The Inner Path
to Sustainability
There is no way to preserve anything approximating the status quo without turning into monsters or cadavers, and no way to survive that is not radical. In this future we will need to keep our eyes open and learn to calm ourselves only with truths.21
~ben ehrenreich
We know a lot about how to reduce our carbon footprints, but relatively little about how to do so with less and work for free to save our lives. Ironically, we’re so busy “surviving” that we’re killing ourselves. Inner work undoes this catch-22. Such inner climate action is as important as outer, especially since no immediate climate solution currently exists and because “nothing like what is happening—and what needs to happen—has ever occurred in history,” says meteorologist Eric Holthaus.22
In addition to a lack of guidance for how to cope, we have but a superficial understanding of how we got to this precipice. Surely there must be more to the story than burning fossil fuels, corporate greed, and political stonewalling? Understanding the unseen forces for how we arrived here—hidden in our very bodies and inherited from our storied evolution—can empower us to move beyond ignorance and compulsion to untangle our knotted hearts. Then we might begin to back away from the edge of the cliff and improve our experience here, as well as that of countless other species with which we share the planet.
On this journey together, we explore how climate crisis and its impending consequences can catalyze our greatest transformation. I introduce these perspectives and some navigational strategies just ahead. I also introduce salient themes to be developed in subsequent chapters where they are integrated into a cohesive whole. So, let’s begin with an overview for how to holistically engage with our climate predicament.
Radical Sanity
Healing climate crisis and our heart-minds shares the same strategy: facing reality with intellectual and emotional honesty while cultivating passion, meaning, and depth. This requires every inner and outer resource we have. Climate cure means we not only heal ourselves, but also help the rest of the planet flourish as much as possible. In this sense, climate chaos is a catalyst, an opportunity for regeneration, similar to other forms of heartbreak.
Conveniently, the honest, critical thinking and emotional intelligence we need to resolve our personal heartaches are the same capacities we need to reckon with environmental collapse. They are a form of “radical sanity” as we follow Ehrenreich’s wise, challenging prescription to “calm ourselves only with truths.” 23
The word radical means “root,” which connotes the roots of plants and trees that hold the Earth’s soil, as well as our humanity, together. Radical also conveys severe or extreme, fringe or counterculture. Because the radical problem of climate chaos is rattling our many support systems, we must dig down and branch out in new directions that are foreign to our current sensibilities. Indeed, we must live beyond current societal norms—the taken-for-granted beliefs and business-as-usual practices we have grown up with that are, unfortunately, tearing down the world.
As a Chinese medicine clinician, I am trained to discern the root causes of disease, the same focus I apply to climate illness. This holistic medical system has its roots in our interdependence with the natural world. For this reason, and for its wise metaphorical foundation, Chinese medicine provides an excellent framework through which to assess human-nature dynamics. While outer fixes such as solar panels, carbon dioxide sequestering devices, and electric vehicles can stem some climate chaos, I propose that no external solution will ultimately be enough to stay away from the edge of the climate cliff. This is not only because we don’t currently have a viable solution, but because until we deeply heal ourselves, we will repeat unsustainable patterns, just as we do in intimate relationships that, to be sustainable, require us to address the roots of our psyche. Until then, we will continue to follow the destructive pattern: hurt people hurt others.
Becoming the Change
We’ve all heard the catchphrase, attributed to Mahatma Gandhi and often spoken in the context of stepping up to the plate to save the planet and ourselves: “Become the change you want to see in the world.” While it’s a fine bit of wisdom, Gandhi didn’t say it. What he did say is: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change toward him.” 24
The great hero for social and environmental justice tells us that personal and collective transformation go hand in hand. Gandhi suggests the locus for transformation is body-centered; this orientation is also Earth-centered because our bodies correlate with the body of the Earth. We are indeed walking talking chunks of Earth. But how exactly do we change, and do so deeply and comprehensively enough? The nuanced, uncommon explorations of this question in the pages ahead will likely surprise you.
A starting point is to embrace inner work that allows us to become a quality of people able to care enough to passionately and cooperatively address the collapse of human integrity and the environment. Caring enough is often made possible by privilege, by being fortunate enough to have a good life—one that feels worth living. Securing rights for marginalized groups is more than a path to meet basic needs. It is also a means to provide broader opportunities often thwarted by a struggle to merely survive.
