FIELD WORK
Foreword
This article describes a model of understanding I’ve felt called to develop, test and practice for several years. It has offered an open door to fruitful exploration, both on my own and in concert with others. I believe it can be useful to enough practitioners of attunement that a written article seems warranted.
This article offers a model of understanding and practice. It is not intended as THE TRUTH, or even the True Cosmology. In time, I hope this model fades into obsolescence in the face of new discovery and experience.
I quote Rumi and the Book of Genesis as part of the model. In quoting Genesis I’m not advocating for the Christian religion, any more than in quoting Rumi I’m advocating for Sufism. I respect wisdom, but I don’t consider myself either a Christian or a Sufi.
The model is of a sacred river which divides into four, defining the spiral movement of unfolding creative cycles. The four unify into one again as attunement practitioners collaborate in stewardship of those cycles and give them first form. Pretty trippy, but adequate to the moment, I think.
The more I have practiced attunement, and encouraged others to take up the practice, the more I understand that apart from a mere handful of simple energetic tools, the practice is as varied as the people who practice. I think that’s exactly how it should be — one current, released through many forms of practice.
Therefore the reverse is also true: no matter how different our forms of practice, we recognize each other by the vibration of the attunement current we share, trust, and revere.
Rumi and Field Work
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.
These lines from Rumi’s magnificent poem “A Great Wagon,” translated by Coleman Barks, hold a key to attunement practice, and to the expansion of attunement practice beyond the familiar work of subtle energy healing.
I’m convinced every human being has had personal experience, if only accidentally and for a moment, of that exquisite wordless knowing in a place of wonder and beauty. Oneness.
Further, I believe attunement is the perfect means by which we can not only enter that field of wonder deliberately, but when we enter, begin to collaborate with the rhythms and cycles at work there.
“Long distance” attunement has been a component of traditional attunement service for as long as I remember. Looking back, this practice was my boyhood introduction to the concept of quantum entanglement: inches from someone’s skin or thousands of miles away, attunement is the same. The story of Jesus and the Centurion’s servant taught geography didn’t really matter. It was consciousness that counted.
Around 2006, my two sisters and I lived so far apart that getting together physically was impractical. We began joining in attunement weekly for half an hour.
We agreed we would have no agenda, not even healing: we would just come together for a time, and then compare notes about our experience afterward via email. This second part of this practice was of great value to me, and later I’ll return to why I think it’s so important.
Our experience deepened — and brought not just deeper communion for us, but an awareness that we were actually working together. Without an agenda. The nature of the work varied — sometimes outwardly radiant and active, sometimes quiet and internal, sometimes a sense of standing firm, holding a boundary, sometimes dancing in an indescribably delicate flow. We never knew what we would encounter until we met, but whatever the character of our time, always deeply loving. It took me the next ten years of practice to find thought-forms and language to share it beyond our circle of three. (Incidentally, today my sisters and I live farther apart geographically than ever, but are so deeply connected that there is no distance between us at all.)
In 2016 at an attunement workshop at Still Meadow, I suggested that this field Rumi referred to, that exists beyond ideas of rightdoing or wrongdoing was a very real vibrational place where anyone could meet and commune as well as collaborate. What would we do, I asked (rather prophetically, I see in hindsight) if for some reason we could no longer travel to meet in person, or communicate through external means? How could we stay consciously connected and work together?
I proposed that developing our skills at being together in Rumi’s field would be a good way, and the interest was immediate and vigorous. People self- selected into small geographically disparate groups, found a time to meet in the field and then share their experience via phone or email.
From subsequent Still Meadow workshops, when we could share reports and stories in person, it is clear that this was a kind of attunement work whose time had come. It’s taken on a life of its own now, work that had little to do with finding the pattern in the pancreas — which is still an important attunement skill, just not the only one we need.
