You've just realised how bad the climate crisis is - what can you do now? Resilience, Wisdom and Love in the Time of Climate Collapse
15th September 2021 - 19:00-22:00 CET, tickets 20 GBP - reserve your spot here
You’ve just realised how bad things are in our world. Perhaps you feel afraid, wondering what on earth you’re going to do when sh*t hits the fan. Maybe you feel despondent, hopeless, wondering why you should even bother getting out of bed. You might be furious, brimming over with anger, wanting to shake people and scream “wake up!!”. Or you’re numb, strangely calm, but unsure of how you’re going to figure out your life now.
Over this three-hour workshop, we look at how to build internal resilience, process the eco-anxiety and grief you may be feeling, and how you can start to work out the part you’re going to play in co-creating a world that celebrates and defends life; not one focused on extraction, exploitation and endless growth. Can we thrive, let alone survive, what’s coming? One thing is certain – we won’t figure it out all by ourselves.
What Now? follows the spiral of Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects, a powerful body of work that helps activists and concerned citizens alike to move through the overwhelming barrage of emotions they feel around the global predicament and to reawaken their inner resilience, wisdom, and sense of interconnection with all of life.
If you're wondering what the f*** you're supposed to do, think or feel given all the things you've been seeing in the news lately... then this is the space for you!
We can't offer band-aid, quick-fix solutions and we won't cheerily tell you to go and recycle a bit more and join an environmental movement to make yourself feel better. However, if you're looking for the first step to unlocking the resilient, wise warrior inside you that is screaming to protect our earth's children (not only the human ones), you may just feel called to join us.
This is an interactive workshop - not the kind where you sit back and listen to something in the background while you multitask. So please, sign up only if you can give three hours of your full attention and care, and you're willing to open up (as much as you can).
About The Work that Reconnects:
The Work that Reconnects initially evolved in North America in the late 1970s, during a time of escalating concerns about nuclear weaponry and the hazards of nuclear power as “despair and empowerment work”, when creators Chellis Glendinning, Joanna Macy and Fran Peavey realised that when people share their feelings of fear, anguish or despair with others, their power to act for change is released. In the face of environmental uncertainty, climate despair, or whatever we want to call it, WTR allows us to access and honour our pain for the world, and through doing so realise our interconnectedness to the earth and all beings.
Workshops guide participants through the “spiral”, which helps us to face the challenges of the world with new eyes and a sense of rootedness, belonging and energy. The spiral begins with gratitude - what are we grateful for having witnessed and experienced in this world? Then, we honour our pain for the world. All too often we bury and ignore our pain, numbing ourselves because the cost of feeling it is too high. By allowing the pain to speak, we also realise that we are capable of feeling for something far beyond our ‘selves’ as we have come to perceive them. Recognising our interconnectedness to life, we begin to see with new eyes, enabling us to go forth into the actions that call to us.
Do you feel the call to be a defender of the earth? What is the cost of ignoring your intuition about what is happening to the planet, and of continuing business as usual?
“As a society, we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. In this 'caught' place our responses are blocked and confused…. On one level we maintain a more or less upbeat capacity to carry on as usual…. and all the while, underneath, there is this inchoate knowledge that our world could go at any moment. Awesome and unprecedented in the history of humanity, it lurks there, with an anguish beyond the naming. Unless we find ways of acknowledging and integrating that level of anguished awareness, we repress it; and with that repression, we are drained of the energy we need for action and clear thinking.” Joanna Macy.