Hosting climate grief and deep adaptation workshop in Estonia

I returned from Estonia this week hosting a climate grief and deep adaptation workshop for a group of 25 climate activists. At home in London, people were sweltering in 38 degree heat.

Hosting this grief workshop for built around Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects reconnects me to my own deep sense of purpose in my work in my lifetime. There is so much to act and work for. This is the single most important issue of our time.

Thank you to the people who invited me to facilitate with them, Anne Symens-Bucher and Morgan Curtis, with whom I learned so much.

Joanna called in for 15 minutes and it was still so strengthening and inspiring to experience her connection to doing what is right in the face of collapse and destruction of so many of the things we hold dear. I heard it said by John Seed once "Joanna Macy has many friends. Most of them are not born yet".

We created a container where it was safe and welcomed to share traditionally "negative" emotions like fear, grief, despair, anger, emptiness, lostness. I feel sure that this is what is needed to unblock our innate feedback loops and derive our action from the truth of what we see and feel and know is happening to our world.

People left the workshop with a profound sense of transformation. It’s the closest thing to “transformation” I have born witness to as a facilitator. There was and continues to be a deep sense of shared solidarity and people reporting a sense of seeing their life and the world with new eyes.

Folks talked about finally being able to see steps forward in their life, being able to connect dots previously not possible, and a grounded sense of meaning and realistic and accurate hope and rightful sadness and mourning for what is dying or ending.

I am committed to organising more workshops like this one. Please reach out if this is something you'd like to support, join or encourage me forward in doing! It feels like a big task, and yet nothing could call me more strongly.

We keep putting pressure on the individual to stop climate change without success. Humans are not naturally apathetic. The apathy is the symptom of people knowing of a larger system that inhibits larger change from happening.

Humans are self-regulating systems. Society is a self-regulating system. We need to unblock our feedback loops and allow action to come from really feeling, seeing and acknowledging what is happening in our world.

Let’s face it together.