As I’ve continued in this field work, my understanding has grown. Chalk it up to my characteristically vivid imagination if you wish, but I suggest Rumi’s “Field” is the Garden of Genesis, planted eastward in Eden, the one which, according to the story, humans were created to dress and keep.
The Garden
The book of Genesis tells the story of how humans were placed in a garden planted eastward in Eden. Eastward, where creation’s design and cycles take first form.
According to this story, our first responsibility is stewardship of the garden. The story goes on to indicate that humans were invited to enjoy the garden as well as tend it. We could eat anything except from one tree — the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of rightdoing and wrongdoing.
This is significant in the discussion of field work because the cycles of the Garden of Eden are ours to tend and keep but not to judge.
At any rate, as you know the story goes on to say how humans ate of that forbidden tree and were expelled from this garden planted eastwards in Eden, and that an angel with a flaming sword was placed at its entrance to keep the way of the tree of life.
There is another piece to this story in Genesis that helps me understand the difference between attunement as a practice of subtle energy healing, and attunement as our most effective starting point in returning to our work as gardeners in Eden:
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.”
I was taught that the number four was often used as a description of the four forces moving in their cyclic motion. That makes sense to me here — from one great source that waters even the garden beyond the angel with the flaming sword, comes a sacred river emerging into four heads.
Without picking this story until nothing remains but a theological carcass, I’d like to suggest that this river has been our salvation, our unbreakable connection to the garden which lies beyond the angel with the flaming sword. To me, this four-headed river is the river of attunement as we’ve known it. It is available to everyone everywhere, even if we insist on clinging to our ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing. Anyone can be a deep blessing in the world without ever having to face the angel with the flaming sword. Think of The Salvation Army, with very very strong views about rightdoing and wrongdoing, yet they still offer their particular blessing to the world.
As I have followed this line of thought, I have become aware that this Garden which I will interchangeably call Rumi’s field in order to avoid too much Biblical entanglement, is far more expansive and complex than I had originally thought. It is, I believe, our heaven. The vibrational place of shaping, where creative cycles initiate, are stewarded, and complete. We belong in this Garden. In a very simple way, we attunement practitioners belong TO this garden. We have work to do there.
If we are willing to travel the four-headed river to its source, lovingly setting our concern with anatomy and contact points and chakras and cervicals aside for a moment, the Garden waits for us.
If we are willing, we can enter the field beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing on the vibration of attunement. We can begin to re-learn the field’s cycles as we listen and open our hearts, eyes and minds to what is present.
Ponder this miracle of Grace for a moment: we have the capacity to return to the Garden planted eastward in Eden to resume our responsibilities as faithful gardeners, tending those cycles as they move from initiation to completion. Not in some wishfully-imagined tomorrow of restoration. Today.
How I See It
The challenge in entering this field, of course, is leaving behind the ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing that prevent us from entering the sacred garden, Rumi’s field.
What if we were to accept, just for the moment, that the river of attunement is the practitioner’s very functional path into the garden?
Imagine that you are sharing an attunement with someone. Two streams of information meet in you. One is your awareness of the attunement current itself, and the other is the awareness of the energetic state of the person you are serving. This is a familiar and wonderful experience.
Historically, much of a practitioner’s attention has been directed to the information we receive reflected back from the recipient. Heart patterns, liver patterns, balance, etc. But what of the information we receive in the river of attunement as it flows to us?
Attunement practitioners have always been aware of the river flowing out of the garden. After all, that flow is the very essence and power of attunement. It is not an undifferentiated current, however, like water coming out of a tap whenever we open it. It carries language, rhythm, and guidance long before it flows through us. That flow carries messages to us from the garden itself, guiding us in facilitating its manifestation.
We are the means by which the invisible is made manifest. We occupy a kind of crossover point between the invisible flow from the garden, which contains guidance as to how to let that flow manifest, and the release of the river’s current as first forms of living art in the earth.
The familiar information concerning the recipient’s individual field is still relevant, of course, but to me represents less than half the information we need. The first stream — from above, we could say — is the predominant source of information. It is the source of the design and shape of every attunement.
