Resilient Spiritual Practices for a Time of Climate Crisis

We will explore what resources exist within spiritual traditions and communities that can nurture resilience for climate activists.

Drawing on interspiritual/interfaith approaches across six weeks we will offer wisdom and practices to guard against burnout, despair, and isolation. We will also be practising supporting one another each week as a learning community, and drawing on the wisdom of all participants.

Open to all who want to seek justice in the world in a way that builds on “inner work”.

Week one: Greater Community We will explore how we can work against isolation and individualism by drawing on communities of the present, communities of the past, and a sense of the Greater Community of interconnected existence. We will explore community as a sustaining practice.

Week two: Unmasking the Powers and Seeing the Invisible Drawing on the work of theologian Walter Wink we will delve into an understanding of interconnected social systems to understand the invisible Powers that fuel the climate crisis. We will explore understanding as a sustaining practice.

Week three: Imagination, Storytelling, and Hope We will explore how imagination can be colonised by the Powers we live under, and how to decolonise the imagination as the foundation for active hope. We will explore storytelling as a sustaining practice.

Week four: Compassion, Pain, and Anger We will explore how awareness of pain, our own, and others’ pain, can inspire our activism, and how to pay attention to our inner emotional lives. We will explore self-reflection as a sustaining practice.

Week five: Joy and Pleasure The possibility of joy in the midst of the work will be explored in this session. We will seek to understand how to pay attention to bodies. We will explore Sabbath as a sustaining practice.

Week six: Ego and Non-attachment We will explore what it means to be non-attached to outcomes, and to understand the place of ego in activism. We will explore prayer as a sustaining practice.