Can we be psychologically healthy, happy, and fulfilled while treating the planet with disrespect? Can we live well without any love in our hearts for Mother Earth?
Do we value the mineral components, the elegant math, the obvious benevolence of the life mysteries that give rise to our physical bodies?
Can we really live any longer without honoring the earth which affords us, that makes it possible to be conscious beings in human bodies at all? What do you think?
We at Villa Kali Ma feel it’s common sense to try to practice deep, loving respect for the natural world. The planet is, as the common wisdom goes, our real mother – the generous, yielding being who births, sustains, and feeds us throughout the entirety of our lives.
From nourishing sunlight to oxygen, to life-giving water, to the many astonishing, fearsome, and adorable kingdoms of creatures we share the planet with – planet Earth is just right for us. Planet Earth gives us all we need for a meaningful life of beauty, inspiration, play, joy, and significance.
Without a happy, healthy planet Earth – without blooming roses, cleansing rains, whale songs, crystal caverns, aloof and secret forests – what would human life be?
What is Earth Day?
Earth Day is a yearly event dedicated to celebrating our beloved home, planet Earth. Started in 1970, Earth Day grew from humble beginnings within the grassroots environmental movement, to now include the participation of almost one billion people annually. Through activities, themes, and awareness campaigns, the day is celebrated globally as a coordinated event involving almost 200 countries around the planet.
Who established Earth Day?
Earth Day was created in the spring of 1970, as a response to protests by nearly twenty million Americans involved in the ecological movement.
Senator Gaylord Nelson, of a sympathetic mindset, founded Earth Day then as a way to acknowledge the voice of the people, and to bring government attention to how we might work together to protect the earth from environmental ravages.
When is Earth Day?
Earth Day is on April 22nd, every year. In 2024, Earth Day falls on a Monday.
Why do we celebrate Earth Day?
The Earth, her ecosystems, and all her lovable inhabitants are excessively harmed by some severely dysfunctional aspects of how human society is ordered. A tiny percentage of the world’s population has an outsized effect on the whole planet.
This small group of unwell people manage to do a lot of damage because they hold the vast majority of the economic and political power. They use their positions to serve themselves, blatantly abusing their power and privilege to make decisions in our name while actually overruling the heart wishes of the majority.
In the guise of corporate entities working in public-private partnerships with government – people who hold office and other less visible functionaries – these unwell people pursue self-serving goals without regard or remorse for the lives of ecosystems, plants, animals, and human beings. The rest of us participate, though we are not asked for our permission.
Now more than ever, our most fundamental need – for a naturally healthy, life-sustaining home planet – is under threat. A great time to take the original spirit of Earth Day into our daily lives!
How can women honor Earth Day with mental health in mind?
Personal mental health and the health of our home planet are two facets of the same diamond. Whenever natural life is supported to bloom and thrive, everybody wins.
As we see it here at Villa Kali Ma, recovery of our own true natures – which means freeing ourselves from the legacy of harm done to ourselves, and our loved ones, getting ourselves out of victim consciousness and into creative authority – is part of being able to stand up against the encroachers and heal the world.
To do that, we must detoxify our minds from poisonous beliefs that told us we are no good, and clean our bodies from the chemicals they sold us. We need to do the work to heal our emotional wounds and move on to the business of activating our true soul purpose and potential. We do all this so that we can work together to get planet Earth back into the hands of people who will treat her with respect, love, and care.
Any woman who awakens her consciousness to free herself from the inner oppressions of trauma, addiction, and the internalized lies that generate mental illness in our minds and hearts, can become a worthy steward of our planet, one of the ones who knows.
A meditation for Earth Day
Here is a meditation prompt for you to celebrate Earth Day and your mental health together as one. May it bring a little bit of joy to you today, sister!
Begin by preparing your body to meditate, breathing deeply for 12 long, slow breaths.
Bring relaxation to every section of your body, starting with the crown of your head and moving the energy down to your feet. You may want to picture yourself under a hot shower, spreading warm relaxation down your body.
When the body feels pleasantly relaxed, gently bring your focus inward, towards your center. Connect with your core for a few moments. Feel love for yourself. Say hi.
Now start visualizing, imagining seeing yourself, looking at you as though from the outside. See that you seem happy, the happiest you’ve ever been or felt.
Looking at yourself, you see that you are energized, vital, and alive. You are brimming with life. You look loving, soft, open, and grateful, lit up from within like a Christmas light.
Now make the light inside you stronger, like turning up a dimmer switch. As the light intensifies, it illuminates you from inside, and makes you transparent, like a lantern.
Looking at yourself glowing like a lantern, fully transparent with a strong source of light, like a sun, inside you, notice that there are tiny bubbles of light moving upwards and around inside you, like little fizzy-water bubbles of happiness circulating inside your body.
Turn the light up even more. Expand the sun at your core until it takes you over – all of your body inside this light. You are a human-sized star, a small sun.
Now imagine another person, someone you love, comes walking towards you. As they slowly approach, see that the glowing light inside you is reflecting on them, lighting them up, warming them. The closer they get to you, the more lit up they are. The more lit up they are, the more happy and relaxed they seem to be.
As they come within a few feet of you, looking at you in your sun form, see that a small blob of your light leaps from you into the other person, like a sun flare. This sun flare is harmless, but warm and energizing. It is causing them to start to be lit up from the inside too, like a spark from a fire setting them ablaze. This is a friendly, warming, loving light, that brings happiness and health to them.
See them fill up with flames of light. See them smiling, happier than they’ve ever been, glowing, and filled with moving fizzy light particles just like you.
Now imagine many people, crowds slowly walking towards the two of you. As they approach, each of them is affected the same way as you just affected the person you love. The light in you jumps over to gently, lovingly pop them into incandescence, like a light being switched on, or a pilot light on a gas stove.
Each person that you affect, in turn, affects another, so that the crowd of lit people grows ever larger. More and more people pop into lit-up, bubbly, smiling sun star bodies.
Imagine the momentum of this light-ignition of human suns taking over your local area, like popcorn popping now, every person popped into sunny brightness.
From your local area, gradually expand to light up every human who lives in your state. To your whole country. To your continent. See this spreading sunny starlight glowing, connected by every single person in the whole world, 8 billion Christmas tree lights lit up.
See that there is no human being left out of this lighting, the freshest newborn babies and the oldest person alive, are all alight.
Finally, imagine that each of these happy, fizzy, glowing, smiling, alive, radiant beings is sending their igniting light down into the heart of the planet. See the planet pop into one giant sun of light, too. Stay with this image for a while!
When you’re ready, decide to say goodbye to the image, and allow yourself to return to your ordinary state of consciousness carefully. Wiggle your toes, feel your body, take some breaths, and return to now.
What did you experience?
Villa Kali Ma helps women be mentally healthy and strong
Loving our own selves helps us be in a condition to at last treat our kind mother, the generous Earth, the way we long to in our most private and true hearts. With proper love and appropriate reverence for the mysteries, with immortal gratitude for the nourishing source that gives rise to our very embodiment!
Does that sound hard? Maybe it is. It’s a lot easier with help, sister! Come work with us, and we can do it together, side by side.
From our inner sun to yours, Happy Mother Earth Day!