It’s not possible for many to care enough for the natural world when their only means of survival lies in its destruction. Burning the Amazon jungle to clear space for raising cattle and soya, butchering elephants for their ivory tusks, or poaching exotic and endangered birds in the Indonesian rainforests and razing it for palm oil, are environmental violations driven by social injustice. Eighty-five percent of Indonesia’s CO2 emissions derive from destruction of the rainforest and its underlying nutrient-rich soil. This soil (called “peat”) sequesters eleven times more carbon than the biomass above it.25 Included in the social-environmental equation is the fact that indigenous peoples, who are often exploited, steward 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity.26 Racial and social justice are vital for environmental justice and our collective survival. Said another way: “The urgency of climate change is also an urgency for racial justice.” 27
Caring enough invokes grief and other difficult and challenging emotions such as fear, remorse, anger, longing, and despair. As we will explore at length, these “dark” emotions have the sacred power to awaken us. To become more caring and sustainable, then, we must tolerate emotional pain, especially grief. When we compassionately face and allow ourselves to be transformed by our dark emotions, we become more psychologically regenerative, inwardly rich enough, to curb our need for outer riches. This is why I call emotional depth work “the inner path to sustainability.” It’s also why addressing climate collapse through care, and with a modicum of fright, is essential (discussed further in chapter 4).
We embark, then, on an inner journey into why we destroy the planet and the means by which we instead can fundamentally renew our relationship with Earth, ourselves, and one another. In this vein, we explore the shadow work (introduced below and covered at length in Chapter 7) needed to become people radically different from the cultural status quo that got us into this mess.
You may also be familiar with a quote commonly attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Except Einstein didn’t say this. He did say something similar that was quoted in a 1946 New York Times article: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” 28 If we marry Einstein’s genius to Gandhi’s and adapt it to climate crisis, we get something like this: we must become a comprehensively new version of human being able to both think and feel differently to help transform our global climate predicament.
Shadow Pain
In our quest to reckon with the hidden forces that have propelled us to such destruction and suffering, not just any kind of inner work will do. We need the sort that makes us more second-naturedly compassionate, so we don’t have to struggle to muster enough kindness.29 We need body-centered, somatic work that transforms our hearts to allow compassion to naturally flow from us, not just to try to become what we think is compassionate. This is the territory of radical transformation, of clearing enough of the hidden shadow pain that shrouds our hearts.
In my own life, for example, I felt generally angry and frustrated prior to enrolling in somatic (body-centered) therapy in my mid-twenties. I distinctly remember saying to friends, “I just don’t think it’s my lot to be a happy person.” After a deep stint of grief work, however, I found myself significantly happier and more fulfilled.
From the outset, and for the purposes of our discussion, I want to distinguish grief work from the emotion of grief. I use the term grief work to refer specifically to healing our core, historical love wounds. This is to work through the painful losses of love and other sad or traumatic experiences we didn’t get a chance to fully process—especially during childhood, but also as adults—usually because we weren’t supported in our feelings. Examples of this wounding include being verbally or physically abused, not being appreciated and supported, or being otherwise neglected or abandoned by a parent. Grief work entails mourning these losses, which we do by experiencing the emotion of grief. Grief also refers to the sadness we feel during current, or in anticipation of future, loss.
Grief work is the heart of transformational emotional healing. It is foundational inner work that sets the stage for and renews all aspects of our lives. Grief work is to go deep into the body and experience the places we have been disavowed, ignored, abused, or disenfranchised. During grief work we might feel not only sadness but a host of other attendant emotions, such as anger, rage, fear, remorse, helplessness, and even hopelessness.
During my process of grief work, I would sit quietly, feel into my body, and let it both express its pain and tell the story of what caused that pain. This journey took me from my present life all the way back to my mother’s womb. I engaged this inner work for three years, after which I could not find any more heartache to render. Releasing this sadness and anger also allowed me to become more sensitive and empathic to others’ pain. I consider this inner work with ourselves (triangle of resilience relationship #1) to be the heart, or main facet, of our triangle of resilience relationships.
