*Please note: we have decided to postpone this course for now. If you are interested in joining at a later date, please sign up to my newsletter to receive updates or email connect@gwynethjones.coach
Once absorbing the scale of the climate crisis, it is natural to experience states of anxiety, rage, despondency and numbness. What Now is an 8 weeks-long deep dive into realignment, resilience and radical love.
Eco-anxiety exists for a reason; it tells us that our home is in danger. It alerts us to a very real and present threat; to attempt to make it go away so that we can continue with day-to-day life is a disservice to ourselves and to all life on Earth.
With this course, we offer you community support, collaborative space, and a range of powerful tools. The processes used, and the generative power of the space, expertly held by us can help you process your feelings. Perhaps that can be enough for now. Most of us try to leap from learning about the climate crisis, to action, without making space for their grief and rage; consequently allowing their hijacked brain to run the show. This results in activist burnout, poorly planned and unsustainable initiatives, and an unhelpful projection of our inner pain onto our creations.
“It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society” – Jiddu Krishnamurti.
This course is a deep dive into realignment, resilience, and radical love for those left wondering “what now??” as they stare into an unknown future.
What Now? is an 8-week course. There will be plenty of reading, listening, writing and other tasks (optional but recommended) between sessions to enrich your experience.
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.
Over eight weeks, you will join a group of like-minded souls who are wondering how to navigate just what it means to be a human alive in these times.
Although we are in a climate emergency and are running out of time, we must also do things carefully, wisely, and with our full attention. This world full of rushed, sloppy, multitasking, glorifying-busyness, half-baked ideas and lazy thinking is partly what got us into this mess to begin with.
As Bayo Akomolafe says: “The Times are Urgent : Let’s Slow down”. By giving ourselves time to be with our feelings and thoughts we can make sure we are responding to the climate crisis from a place of groundedness and wisdom, rather than from a place of panic.
This course is offered by Banduri, a new collaboration between Gwyneth Jones and Shayontoni Ghosh.
“Shayontoni and Gwyneth work beautifully together and have created a perfect refuge from the storms of climate collapse. A place where you can rest, reflect, be acknowledged and get some solidarity. “What Now?” has been a key ingredient for keeping me going. I’ll be doing it again!” Fred, course participant May 2022
Price: The course is offered on a sliding scale of £350-500.
If price is a barrier for you, please get in touch and speak to us about it. Due to the number of people who have accepted free spaces and dropped out at the last minute, we will ask you to join one of us on a 10-minute call to assess your suitability and commitment to the programme if you apply for one of these spaces
During this course, we will:
* Take a realistic look at where we are, the problems we’re facing, the root causes and what we can honestly expect from the next few years and what kind of deep, systemic changes are really required if we are to change our relationship with the planet to one of collaboration, not extraction;
*Learn powerful coping mechanisms to deal with overwhelming emotions, including ways to increase our emotional resilience and intelligence and to stretch our “windows of tolerance”;
*Uncover, explore and honour the feelings we normally try to push aside, and discover the power of tapping into your sacred anger and of group grief rituals;
*Step beyond our human-centric view of the world and explore nature’s intelligence and regenerative powers, considering what is possible if we help nature to heal herself;
*Explore why “apocalypse” is not the final story and look into projects that are taking place all over the world towards regeneration and deep adaptation (while learning to separate the effective from the greenwashing);
*Discover the strong, resilient and wise spirit inside you through powerful, imaginative exercises that connect you to your intuition, as well as to our ancestors, future generations, and the non-human world;
*Look at the skills, resources and connections we will need in order to survive the coming decades and to contribute meaningfully towards creating “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”;
*Reconnect to our sacred mission and look at how to realign our paths forward to fit with what we now know.
About Us:
We - Shayontoni (India) and Gwyneth (Wales) - have been offering Work that Reconnects spaces in the online world for the last 18 months, where we help people reconnect with themselves, the human world, and all of life (the earth, nature, the universe).
We are inspired by Ecopsychology, emotional intelligence work, earth-based spirituality and indigenous wisdom, environmental justice, the Work that Reconnects, and many other things. Collectively, we bring experience in healing circles, sharing spaces, drama therapy, emotional intelligence, coaching, and a lifetime of Indian and Celtic wisdom. We have been offering workshops and courses for collective healing since 2020, and this summer, we created Banduri, a home for our offerings together.
Testimonials for What Now:
“This course was maybe the best Zoom course I've taken. The facilitators did an excellent job of designing a space that was as in-person and community centered as possible. Each session was valuable on the level of providing community, intellectual learning, and experiential exercises that helped me embody the learning. I feel like this course helped me process my emotions around climate and gave me tools to continue to do so for myself and others”. -May Bartlett, participant October 2021
“This class was really important for me to touch into the feelings that I have been having about climate change (and the systemic problems that have caused it). It was so important to be able to get to hear others and to share with others my thoughts and feelings. I feel much more sane now and have more tools to help myself function in this world.” Participant, May 2022
“I needed this course to dive more deeply into my own current experience and awareness of my Gratitude and Pain for the World AND was graced with a wider lens through which to come more fully alive in this crazy, wild world. I also gained inspiration to become more imaginative and future oriented, going forth with a (slightly) better glimpse of "the more beautiful world we know is possible". Many valuable resources were shared: the Joanna Macy videos were essential pre-work for this course; Gwyneth's and Shayantoni's added resources were VERY timely, relevant and broadened/deepened our learning via connections to Gwyneth's blog, Deep Adaptation, EQ, other ancestry and systemic thinking sources. These made the course unique among other offerings of the WTR.” Participant, October 2022
Do you feel called to join us? Register at this link
Read more about the Work that Reconnects
Read my blog post Crying With Strangers : The Power of Expressing Emotions in a Group
Read my blog post Feeling Overwhelmed by What’s Happening in the World? Here’s Why You’re Not Broken or Weak
Read my article at SheSapiens: Eco-anxiety: How to emotionally process climate collapse