Regeneration
Because we reject our own humanity, we reject what Jung calls the shadow side;
we’ve pushed that down into the unconscious, and the minute we do that,
we start projecting it out onto someone else so that someone else
has to carry our so-called darkness. What I’m suggesting
is that we have to now begin to own our own darkness.202
~marion woodman
We can ignore our own and the world’s pain. The misfortune of doing so is, in fact, the norm and has brought us where we are. Suffering pain is a hallmark of our humility, and of our capacity to be part of the whole and resist our desire to excessively dominate others and the natural world. Most of our dysfunctional relationship to the world is rooted in trying to escape emotional pain. We shove it down it, drug it, distract from it, pleasure over it, and project and displace it. Through denial, we secretly build the lethal mega-bomb of our shadow, which we then drop on the unwitting, including ourselves.
The year of 2020 will be remembered as the year of COVID-19. Like the pandemic, the darkness of climate crisis appears separate from our inner lives. Yet, what threatens from the outside has grown out of what we’ve killed inside us. This is especially obvious with climate change, as the external dynamic of ecocide is of our own making. Climate crisis is but one symptom of the many ways we have disavowed ourselves. In contrast, when we face and die through our pain, we come alive via our finer jewels of being human to heal the world.
Ecocide begins as a smarting, dark corner or an invisible, roiling storm of pain and disconnection inside us. At any moment, however, we can befriend our difficult emotions to reduce our pain and not discharge it onto one another and the Earth. If we have already displaced it, we can own our error, make amends, and adjust our actions. This is how we begin to withdraw the shadow we have asked others to “carry” by imposing our “so-called darkness” onto them. Marion Woodman calls it “so-called darkness” because our shadow is only malevolent when we disown and unconsciously act it out. When we own and work with our shadow, we allow it to birth our finer jewels and, at the least, keep our violence in check.
When we cease deranged activities and own our darkness, Yin and Yang begin to notice, converse, and cocreate once again. Thus begins the re-fertilization and blossoming of our world. This is a return to regenerative psyche: to a balance of rest and activity, to productivity and replenishment, to inner reflection, for wise action. It is a return to justice and integrity, to all that nourishes our relationships and our body-minds, rebuilds the soil, purifies the waters, and reinvigorates the air. We can and should press our governments, but we cannot wait for them to do this for us. We have to do it. And we have to show others the way, so more of us can muster the gumption to successfully degrow, resist, and renew.
Our Many Forms of Exhaling
On the most practical level, we can resist the irremediable process of genetically engineering our food, which has contributed to the insect apocalypse and is escalating our deadly dependence on ever-more complex, untested pesticide cocktails. We can also reject the barrage of synthetic, toxic chemicals in the innumerable common products that fill our homes—such as artificially scented laundry detergents, air fresheners, colognes and perfumes—and are linked to allergies, depression and anxiety, sperm damage, autism, obesity, endocrine disruption, and cancer.203 We must ban chemical products that outgas to the environment, and dismantle those that needlessly gas it, such as two- and four-stroke motors—especially leaf blowers. These many forms of exhaling share similar shadow poetics with our other CO2 emissions, and the increasing methane releases from farming cattle and melting Arctic permafrost.
We must stop believing it’s better to live in a synthetic, toxic slurry of “progress” than within moderate means that include a rational measure of technology. To stop burning up the planet we must reclaim our cool, or there will quickly be no life left to build upon. Maverick scientist and author Dr. Guy McPherson says, “If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money.” 204 To breathe better, we must become integrated dark and light Earth citizens capable of living with more outer simplicity in exchange for a richer inner life. This includes breaking the many faces of the addiction cycle, which works squarely against the fertility cycle. Making the dark conscious, we become ripe for wisdom and more likely to choose heartfelt, common sense for the common good.
Paradox for the Win
If we can’t prevent nature from destroying us (because we have destroyed it), can we, as Carolyn Baker proposes, “collapse consciously” ? 205 As a last gesture of dignity, can we work to save what is beautiful and sacred? Even if we despair, every desert poppy, needlessly scorched koala, or stranded orangutan that we can rescue or protect matters. Can we open our hearts to courageously face our folly and feel the ache of these times, especially the pain of the untold ecosystems we have injured along the way? When our hearts are heavy with unresolved grief, urban pollution and neurosis, frivolous distraction, and addiction to the unimportant, there’s little room for the freedom to care for anything but ourselves. We can begin cleaning up our inner and outer acts at any moment.