While I offer several grief-work exercises in Chapter 6, here’s a taste of body-centered work to prepare for this deep inner work:
Sit quietly or lie down and notice how your body feels, in an overall sense. Next, with your inner sensory awareness, slowly “feel into” your body from your feet to your head. Begin at your feet and notice how they feel. Allow yourself to rest in this experience of your feet being as they are for thirty seconds or so. Proceed this same way all the way up to your head, tuning into your calves, thighs, groin, hips, belly, chest, arms, neck, head, and any other places that you want to feel into. Allow your breath and your body to be relaxed during the exercise. All you are doing, for now, is noticing and making contact with how your body feels from your inner awareness of it.
Central to realizing a new level of compassion, then, is grief work. Until we release the backlogged pain of unconscious love wounds, it effectively possesses us and drives every aspect of our lives. Unattended, our love wounds block our capacity to give and receive love and cause us to violate and injure others, including the Earth. Until we deal with this shadow pain, we remain too self-obsessed (ironically enough) and unable to love enough, especially during times of decline.
Through grief work, we liberate our grounded care—our embodied human capacity to give and receive love—in the form of what I call our finer jewels of being human. These finer jewels are psycho-spiritual resources that have, in significant part, remained mired in our negative, shadow pain. Our finer jewels therefore correspond with our positive shadow—our inner storehouse of unacknowledged and often underdeveloped, life-affirming capacities and aspirations. They include a stellar repertoire of virtues: our compassion, empathy, creativity, passion, honesty, patience, freedom, humility, perseverance, critical thinking, courage, care, wisdom, and a robust sense of meaning and purpose.
A profound and sustainable way to liberate our positive shadow is by reckoning with our negative shadow—our unacknowledged arsenal of pain and life-depleting attributes. Note, these positive and negative descriptors are merely that—descriptive. They don’t assess intrinsic value. Like dark and light, each dialectic is valuable for its unique contribution to our wholeness. When both are left unconscious, they cause unnecessary suffering. When made conscious and worked with paradoxically, we get integration. Integration bestows the integrity of care.
Embodied Spirituality
In the midst of climate crisis, we have the opportunity not only to radically renew our hearts and come together as never before, but to do so vis-à-vis our relationship with the natural world. For this, we explore how our negative shadow grows as a result of our disavowed pain and our disconnect from nature’s rhythms and one another. We engage “inner activism” to deeply heal these essential relationships. I invite you to consider these severances as modern, virtually invisible illnesses—radical causes of climate disease. A catch-22, however, is that our fear of climate crisis can shut us down even further, preventing us from addressing these relationships and climate trauma itself. The first step to healing our relationship with climate trauma, then, is to notice and identify these hidden dynamics.
We also will have to communicate intimately and compassionately, as well as work humbly and cooperatively, with one another in any new world we create. This requires accountability to self and others, as well as being able to move through and let go of “small stuff” differences for a larger goal. Earnest inner and interpersonal work, especially via emotional intelligence and critical thinking, vitally prepares us for this level of regenerative community. This forges a new level of resilient relationships, unlike those that gave rise to our current atrocities. Case in point: during a local Extinction Rebellion meeting, one member commented how uniquely restorative and invigorating it is to work collaboratively for shared principles in a context other than a corporate setting.
To renew our connection with the Earth, I propose an embodied spirituality for becoming more fully human. In this Earth-centered orientation, we learn how to cultivate the inner and outer resources to comprehensively renew ourselves, as well as how to endure and mitigate our wholesale destruction of the biosphere. We discover how we can truly change, from the inside out, and radically heal our triangle of resilience relationships, all of which have served as dumping grounds for our disavowed shadow pain. This path is a soul-saving undertaking even in the absence of climate crisis.
If we miraculously escape the worst of climate collapse, having learned to grow our hearts as wide as the world will leave each of us a better person. To live with such integrity is a gift to everything amid our modern-day madness, no matter how lonely the journey. And to whatever degree we save ourselves and the planet, a resuscitation of our triangle of resilience—intimacy with ourselves, the natural world, and one another—potently prepares us to weather tougher times.