So we have two streams of information. One we are familiar with in specific, the information of perception of the field of the recipient. Many of us are familiar with the information it contains. The other stream comes from the river of attunement flowing out of the garden. What information does it contain? I suggest that it contains wisdom and guidance on a scale beyond our capacity to grasp as an individual, even as we are responsible to let some aspect of it. We can’t understand it all, but we CAN understand our part in the all.
For the most part, I think we’ve relied on our familiar palette of sensitivities — of glands, organs, chakras and contact points to shape the attunement in support of the recipient. Many dedicated practitioners have developed great skill in perceiving the interrelationship of all the aspects of a body and life pattern, we might call it.
This has been an important and necessary stage in the evolution of attunement, and countless people have been blessed by that work. Many more will be blessed by that work in the future, and I fully intend to be one of those who bring that blessing to others, in my way, as long as I’m alive.
However, I think it’s time to turn more of our attention upstream, so to speak, and abide reverently focused on the flow of the attunement itself as it flows through us as practitioners.
At first, we may hear almost nothing but the familiar general tone of the attunement current. But little by little, as we practice by making space for it, we begin to hear voices and sense rhythms in the flow. We begin to perceive essences we hadn’t noticed before. As we listen, we may even be guided to incorporate other elements into our attunement practice.
This is why I recommend undertaking this new work without an immediate recipient, at least for a year. This is a different kind of attunement work, and at least at first it’s important to separate these two practices.
For myself, I still keep these two practices distinct, although I love how they are also inextricably intertwined. I maintain my “upriver” work as meditation or prayer, and my “downriver” work as my creativity and attunement practice. One thing is sure, though — my upriver work invariably guides me to let it consciously inform my downriver work. It is, after all, one river and I merely occupy a crossover point as it flows from one dimension to another.
By opening our conscious attention to the four-headed river flowing out from the garden we begin to sense the cycles and rhythms contained in it, and to entrain our behavior to the unique design the river contains for each particular attunement as well as for all our creative living.
Perhaps we haven’t taught much about how to pay attention to that guidance simply because we ourselves didn’t understand how, at least without filtering what we receive through our particular ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing.
I suggest it’s time to learn. The foundational concept of the teaching of Emissaries of Divine Light has been that the vibration of spirit moving through consciousness and released into the world contains the design for the form subsequently created. We called that the spiritual expression plane approach. Either that principle is true, or it’s not. If it’s true, I think we ought to trust it, and rely on it as a practical tool of creation.
I for one have embraced that principle as being unshakably true: the quality, frequency, nature, essence of spirit expressed offers a design for the manifestation that spirit would create. Whether the created form perfectly reflects that design is another matter, but the design is present, and our intention is to let it take accurate form.
So when we open to the current of attunement, we have opportunity to meet in this field, where I believe we have profound responsibility to fulfill, responsibilities that for the most part have not been tended collectively with conscious care and skilled stewardship for a long time.
We can practice on our own, but in reality this stewardship is collective work. When we enter the field with others sharing the same intention to be ready, to pay attention to what is there, to listen, something profound and utterly wonderful begins to occur — something that never would have happened on our own.
The Garden and the Gardener
So what information might be available in the river as it comes to us? What might we look for as we open to hear what the river is saying to us?
Like in any good garden, there are many cycles moving simultaneously — all in the present moment. A garden can live only in the present. Such a wonderful metaphor! But in the present moment, some cycles are in their fullness of maturity while others are just beginning. Others are closing down. It’s all one garden, and it’s all in the present moment.
To care for a garden, with all its creative cycles moving concurrently, a gardener must plant, prune, mulch, compost, harvest, dig, weed. There is constant death in a garden, as well as constant life. That is neither good nor bad. It’s perfect.
There’s a well-known passage in Ecclesiastes that makes a good point about cycles: there’s a time for everything. The question then becomes, what time is it?