Contrary to what the media and mega-corporations want us to believe, our difficult emotions are deeply liberating. They are the secret paths to sovereignty and freedom from mercenary maniacs’ control over us—those who, for millennia, have tried to brainwash us into believing wholeness and freedom can’t be found in heartbreak, outward simplicity, the beauty of the natural world, the dark earth beneath our feet, and the wisdom of our own bodies. This is the biggest lie and it’s sold to us in every conceivable way. These dark domains are in fact what make us truly great, deeply humane, and able to care enough to live regeneratively on the planet. Like the phoenix they represent, our dark emotions harbor all the light we need to rise through the rubble of climate breakdown.
In the most absurd irony, our dark emotions gift us what we search for in trying to avoid them. “So without knowing it, your whole life is regulated by fear and pain that you’re trying to escape from in various ways,” says addiction expert Dr. Gabor Maté.206 I invite us to step off this road to nowhere, break open, and live through the transformation of our core wounds into their obverse—our finer jewels of being human—faithful to the deep wisdom of Yin-Yang and the cycle of the seasons. When we revive this natural wheel of transformation inside us, we can join with and care more deeply for the natural world and one another, cleaving our love to the welfare of all. This is the embodied magic of living paradoxically, which is to live poetically and to feel the world come alive in us through our collective heartache and ensuing renewal.
Vulnerable Strength
For the treasures we can’t rescue in time, we can generate a quality of heart to expand and bend with the demise of the biosphere in passionate, broken-open witnessing. We may not be able to save ourselves or millions more species from extinction, but we can cherish and protect the good that remains, and what’s beautiful inside and shared among us. To this end, reviving our triangle of resilience relationships—inner work, nature connection, human community—is an honest and genuinely hopeful way forward.
Revolution germinates in our own bodies, via inner activism and sacred permission. It puts down roots and grows through the building of sustainable Yin resources: spending quality time with one another, embracing our dark hearts, sharing embodied love, creating gardens and art, slowing down and minimizing, and sharing nurturing touch. It flowers through the embracing of regenerative Yang: clear thinking, mobilizing and channeling healthy anger, courageously confronting unhealthy fears, resisting greed and addiction, protesting, and fighting for justice. Resiliency grows most robustly when we allow ourselves to be changed by our difficult emotions and the difficult news, by staying close enough to vital silence, one another, and the natural rhythms inside and outside us. This way, we can feel what is diseased and live close enough to reality to build a saner world.
A Fear of Deaths
The paradox we fail to embrace returns to us as tragic irony. The metaphorical deaths we avoid return to us as literal death and destruction. Anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Becker posits that our fear of death causes us to act so violently toward one another.207 I wonder if it isn’t our fear of psychological (metaphorical) death—of passing through death and rebirth while alive—that frightens us at least as much, and fuels our irrational cruelty.
American author and professor Norman Cousins proposed that dying with unlived lives inside us is more tragic than death itself. If so, we must seek to psychologically “die” while we’re alive, so as not to accumulate too much infertile darkness and thereby suffer an infertile death with too much unlived life left inside us. When we live fully, I imagine we can face death with more equanimity, because we have not let too much infertile darkness accumulate inside and around us. This possibility is consistent with the epiphany many experience on their death beds, who wish they had dedicated themselves to what mattered more.
Some might argue that the urgency to live a full, meaningful life stems from a fear of death, or of dying a meaningless death. But, Holocaust survivor and hero Viktor Frankl says, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” 208 Since life is full of suffering, meaning in life is not dispensable and allows us to endure the worst. Facing literal death incites an urgency to live more fully, for life is short and time is precious. Climate crisis adds potency to this charge, presenting us with the ultimate death and rebirth initiation, and therefore the opportunity to most fully live. For myself, this includes Yang and Yin, respectively: I dedicate myself to the most heartfelt, passionate work I can on behalf of all, while making time to enjoy and be renewed by the simplest, and therefore most awesome, natural pleasures.
There is interplay among our capacities to care, to live well, to die while still alive, and finally to die fulfilled and less afraid. Becker says, “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.” 209 While I largely abide Becker’s conclusions, I disagree that we must shrink from being fully alive. The key to unlock Becker’s catch-22 is to die through our pain by grieving our hurts past and present. This way, we come more fully alive, thus uncoupling the cause (daily living) and effect (anxiety and shrinking from life) Becker describes, which I describe in the following poem:
Common Ground
So many fear the great death,
But dying a little each day
Deepens, decompresses
That same ground in us,
Molding our inevitable demise
Into an urn that drinks us
For eternity.