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In the absence of integrity, the default urge to project and displace our inner pain tightens us like a coiled spring, a cobra ready to strike. And we lash out, unwittingly poisoning others, including the Earth. Yet we need not be condemned to this scenario; we can mindfully prevent the coil from tightening so much. This way, we reduce the cycle of needless suffering and harvest from pain our finer jewels. Reclaiming them predisposes us to a fulfilling, deeply joyous, yet also wholly heartbroken, experience of life. Such tension of opposites as dynamic paradox is a sure sign we are on the warrior path: dark and light, inner and outer, Yin and Yang, ever wedded in passionate reciprocity. This orientation allows us to act more regeneratively in the world because we have cultivated our finer jewels by participating in our own regeneration (psychological death and rebirth).
Reckoning with our psychological shadow paradoxically generates more grounded love and passion. This path of difficult descent and eventual renewal is mirrored in the Yin-Yang symbol (Figure 1) pertaining to the Chinese medicine I practice. The Yin-Yang symbol is a perennial symbol of balance and wholeness. This elegant and wisdom-rich image shows us that Yang depends on Yin and Yin depends on Yang. Night and day, inner and outer, below and above, Yin and Yang—each depends on the other.
Yang is represented by the white paisley and Yin by the black. Cardinal Yang qualities include what is masculine, light, active, outward, and prolific. Cardinal Yin qualities include what is feminine, dark, quiescent, inward, and declining. Note that “masculine” and “feminine” connote archetypal qualities, not gender. Yin and Yang are dialectics, opposing yet perfectly complementary forces that support each other. Neither can exist without the other; when wisely integrated they create a thriving atmosphere.
In clockwise fashion, Yang constantly transforms into Yin and Yin transforms into Yang. Round and round through the seasons of life they cycle, as night turns to day and day into night. In this sense, and as we will explore in depth later on, this ancient symbol is more a verb than a noun. In sum, Yin and Yang encompass all our human capacities as well as all aspects of our world. Through the metaphorical lens of Chinese medicine, we learn that rejuvenating our sense of wholeness depends on all our relations and all our faculties—a necessarily Yin and Yang endeavor.
Chinese medicine’s spiritual roots are a way to live in harmony with the ebb (Yin decline) and flow (Yang growth) of nature’s seasons, which include our inner seasons of joy and sorrow, courage and fear, creativity and dissolution. Undertaking this inner path of emotional transformation while reconnecting with the natural world that models it for us—all within the context of heartfelt, tightly knit community—comprises our triangle of resilience for radical sanity in these harrowing times.
Our triangle of resilience relationships include both Yin and Yang capacities. One facet of the triangle, inner work, is a Yin endeavor. Nature connection and community are a blend of Yin and Yang qualities. The cultivation of both Yin and Yang resources via the power of the triangle empowers us to act. When we act wisely, we marry the Yin quality of wisdom with the Yang quality of action. Such integration is regeneration and the foundation for an Earth-centered humanity. While the atrophy of our triangle of resilience relationships is a virtually unseen driver of climate crisis, the bolstering of these hidden nourishments is the best means we have to cope, thrive, and heal through climate disruption.
Magical Thinking and Ecocide
In a body-centered, Earth-based spirituality, we exist in constant interplay and attunement with the natural world. Outer reality directly informs our inner lives—and, ultimately, our actions. Unilaterally light-seeking and bliss-focused forms of spirituality tend to omit this vital intimacy between our bodies and the Earth, thereby leaving this vital link undernourished. Without our bodies, without our humanness and the Earth included in our daily meditations and blessings in action, we lose touch with what supports any form of spirituality.
In contrast with an Earth-based spirituality is “spiritual bypassing,” which means seeking refuge in lofty spiritual ideals and ethereal states as a way to avoid—to bypass—difficult aspects of everyday life, especially difficult emotions (Resource 2: “Masters”). It is a largely disembodied orientation, often with roots in childhood abuse and neglect. Bypassing abandons grounded reckoning with ourselves, one another, and with the body of the Earth as a way to deny what pains us. As we have briefly discussed, when we avoid inescapable pain, we avoid sustainability and regeneration. And because this pain is unavoidable, we transfer it to others when we don’t steward our core hurts. Spiritual bypassing is therefore another invisible contributor to climate crisis.
