This is part of our four Order-Wide rituals for healing the earth. Please see this page for details about the ceremonies as a whole and how to participate.
If you want to add yourself to our ritual map or discuss our ceremony, please do so in our forums here or under our AODA Discord Server #earth rituals.
For a full script of this ceremony (including the opening, SOP, and closing) and more details on the visualization and step-by-step of the ceremony, you can download a Word document here: land healing ritual script.
If you are performing the ceremony, we would welcome you to add yourself to the map. To do so, please see the instructions in the AODA forums here.
The Solar Land Healing Ceremony at the Summer Solstice
The purpose of this ceremony is to provide protection, healing, and blessing for our lands and those who live within them. This ceremony uses a modified Sphere of Protection placed in a tree or stone to radiate blessing and healing to the broader landscape.
Choose a private space in nature that is outdoors. This can be a forest, park, garden, or any other natural space. In order to select your space, use your intuition and commune with nature to select an appropriate location. Once you select your space, find a tree, stone, or other natural features that will receive the blessing on behalf of the broader landscape. Using your intuition, make sure the tree/stone/other natural feature is willing to receive the blessing before proceeding. (The rest of this ritual will refer to “tree”). We suggest if you are choosing a tree, choose a mature tree, one that is producing fruits/nuts/buds/seeds.
You may optionally choose to use an anointing oil or bowl of water to draw the symbols on the tree/stone/natural feature.
Feel free to create and decorate an altar space any way you see fit with the symbols and energies of the elements, the land, the sun, and for healing. This ceremony can also be done without an altar if you are out in nature.
The Ceremony
Use AODA’s Solitary Grove opening to open a sacred space. (If you are in a public space and do not feel you are able to do this, perform the Sphere of Protection on yourself before you leave for the public space).
Perform the full sphere of protection ceremony, centered around your tree. Rather than facing outward in the East, South, West, etc, draw the symbol on the tree itself, facing inward. Thus, you would stand in the east, facing the tree, and trace the symbol directly on the tree. Do this for the first four elements. Visualize each of the elements powerfully, paying attention to their physical qualities in the immediate landscape and visualizing their energies coming into the tree. For the Spirit Above and below, trace the circle around the tree’s roots (telluric) and trunk (solar), walking fully around the tree each time if possible. When you call the Solar Current/Spirit Above, spend extra time with this element, building the clear image of the solar current, in the height of its power at the Summer Solstice, radiating down into the tree/stone. Feel and visualize the solar current coming into the tree/stone and filling it with golden light. Feel the warmth of that summer sun present. Then, complete the sphere of protection. As you form the sphere, imagine it radiating outward from the tree/stone and into the broader landscape as far as you can. As it radiates, you can continue to draw from the seven elements, especially the solar current, to radiate the blessing outward as far as you can.
Offer this prayer:
Summer sun, stand now
At the height of your power
See this place with your fiery eye
Share your warmth and light.
Let the solar current descend
Blessing all with its radiance.
Let that blessing
Radiate from this place
Blessing the lands
And all who live upon them.
Sit in meditation for a time once you are finished seeing if any additional insights or messages from the living earth arise. Perform any other work you choose to perform. Close the grove (if you opened it) and give thanks to the living earth.
After the ceremony, we suggest that you also do something to bring the energies of the blessing to the earth directly, as an additional offering. This allows you to balance both physical and metaphysical work. This might be picking up trash in the area where you did the blessing, working to replant trees, working in your community to raise ecological awareness or any other earth-path style change.
