A lot of us are used to thinking three or six or 12 months ahead with something like holidays,” says Sharp. “I would encourage people not to give up on their longer-term dreams because we will get there… but, maybe don’t put specific dates on it.” Life-Sustaining Systems and Practices: rethinking the ways we do things, as well as creatively redefining of the structures and systems that make up our society. Decolonization is identified as a key element in the shift in consciousness integral to the Great Turning What specific goal or project could you realistically aim to achieve in the next twelve months that would contribute to this? We are thrilled to partner with the Sainsbury Centre in this exciting series of events exploring the transformative power of art and creativity in responding to the collective challenges of ecological degradation and climate change, as well as the difficult emotional states and feelings that may be associated with this.

If we’re able to receive guiding signals from our larger ecological self, then rather than catching inspired visions, perhaps we could say it is the inspiring vision that catches us. Draw arrows to represent flows of support, with the arrows going toward your name for the support you receive and away from you for the support you offer. As the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, Joanna has created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application. For a complex system to self-organise and function well, it requires both the integration and the differentiation of its parts.After reading numerous books about environmental issues and the climate crisis, I was drawn to Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. A central theme the book explores is how we can engage in a collective transition referred to as ‘the Great Turning’. The new edition brings a shift in emphasis in the way we think about the Great Turning, from outcome to process and from ‘will it happen?’ to ‘What helps this happen?”. Looking at how this larger story can happen through us in any moment brings a focus on three types of turning – turning up with an intention to play our part, turning away from that which causes harm and turning towards a way of doing and thinking and being that supports the flourishing of life.

There’s something else we’d like to bring in alongside this difficult starting point. It is a recognition that when we’re at our most exasperated, we can sometimes surprise ourselves. We might discover strengths we never knew we had or experience degrees of aliveness we’d not even suspected were available to us. This is a time to reach out and find new allies, as well as to discard forms of thinking and behavior that have led us astray. In a process known as adversity activated development, our very act of facing the mess we’re in can help us discover a more enlivening sense of what our lives are about, what we’re here to do, and what we’re truly capable of. Macy and her co-author provide a boost of encouragement to everyone worried about seemingly hopeless environmental and social crises. Practical as well as inspirational, the book includes numerous exercises to strengthen those qualities that will best serve us as we work toward a more life-sustaining world. Macy has been giving workshops on these ideas for many years, testing and refining her methods, and the book reflects the depth of that process. Our large selves feel through us. Our emotions happen through us. But where do they come from? If we see ourselves solely as separate individuals, then we think of our feelings as arising within us and understandable purely in terms of our own story.Joanna macy Ph.D, author & teacher, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism. The first session - a full day - will take you through the above, and the half day one month later will be for you all to reflect and share your journey since then, and continue to discover what Active Hope means and looks like for you. Fee: The events are part of the first season of Sainsbury Centre’s ‘Big Question’: Planet for our Future: How do we adapt to a Transforming World? This book is exactly what the title suggests: it offers a plan for how to face the reality of climate collapse, do what one can, and stave off despair. The advice is fairly simple: it's really about making some shifts in the way we see our situations. We remember that we are part of the earth, not separate from it, and we see the grief, anxiety, anger, despair we feel on behalf of the earth and its residents as the Earth crying out in us. We remind ourselves of the resources we have, our strengths, the people we know are supporting us. We don't worry about the end result, we do what we can each day. We see uncertainty as hopeful instead of destabilizing.

What resources, inner and outer, will you need to acquire? What might you need to learn, develop or obtain? When we come from gratitude we become more present to the wonder of being alive in this amazing living world, to the many gifts we receive, to the beauty we appreciate. Linda and Gwyneth were wonderful guides to this empowering and profound work. If anyone is thinking about giving this a try, I would encourage you to just do it - you won't be judged and you will definitely connect with others and be both reassured and inspired.” Neither complacent optimism nor resigned pessimism has power to motivate us; they don’t generate a hunger for learning or provoke our best response. In Chapter Five, we’ve added a new section on applying inspiration from the Shambhala Warrior Prophecy in our lives.Seeing it emerge as a fairly new phenomenon in Ladakh is a reminder that the desire to put ourselves first isn’t a fixed feature of human nature. We are in no way prophesying or predicting or compelling the future by this kind of imaging, any more than we are compelling the future when we pray. The enactment of the future depends on what we do, how we individually and collectively respond to what we envision.” With process thinking, we view reality more as a flow in which everything is continually moving from one state to another.

When we think of ourselves as interconnected parts of a larger web of life, just as we may feel the Earth crying within us, perhaps we can experience the Earth dreaming within us too. When giving talks, Chris sometimes guides audiences in imaginary time travel to a hoped-for future hundreds of years from now. Take a blank piece of paper and some coloured pens. Scribble doodle, or draw any images to represent concerns you have and the feelings that accompany them. Ecological intelligence involves thinking in terms of deep time a temporal context that includes our whole story. We need to do this now because given our technologies, our actions have consequences extending millions, even billions, of years. Sponsorship: Contribute any amount to help make spots in the program available to those who need scholarships.Quaker futurist Elise Boulding developed a workshop called Imaging a World without Weapons. It’s structured process moves through the three levels of visioning we’ve described. Here is how she describes it: Shift in Consciousness: our wellspring of caring compassion can be nurtured and developed. We can deepen our sense of belonging in the world. The process of thinking happens at a level higher than just individual brain cells - it happens through them. The second chapter brings a new practice that offers a way for two people to go round the spiral of the Work That Reconnects in a half hour conversation.