Consider too that our Earth-denying, privatizing Western culture also stems from collective love-wounding and is exacerbated by capitalism’s insistence on excessive division and individuality. Parceling land, corporate mining and drilling of mountains and forests, damming rivers, private ownership of shared natural resources such as water and trees, and ideologies such as “every man for himself” all breed loneliness, alienation, disease, and egoism. These unsustainable patterns of behavior are passed down generation after generation until we are able to break the cycle by mending our triangle of resilience relationships.
Reestablishing our primary relationships with self, nature, and one another ensures our actions are coordinated with cues we receive outwardly, so that human-to-nature and human-to-human wellness are constantly updated and restored. To do this, we must become more sensitive to the natural world and intimate with our dark emotions that signal us to imbalance, which I will guide you through in upcoming chapters. If we’re attentive and receptive, for example, we may notice birdsong and insect chatter declining after pesticide is sprayed. We may also notice how we feel, and are called to act, in response to the damage. We may feel sadness, anger, and despair when a mountaintop is leveled for coal, or a river and its inhabitants are poisoned from mine tailings. We might become aware that we pause less frequently to speak with each other; and when offering support, we often try to “fix” instead of listen.
Being an inwardly sustainable person includes having the sensitivity and presence to embrace all our emotions and to notice subtle changes in the world. In their book Active Hope, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone counsel, “Repressing emotions and information dampens our energy. It is enlivening to go with, rather than against, the flow of our deep-felt responses to the world.” 30 Doing so, we can synthesize a wise, holistic, curative response. The more we understand and tend to the biodiversity of our inner lives, the more care and wisdom we generate. Allying this inner, regenerative soul-work with its outer correlates of regenerative farming and honoring all forms of life, for example, begins to metamorphically knit a resilient world back together.
Blind Inheritance
Many of us feel overwhelmed enough without having to contemplate the real possibility of getting wiped off the planet. Indeed, we may not be equipped even to contemplate such a large-scale future catastrophe because we’ve been psychologically wired since hunter-gatherer times to focus on immediate survival needs. Far-off projections, such as slowly rising temperatures over the course of decades, does not push our survival-instinct fear buttons. In an article titled “Humankind Is On the Road to Nowhere,” author and columnist Norman Pagett enlightens us to these invisible dynamics: “But nature still cares only that we survive the present, and our hunter-gatherer instinct concurs; in evolutionary terms, action on a threat that is not imminent is still a waste of precious energy, the fact that we have a surplus is taken as confirmation that we need do nothing, because there will always be more. That is why we perceive the dangers of climate change, overpopulation and energy depletion and our other potential problems as being beyond our event horizon, so the majority of us obey primitive instincts and ignore them.” 31
The blind inheritance to which Pagett refers has helped me realize part of why I regularly pore over climate change news. It’s as if I’m trying to beat it into my head and heart through repetition in order to overcome my default predisposition to ignore it. I’m trying to bring the event horizon closer, so I can feel appropriate urgency for it.
Pagett’s quote also invokes a big problem with climate science reporting: many climate projections are made for the year 2100. Even a decade into the future, let alone 2100, is far too futuristic to rouse our concern about catastrophic climate change—because our brains aren’t wired to apprehend or care about such distant possibilities. Nobel Prize-winning behavioral scientist Daniel Kahneman concurs: “A distant, abstract and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilizing public opinion.” 32 Some have even criticized the proverbial 2100 date as a way to transfer the burden onto younger generations and to excuse ourselves from grappling with it.
We need more immediate projections and more media coverage about disasters unfolding now in less fortunate parts of the globe, because catastrophic climate crisis strikes somewhere every day — too often just a little too far away. Fires destroying close to five million acres of forest in the Amazon and some thirty million acres in Siberia in the first part of 2019 grabbed the world’s attention. We need regular reminders of current disasters like these, because we easily forget. Unless we are scared enough (and skillfully mobilize our fear into wise action), our passionate care remains underground, and we continue business as usual.
