“The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.” Joanna Macy

Wildfires. Floods. Political incompetence. Corruption. Lies. Pollution. Species extinction.

You don’t need to have been personally affected by these things to feel angry, sad, fearful for the future. A recent study from the University of Bath, led by Caroline Hickman, found that 56% of young people feel that humanity is doomed. Just let that sink in for a moment.

Perhaps you’re one of those people. Staring into an unknown future that looks bleaker and bleaker every time you check the news, you can’t understand how your friends can carry on planning families and careers in a world that seems to be crashing to a halt.

In recent years, a lot of names have popped up to describe the emotions you might be feeling - eco-anxiety, climate anxiety, eco-grief.

Climate grief can refer to a range of feelings; the grief and trauma when a natural disaster hits you or your loved ones. What makes it tricky is that it can also refer to a kind of “anticipatory” grief; a tainting of everything we love by knowledge of its potential loss. You might grieve the future you had once dreamt of, or the children you had wished to bear but now feel too afraid to bring into the world.

So how do we deal with such an enormous, weighty grief?

As Finnish writer and researcher Pinu Pikhala points out, the mere experience of climate grief can be a sign of how safe and privileged we have been up until now: “For many middle-class citizens of industrialised nations this brings a profound existential challenge. The world is revealed to be much more tragic and fragile than people thought it was. For many young people, the climate crisis is the first enormous existential crisis that they face. And our societies have not been very good in recent decades at building emotional or existential resilience.” (Source: Climate grief: How we mourn a changing planet, BBC Future)

Being told to build resilience can feel almost impossible in the face of everything else that we have to bear; for many young people, even keeping our heads above water can be a huge challenge. On top of worrying about a burning planet, we have to deal with capitalism.

Even if we didn’t worry about climate collapse, the realisation that most of us will never be able to own our own home. In the US, the fear that getting sick could lead to financial devastation or homelessness. War. The constant draining of our health and energies by technology, advertising, chemicals.

According to Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, people are grieving whether they realise it or not. Grieving a future that they once imagined that they had. Grieving the loss of hope, but also the loss of biodiversity. Grieving the ice caps. Grieving the lack of a caring, supportive community that truly sees them and the gifts that their soul has to offer, or of a society that cares about what is happening as much as they do.

But how often do you find yourself able to express your emotions about all of these things? And, if you do, how often do you feel truly held and listened to by a community of people?

What we know: pushing down your emotions is not effective. If you’re in pain and somebody tells you to shut up, stop crying, to grow up, and get on with things, how does that make you feel? Perhaps you will push down your feelings, only to have them pop up again later in the form of physical illness, unexplained pain or anger, or feelings of disconnection from your body.

People are often afraid that if they open up the door to their pain for the world, they will fall into an abyss and never be able to get out again. However, the Work that Reconnects was born when its creators found that, when we share our pain for the world with others, our emotional blocks are released and we are more fully alive — not only to pain, grief, and anger, but to joy, connection, and love.

In my Work that Reconnects workshops and healing and sharing places, we offer the space to speak to your grief for the world, to connect with others in their pain, and to honour our feelings about what is happening in the world rather than trying to push them aside and continue with ‘business as usual’.

But if the idea of a grief circle is more alien and traumatic to you than the idea of turning up at a swingers’ club, then I would at least ask — how might you start to be more emotionally honest with at least one person in your life today? And what might be the impact of NOT having somebody you can share your grief, anger, fear, hopes and dreams with?

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