firm, almost glue-like support of the Earth behind you?
Now sense how the Earth curves away beneath your back in all directions.
Feel her great continents, her mountain ranges, her oceans, her domains of ice and snow at the poles and her great cloaks of vegetation stretching out from where you are in the great round immensity of her unbelievably diverse body.
Sense her whirling air and her tumbling clouds spinning around her dappled surface.
Breathe in the living immensity of our animate Earth.
When you are ready, get up, breathe deeply, profoundly aware now of the living quality of our planet home.
This article is an excerpt from the Worldview Key, a collection of articles collated in the book ‘The Song of the Earth — A Synthesis of the Scientific and Spiritual Worldviews’, offer background material to the curriculum of the Worldview dimension of both Gaia Education’s face-to-face Ecovillage Design Education programmes and our online Design for Sustainability programmes.
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Gaia Education is a leading-edge provider of sustainability education that promotes thriving communities within planetary boundaries.
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