Fulfillment as Sustainable Happiness
Famed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy believed maintaining the vital link between humans and nature a primary condition for happiness. Tolstoy speaks to the equivalent of preserving our second triangle of resilience relationship. Spiraling into egoic pursuits that excessively despoil the natural world disavows this symbiosis.
Pleasure and experiencing beauty are as important now as ever, to recharge and keep our spirits up. In addition to difficult reality, we can also live in celebration with friends, family, and the providence of the natural world that remains. But too much celebration while the house (Earth) is burning down renders us distracted, ineffective, and addicted to surrogates for “happiness.” It’s still deceptively easy to think we can ignore inconvenient climate change news, especially if we believe that flicking a switch, popping a pill, or going shopping can make it all go away, however momentarily.
Ironically, our “happiness” culture might be in good part responsible for our crisis, since perpetual, superficial happiness goes hand in hand with too much consumerism, pollution, and denial. Rather than deal with sacred heartache, we too often try to pleasure it away. While pleasure makes life worth living and soothes its harsh turns, when we use it to avoid too much difficulty, we brew disaster.
In contrast, we are rewarded when we embrace our pain. In his poignant book Original Blessing, Reverend Matthew Fox writes, “Pain destroys the illusions of false, that is elitist, pleasures. It burns from the inside out. It therefore sensitizes us to what is truly beautiful in life.” 33 Our denial of pain not only atrophies our stewardship of the natural world, but also denies our experiences of one another as sacred. It creates a shadow that goes on growing while we simultaneously generate more avoidance to keep it at bay. And we lose yet again when we deny our pain because we don’t get to unearth our finer jewels, which emerge from embracing the depths of our hearts. So, we pursue more and more happiness, more “elitist pleasures,” until our souls are buried beneath so much compulsive pleasuring that happiness becomes not a slice of life, but a covertly fear-driven addiction.
I wonder if Reverend Fox’s use of the word “elitist” is coincidental or uncannily prescient for yoking corporate, elitist-manufactured, unnecessary products with not being sensitive to “what is truly beautiful in life.” In the lexicon of Chinese medicine, this kind of avoidant pleasure-seeking is understood as too much Yang-light (pleasure) casting too big a Yin-shadow (pain). Such addiction robs us of essential psycho-spiritual gifts—from both these domains—conferred by our positive (Yang) and negative (Yin) shadows.
When dark and light fall too far out of balance, chaos ensues as a healing crisis, to transform pain into a more sustainable form of happiness—fulfillment. Fulfillment requires we lovingly embrace personal and collective heartache as a more humane reckoning with everything alive. It takes wisdom and courage to choose such a path over a steady diet of sugary pleasure in the form of protracted avoidance and smiley faces that disguise our suffering. This inner path to sustainability yields a richer life, a full-course meal of meaning, depth, and soulful community rather than that which avoids, appeases, isolates, and burns us — and the planet — out.
Leveraging Chaos
The great depth psychologist Carl Jung realized “When an inner dynamic is not made conscious, it occurs outside us as fate.” 34 The wake-up call to heal our collective pain-shadow of trauma thunders now as the specter of climate trauma descending upon us from outside. In other words, climate breakdown is a reflection of our broken inner lives.
The question is: will we—and more poignantly can we—clear what’s inside and among us to help courageously endure and comprehensively cure this disaster with passion and wisdom? In the spirit of unique opportunities made possible by crisis, I propose that facing the massive initiation that is climate catastrophe can guide us to this necessary inner and outer (r)evolution. Reciprocally, embracing our historical wounds can help us confront, grapple with, and better cope and thrive through this mess.
Within the problem is the solution, and in the case of climate emergency we have to go deep within to find it. Such inner work in turn makes us more emotionally bioavailable to care about the condition of our world. Indeed, climate crisis and our personal woes intersect in our hearts. Climate change causes loss, which is why consciously dealing with our personal, historical losses prepares us so well for dealing with climate-related losses. The more we heal our personal histories, the more resilient we become to face climate crisis and its ongoing pain-making. The more resilient we are to face climate trauma, the more we can effect a cure. Reciprocally, engaging with and feeling climate trauma can help us become aware of our personal love wounds, bring both to light, and heal through them. These dynamics connect our inner landscape—our inner earth—with the earth we live on, creating common ground and the realization that renewing both occurs via the other.