There’s a time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
So a gardener just needs to know what time it is, so to speak, so they don’t cast away stones when it’s actually time to gather stones together, or pluck up what’s planted when it’s actually time to let the plant grow.
It’s not realistic to expect that we will understand all the cycles of the garden in all the requirements of stewardship, all nuances of movement, all the facets of meaning right away. If ever. If your experience is like mine, you’re going to encounter your own incompetence hard and often. Forgive yourself. Have a chuckle and take a deep breath. Keep listening.
The main point here is that a good gardener serves the garden in all its cycles. A good gardener does not become fixated on preserving something that should be passing away, or insisting that a seed bear fruit before its time. A good gardener is not attached to the cycles of the garden, but loves them all. A good gardener knows when it’s time to pull out a plant, when to prune, when to wait.
So the following section offers a practical field guide for those interested to see what this work is like.
A Simple Field Guide
1. Find or create a group. I recommend the Attunement Forum io group, or Attunement Practitioners FB group. See how the group self-selects. Yes, established affinity may play a part, but there may be broader value in joining in with folks you may not feel immediately drawn to or even know. Be daring!
2. Agree on a time, and be disciplined as you can about being fully present at that time, for the full time, every time. In my observation it takes about a year to grow the group energy.
3. At the agreed time, make yourself comfortable, be aware of your collaborators in the field, and open yourself to the attunement current and connect with them. Leave agendas behind and listen. Open yourself to the attunement current, and instead of radiating outward, follow the current upstream, so to speak, curious as to what the current is telling you. Listen openly. That current, coming from the invisible, is bringing you important information.
4. Let your perceptions remain simple and fluid. Don’t try to make anything out of them, or arrive at some big conclusion about meaning. You don’t have to decide on the meaning — the meaning is already in the current. Let your perceptions shift and evolve while you pay attention.
This should be effortless, as if you were floating in the river, carried on its current. All you need to do is pay attention to what the river is showing you as it flows to you. With practice you will learn a different kind of trust in the flow of attunement as you welcome it in this way. There is an unfolding garden contained in that flow.
At first, this may not be as easy as it sounds. You may discover that you held the agenda of being a blessing to someone to keep you focused as you shared an attunement with them. It was startling to me how I used that “be a blessing” agenda to stay focused, both mentally and energetically. In this work, we don’t need to be a blessing to anyone. We just need to listen, pay attention, and trust the current. In my experience, the blessings come later, and they are legion.
5. Avoid the temptation of using these times as group radiation directed at someone or something. Hold no agenda except to listen to, make space for, the wisdom of the river. If your field group agrees to share group radiation directed in the familiar way (and I think it’s a natural outgrowth of the work), set a separate time for that kind of work, at least for a year. Even after a year, my opinion is that the bulk of your field group time should be spent listening in the field, comparing notes, and enjoying each other.
The whole point of field work is to turn our attention from how we might direct the flow of the river to bless someone and focus on learning what the river is telling us about the cycles of the garden we need to be aware of. That said, the river is one flow. Inevitably we will begin to see synchronicity, correlation between what we perceive upriver and the world around us. I think this is the way it should be. But I still recommend first concentrating on developing your familiarity with the voices of the river upstream, and your experience of being part of a collective aperture for those upriver voices.
6. Share your perceptions of the upriver with your field group. What did you feel? Was it light and quick? Dense and slow? Steady or pulsing? Fertile and generous, or banked and sleeping? Did an image form, or color or sound? What showed up in your feelings or intuition? This work requires full participation of all our capacities.
Remember you’re not obliged to come up with deep, mystical, or complex perceptions. There is no wrong honest answer. It may be a challenge to put your perceptions into words — that’s great! Part of working in a group is so that you practice your capacity to articulate what you’re sensing. We have almost no vocabulary for sharing the rhythms, cycles, and the qualities of this part of the river.