Withdrawing Our Shadow
Jung believed the most effective social, political, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw from projecting our shadow onto another. In our discussion, another includes the Earth itself. If we are to heal our protracted self-loathing and our pervasive addiction to try to fill what must remain vitally (spiritually) empty inside us, as well as claim any politico-corporate victory, we must win the battle of reclaiming our emotional shadow and become capable of living without the specious power of junk things and toxic ideas that fail to fulfill us and regenerate the biosphere. With this new freedom, we can rebirth a more sustainable summer from the depths of our present, infertile winter.
We withdraw our shadow by owning it and ceasing to project it. We embrace our ungrieved losses and unclaimed talents, our misplaced love and unrealized passions, our heartfelt dreams and pause-inducing nostalgias, as well as all that we cannot change. Outwardly, we remember, nurture, and spend time with animals and plants, mountains and bodies of water, lichens and soils—that are all unreasonably injured at our behest. We surrender to beauty by facing both the awe and suffering of our times, by trusting in the capacity of our hearts to be rebirthed from what brings us to our knees. This way, we might navigate the coming years of personal and collective crisis not only with more holy heartbreak and remunerative grief, but with more compassion, passion, and meaning than we thought possible.
Let us, then, find the courage to make our daily work that which honors our bodies, our entrusted chunks of Earth. We can take a vow of humility for the now-desperate hope to return richness and sanity to a world gone mad on external power and material fundamentalism—the symptoms of inner vacuity that spoil the party for those of us in love with outer simplicity and inner richness. Or, more practically, for the promise of tomorrow.
May we begin in earnest what we have neglected, which is not only to expose our hearts to ourselves, but to the natural world and each other. Whatever personal dark-night-of-the-soul work we have done prepares us for these times. Whatever more we have left should be commenced, as our disavowed inner lives increasingly close in on us from outside in the form of climate collapse, to which we can barely extend our trembling hands from our too-busy, overwhelmed lives.
There is yet much to celebrate, to be passionate about, and to engage. Let us enter our collective dark heart of healing together with the light of love we already have in hand to rebirth our care, so that “everything glows a little more from our presence here.” 210 Through grief and shadow work, renewed intimacy with one another, and nature connection, we can fulfill the body of love as regeneration on every level.
When we know that metaphorical death is truly the birth of our fuller selves, we can more confidently enter paradoxical healing and avoid lethal ironies. This is how we become more conscious of our unconscious, so we are able to choose a different fate, so we do not destroy ourselves further “through the might” of our “own technology and science.” 211 May this path catalyze our cure, our hearts as one with the Earth and other humans, as medicine for our times.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, we have to act differently—very differently. We must face, weather, and mitigate climate crisis by way of regenerative revolution. We must also rebel, because it’s quite possible the corporate elite are well aware of the crisis at hand and deliberately allowing the world to burn (Resource 2: Plested, “How the Rich Plan,” and Hedges, “Saving the Planet”).
I have tried to expose the largely unseen factors that, unless recognized and worked with, prevent us from being the change we must. Changing our lifestyles is indeed “hitched to every other thing.” 212 Curbing consumerism and fossil fuel use, as well as restoring enough of the natural world, are more difficult than they seem.
Ninety corporations create two-thirds of global emissions.213 Please pause and just consider that for a moment. Our individual, bottom-up actions are no longer enough. We must make global, top-down changes. This is what brave young climate activists and Extinction Rebellion are pressing government to do, as we work to reach the critical 3.5 percent of the population threshold needed for massive social change. Make time for these efforts today by radically minimizing your life and dedicating yourself to inner work, to commune and enjoy time with others, and to engage in direct climate action.
If you can significantly reduce your carbon footprint and sustainably rebel without any of the healing offered in this book, fantastic. I believe some can do this and tolerate the sacrifices. Many, if not most of us, require more effort.
Once we take a step outside the status quo of business as usual, invisible psycho-spiritual obstacles we didn’t know existed come to light. Left unchallenged, these emotional wounds, unconscious biases, and irrational fears and anxieties neutralize our will to change and prevent us from sane progress. They are the same drivers that engendered and perpetuated our current chaos. Building triangle of resilience relationships helps us overcome these obstacles, to better cope and thrive through decline and any degree of renewal we can muster. Yet, because the climate bewitching hour is here, we must now make rebellion for top-down policy change our climate cure priority.
