Ruby Gibson on Reconciliation with Mother Earth
- Alissa Fleet
- August 23, 2023
For over 30 years Dr Ruby Gibson and her Freedom Lodge organization have been working in Native American communities on the recovery from historical trauma. Following the method she developed “Somatic Archaeology” you begin with listening and bringing awareness to the great library of information and story each person is walking around with. As she says, recovering from trauma is not very hard when you have the right tools; trauma is just like a speed bump that is part of life.

What intrigued me is that her conversation with Thomas Hubl, when asked where she wanted to take the work next , she said that she dreamed of doing healing sessions with the Earth herself, similarly to how you would with a person.
To paraphrase:
“It is like there is a fragility right now to nature, because humans have been careless in our relationship with her. So go to the places of hurt and listen to her. Offer your love and awareness, as a kind of repair. Go to the places that have been mined and drilled and bear witness to those scars in the earth. Go to the burial grounds, the places where there were battles, the places where there has been a lot of pain and wounding, and offer prayers and blessings so that we can come back into relationship with the earth.”

Going on pilgrimage to the places of historical harms, to bring awareness and witnessing, is a practice I have been part of from the peace walks with the NE Peace Pagoda, and am curious to keep learning from. My understanding from systemic work is that for human beings to “find their place” again in relationship to the earth, we have to realize how young and new we are as a species, compared to the ancientness of the Earth. And that when we know our place, we see that is is absurd for us to attempt to “heal” the planet. What we can reconcile though is the relationship between humans and the earth, which is something different. This is where ritual and ceremony come in.