At a minimum, this inner-outer recognition can be a silver lining, a consolation for our current tragedy. At most, it is a way to become the people we’ve always wanted to become and create a more beautiful world. Likely, we will continue landing somewhere between the tragic and the beautiful. So, while this formula may not create the optimal world we’d like to live in, it offers us a better chance to salvage our best selves and minimize suffering for other forms of creation in the process.
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While we don’t need outer crisis to address our hurts, this is often how deep healing happens. We can leverage existential climate pressure as an ally to address what we have avoided, often for generations. Again, this is similar to how a challenging romantic relationship encourages us to work through our limitations to create more goodness and love. Building emotional intelligence can fortify us to explore the historical reasons for why we avoid all manner of initiatory difficulty. Such inner work helps us to confront our fears and process our backlogged pain. This way, and in true Yin-Yang balance, our inner and outer worlds constantly inform and support each other for mutual benefit.
Our predicament was dire prior to the inauguration of the forty-fifth United States president. With the result of the 2016 election, the gas pedal of denial, ignorance, and malevolence is now pressed ever further to the metal, accelerating the unraveling of our biosphere.35 We can’t face or endure this alone. We need each other, which is why gathering in community—face-to- face and heart-to-heart—is essential (more on this in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11). We have no choice but to collectively address the injunction climate crisis presents. It’s now or never to engage with our inner and outer darkness as we never have, for the heavens are truly burning and the tides literally overflowing.
If nothing else, we now have a great excuse to abandon less meaningful pursuits. It’s time to get down to sacred business so we can live and love more passionately than ever before, especially if it seems too late. For this, we turn to building deep emotional intelligence and working more effectively with fear and anxiety so we can engage more robustly with deeper inner work, climate activism, and community building.
• Exercise •
Chapter 2 Journaling
Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and write out your responses to the following prompts.
1. If you want to become more a part of the solution, close your eyes and allow your awareness to be simultaneously present in all parts of your body (refer back to and practice the Body Survey exercise). Ask yourself this question: “How do I envision becoming the change I want to see in the world; what calls my passion forth?” Sit quietly with these contemplations and, when ready, begin to write about what surfaced for you. Feel free to pause at any time, close your eyes to feel into the question again, and then resume writing.
2. Which emotions do you experience when interfacing with climate change? Do any of these emotions prevent you from becoming more engaged with climate action? After you’ve identified any of these emotions, sit with your eyes closed, feel the place where you feel each emotion in your body, and note any memories that arise in relation to sitting with or contemplating these emotions. Perhaps a childhood memory arises, or an incident at work, or details from a relationship. What comes to mind? For now, just note what comes up and write it down in your journal under “Chapter 2.”
21. Ehrenreich, “To Those Who Think We Can Reform Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis.”
22. Holthaus, “U.N. Climate Report Shows Civilization Is at Stake If We Don’t Act Now.”
23. Ehrenreich, “To Those Who Think We Can Reform Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis.”
24. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 13.
25. Zuckerman, “As the Global Demand for Palm Oil Surges, Indonesia’s Rainforests are Being Destroyed.”
26. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States, “6 Ways Indigenous Peoples Are Helping the World Achieve #ZeroHunger.”
27. Holthaus, “The Climate Crisis Is Racist. The Answer Is Anti-Racism.”
28. The New York Times Archives, “Atomic Education Urged by Einstein; Scientist in Plea for $200,000 to Promote New Type of Essential Thinking,”
29. This mustering, however, is not useless. It is important when we find ourselves reacting in an inappropriately violent manner.
30. Macy and Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In without Going Crazy, 70.
31. Pagett, “Humankind Is on the Road to Nowhere.”
32. Mui, “3 Reasons There Might Be No Path to Success on Climate Change.”
33. Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality Presented in Four Paths, Twenty-Six Themes, and Two Questions, 76.
34. “Jung: ‘When a situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.’” Collected Works 9ii: Christ, A Symbol of the Self, Par. 126.
35. Oppenheimer, “Avoiding Two Degrees of Warming ‘Is Now Totally Unrealistic’.”