Renewable energy does not seem to be enough to save us from the worst of climate crisis. While they can help, renewables also require massive amounts of fossil fuels to produce and maintain. I don’t think we are going to plant enough trees that can survive. I think we will spray the skies to reflect the sun’s rays sooner than later and suffer its perils. I hope I’m wrong. Meanwhile, the most promising adjustment to our lifestyles we can now make is radical degrowth—cutting consumption, waste, and especially fossil fuel use—in essence, radically minimizing our impact and localizing our lives. We must walk away from empire.
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Thankfully, the good word is out now about our bad situation. Climate crisis is real and rapidly descending upon us. Personal and planetary transformation are needed now, whether we like it or not. We’ve turned away from this challenge for too long, which is why we are in cataclysm. I hope the information I’ve shared with you has bolstered your mental, emotional, and spiritual preparation, and that it helps you mobilize outwardly, wholeheartedly, and effectively.
I imagine outer climate solutions are going to be coming faster and more furiously as conditions deteriorate. We must implement any of these fixes judiciously, even if they are only branch treatments for root problems. With some very good fortune, their exponential effects—be they any combination of renewables, geoengineering, artificial CO2 sequestration methods, regenerative agriculture, degrowth, and planting billions of carbon-capturing trees—may help us prolong our lives and save the species that remain. They could buy us time to slow the locomotive of modern civilization. This wouldn’t be regression, but a return to perennial values of decency, a lower standard of living in the name of survival, and leading more meaningful, compassionate lives. This could increase our quality of living. Ancient, Earth-centered wisdom is also invaluable for creating this new culture. Nature-ignorant despots and climate denialists must be swiftly dismissed; make sure you vote accordingly.
With your effort and resilience to expose yourself to reality, to better thrive and to care enough to be more directly engaged, we can change the tides—or at least some tides. Whether or not we can save ourselves and what’s left of what we love is unknown. I sure hope you’ll try with me. You are the answer. So am I. Yet, my effort is not enough without yours, and yours is not enough without mine. I encourage you to continue to embrace paradox: to embrace what’s uncomfortable and to balance it with simple, wholesome pleasures. I will too. This is what’s needed to save ourselves, so we and especially our children can enjoy a safer and saner world than we’ve ever known.
Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and enjoy creating your responses to the following:
Now that you’ve completed this book, let’s bring all the information together, beginning deep in your heart and manifesting out in the world. Below are three writing prompts and a final action prompt. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers, just honestly assessing where you are right now.
1. On a fresh sheet of paper, write down your responses to the following, even if there is some overlap from previous exercises. This is an overall, gut-level, final inventory:
• Sit quietly, close your eyes, and feel deep into your essence. On a scale from zero to ten, rate how much you care for your life, the more-than-human world, and (y)our children.
• Then, write down to what degree you feel it’s worth mobilizing for climate action and how you see yourself engaging this.
• After reading this book, how committed are you to your self-growth for the greater good?
• Which of the many recommendations and self-help tools from any of the chapters stand out as most important for you?
• Which unnecessary or unhelpful activities, distractions, or burdens are you willing to forego to take better care of yourself, others, and the natural world?
• Which emotions do you imagine will challenge you as you make any of the above changes in your life? What support can you garner to help you through these challenges?
2. Which unique gifts do you bring to addressing any aspect of climate crisis and how can you more fully exercise them?
3. On a fresh sheet of paper, write down the most empowered and fulfilling life you can imagine living as we all journey through climate crisis together.
4. Are you ready to live this life?
202. Horváth, “Marion Woodman: Holding the Tension of the Opposites.”
203. Sigurdson, “Expert Panel Confirms Fragrance Ingredient Can Cause Cancer.”; Nelson, “Fragrance Is the New Secondhand Smoke.”
204. McPherson, “Time for a Revolution.”
205. Baker, Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse.
206. Caparrotta, “Dr. Gabor Maté on Childhood Trauma, the Real Cause of Anxiety and Our ‘Insane’ Culture.”
207. Solomon, “Ernest Becker & The Denial of Death.”
208. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: Revised and Updated,117.
209. Becker, The Denial of Death, 66.
210. Weber, “Thanksgiving: an Activist’s Grace.”
211. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 110.
212. Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, quoted in Laura Moncur’s Motivational Quotations.
213. Goldenberg, “Just 90 Companies Caused Two-thirds of Man-made Global Warming Emissions.”