7. Let the lens of your consciousness be continually reshaped as you work. The way you see things will change. What you pay attention to will change. The way you think about attunement will change. Your sense of connection, relationship and distance will reorganize completely. Your capacity for respect, love, gratitude and reverence will blossom. I promise this.
What is even more miraculous, we will begin to learn a language suitable for caring for the garden planted eastward in Eden.
Why Groups?
First, it’s my belief that tending the garden is a collective task. Yes, we each have unique work to do in tending the garden, but we cannot do even our own work alone. We’re not meant to. Heaven is collaborative, and if ecology shows us anything, Earth, even in its current distressed state, is collaborative, too.
So tending the garden is a team effort. Because our skill level has been so low, it has seemed that in attunement we all do pretty much the same thing. I hope those days are sliding into our past. Now we must discover how our unique gifts work together to create something larger than any of us could do on our own.
Long ago, I learned the fable of the blind men and an elephant.
Five blind men were told to describe an elephant. One, feeling the side, spoke of how an elephant was like a wall. Another, feeling a leg, said the elephant was like a column. Another, holding the tail, said the elephant was like a rope. The last, holding the trunk, said the elephant was like a powerful snake.
This story was taught to me (and which I then taught to others in the same scornful tone) as a moral lesson that we should not trust our own perceptions. I now understand that the story teaches exactly the opposite: each one of the blind men was right! And when the blind men, because they worked together in a field group, shared their perceptions and benefitted from hearing the perceptions of their field-mates, a truer understanding of an elephant began to emerge.
But only, I must point out, because the blind men spoke honestly of their perceptions, and were not concerned about the differences in perception, or scoring points for cleverness. They assumed each was right, and found unity in their intention to understand what an elephant was.
It’s so important to understand that caring for the cycles of the garden is not an individual task. The garden requires all of us, each of us with our particular and unique gift.
So the other purpose to sharing field work in a group is growth through accountability and shared practice.
Accountable to others, I learned I had to pay close attention to what was happening during our time and not drift (it’s amazing how having a “server’s agenda” can be used to stay focused) and then to be unflinchingly specific about my perceptions. I have an active imagination, so often over the first ten years or so especially I would preface my comment with “I might be making this up, but I felt…” Then Helen or Rose could confirm with their own experience, or not. I still allow for the possibility that my perception might be distorted, but I’m much more comfortable with not being “right” now than I was years ago when I started this work.
So, Onward
Clearly this story is not finished — it’s barely begun! Some of us are trying to figure out a way for people interested in joining a fieldwork group to do so. Stay tuned! Offer suggestions!
I hope you will join me and many others in the adventure of collaborating in Rumi’s field, where the creative cycles we are responsible for take shape, gestate, and call to be born through us into a world starving for the essences of the garden.
Learning the craft of stewardship over these cycles will require that we learn different aspects of gardening, learn different skills, practice attunement in ways that may bear little resemblance to how we originally learned the craft. The river will show us the way, for the design is in the river.
Variously we will be called to music, dance and all the arts, to astrology, science, education, earth stewardship, care of animals, psychic expansion, social evolution, weather. In the process, we will most certainly be reshaped ourselves, and taught by the river to better accommodate that flow with grace and wisdom.
Wishing you every blessing and fulfillment on this journey,
Lloyd Meeker
PS — I proudly acknowledge that my starting point in this journey, many years ago, was my father’s service The Things of Heaven Must Pass Away, given June 17th, 1954, mere weeks before his death. It is one of the most profound meditations on the beauty and necessity of impermanence I know of. Every good gardener understands the beauty and necessity of impermanence.
If you’re at all interested in visiting this beginning point, I recommend the audio version, not the printed version. Both are available from the Sunrise Ranch archives, and John Flood would be the one to contact.
The printed version is heavily edited, and to my eye does not read smoothly on the page. The audio recording is much longer, of course, but the voice will carry you, if you let it.
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