Many years ago, I was down in the jungles of the Yucatán working with Zoila Gutierez, a shaman healer of Mayan descent. She is an elderly woman of tremendous physical presence and power. The first time I ever met her, I could see a coiled rattlesnake behind her eyes, which were kind and gentle, and I knew that I would never cross her. Yet her grandchildren ran in and out of the yard with gleeful abandon, interrupting our work and asking to be told one story and then another.

One day we were walking through her garden when an exquisite green hummingbird flew between us and explored a fuchsia bush. Zoila nodded toward our guest.

“Watch how the hummingbird hovers in front of the flower,” she said. “Pollen is power to that tiny bird. See, she waits until just the right moment and then joins with it. She takes what she needs and flies away. “When power comes to you,” she continued as we watched the hummingbird fly off, “be still with her. Don’t discuss it and bleed the energy away. Just hold it. Slowly she will begin to dance with you, but only if you are patient and listen for her voice.”

Watching my teachers, forty-four women healers from four different continents, many of them elders in their communities, interact with Mother Earth and all of her children is truly like watching the most exquisitely choreographed and danced ballet one could ever imagine. They have a way of understanding and communicating with the natural world that is seldom seen in modern society. Their relationship with Mother Earth, Gaia, the First Mother, is filled with eloquence and grace. It is a relationship that is based on love, wisdom, mutual respect and the sacred giveaway. It is born of the understanding life is a planting of the spirit so that a body can be formed from the dying seed. Without this earth, the seeds of the spirit of human beings would have no place to be born. Our role, then, is as a keeper of this mother garden; the wisdom of life comes from her, no matter what our ego minds tell us.

To the shaman, Mother Earth and all of the plants and animals that live upon her, including humans, are living beings that are part of one another through the great Oneness of all of life that is the Great Spirit, and you see this reflected in every aspect of their lives.

In shaman prayer, we pray not only to the Great Spirit but also to Mother Earth and to the powers or guardians of place. If it is raining, we pray to the rain as if it is a being in itself. It is something we consider as having life; it is an energy form, so prayer becomes an exchange of energy, a direct communication with the rain, or the clouds, the wind, thunder and lightning, calling in the spirits of being that influence weather.

Shamanism is having a sense of the oneness of the universe so that when you pray and ask for power or guidance, from an element, for example, a thunder being, maybe, you are praying to that thunder being but you are also in that process understanding that within yourself, as a person of power, the thunder being makes up the oneness of the entire universe. So you are not only praying to the thunder being but also to the Great Spirit at the same time.

Prayer arises from a sense of gratitude for all that is, for the magnificence and the miracle of life. So prayer can be sitting on top of a mountain, sitting in a sacred circle somewhere in the wilderness, or sitting in your home silently in a state of introspection and serenity and simply experiencing the bliss and the power of the universe in harmony all around you.

When you approach all of life as a prayer for the magnificence and the miracle of life, then when you are working in your garden or preparing vegetables to be eaten, you understand that through what you are doing, your presence transforms life. You talk to the plants that provide the fruits and vegetables of your sustenance. Those plants are alive, they have a spirit, and when you eat the plant it gives away the power from its spirit to you. You give back to the spirit of the plant through prayers of thanks.

When my teachers sit by the mud after a rainstorm or alongside a stream, they are reminded by the teachings of the mud, of the lotus blossom that for a long time germinates in the mud at the bottom of the pond. Then, from that period of germination, the lotus transforms into the light of day and blossoms into a magnificent, innocent flower that floats on the top of the pond. They say that in the life of people it is the same way, that the chaos of life, the madness, the pain, the agony, the evil that surrounds the human condition on so many levels, is represented by the mud. If we will look for the seeds of wisdom that are sometimes planted only in that chaos and pain , if we will go into that pain and look for the teachings about our selves and our live that live there, we can learn to grow and blossom out of the mud of our existence and into the beautiful light of the Great Spirit.

When you sit by a river, a creek, let that river speak to you of movement. That movement is life force reflected through the water, and as it flows by you, it tells you of truth, that you are surrounded by truth. You are surrounded by your teachers, and the teachers are in nature, in the trees, in the grass that moves in the gentle wind. The river teaches that movement is very different from activity. If you are moving around in a fit of anger, scrambling things, throwing things, stomping around, that is activity. Movement is quite a different thing. It is like an action that comes from the heart and soul of your body. It moves out into the world as an expression of power, as the river moves through the land, an expression of power.

If we would truly heal our Great Mother Earth, we must first learn to sit with her, observe her, discover her rhythms and her cycles and let them awaken us to the truths about life that reside within us, in the place where we are one with the Great Spirit. You learn so much by observing the flow of life throughout the natural world, observing the plants and animals that live on the Great Mother in close communion with her. Understand that these beings are great teachers for how to live in harmony with her.

The flower of your being begins to bloom when you move with the flow of life. This is a process of letting go, of moving your consciousness out of your mind and into your body-mind, which is an inch or two below your navel. Feel your receptivity as you become still. Watch the river flow as if you were a mountain high above. Be serene, at ease, and totally within your power. Then let the waterfall of life work for you, as you become like a twig carried on the surface of the rushing water. Become one with the river, dissolving the sense of mind and living totally in your instinctual nature. Let go, and relax into the eternal flow.

Agnes Whistling Elk teaches us that all of life is a circle, that all beings that are alive are part of that circle, that in fact, though we become lost in the dream of duality, the dream of separateness, we are in fact all reflections of the Great Spirit. We are all part of the same spirit and the same God. We are indeed all one. We cannot lose each other on any level, but sometimes in our ignorance we forget the meaning of life, and we forget our destiny. What we do when we sit with Mother Earth, with the plant and the animals, the rivers and oceans, the winds and the rain and the magnificent night sky, is a process of remembering, of remembering who we truly are.

This is how we will protect and restore our beautiful Mother Earth, by remembering who we truly are as part of the great circle of life that she is. As my beautiful teacher Ani, a healer from the foothills of the Himalayas, so eloquently put it,

“Mind is like a rice bowl, and rice is our knowledge. The rice is limited by the confines of this bowl. Be a magician and stay open to the mysteries. Let your wisdom reach beyond the limits of ordinary mind. Life, existence, is a mystery. Symbolically, your knowledge is not limited to a simple rice bowl, and that is the way it will always be. Instead of fighting for the rice bowl, fight to make better rice.”

Lynn Andrews is the New York Times and internationally best-selling author of the Medicine Woman series, recognized internationally as a leader in spiritual healing and personal empowerment. Learn mor at www.lynnandrews.com