Individual and group exercises, meditation, discussion, and reflection, engage the body, heart, imagination and intellect to explore how we can transform these insights and understandings into a lived reality – from the spiritual to the social, the political to the personal, and the imaginative to the inspirational!
The Work that Reconnects has been developed over several decades by Joanna Macy, John Seed, Molly Young Brown and many others. Drawing upon their inspiring lead it is now being developed and facilitated across many continents by a wide range of facilitators.
The Work that Reconnects includes despair work through which we discover how our pain for the world and each other actually reveals our interconnectedness and can become a source which energises our action on behalf of the world. Joanna Macy suggests that “as a society, we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. In this 'caught' place our responses are blocked and confused.” She thinks we are leading 'double lives': “On one level we maintain a more or less upbeat capacity to carry on as usual…. and all the while, underneath, there is this inchoate knowledge that our world could go at any moment. Awesome and unprecedented in the history of humanity, it lurks there, with an anguish beyond the naming. Unless we find ways of acknowledging and integrating that level of anguished awareness, we repress it; and with that repression, we are drained of the energy we need for action and clear thinking.”
The work also supports us in opening up to a deeper awareness of time. Liberating ourselves from the alienation of ever shorter attention spans and the need for immediate results, we can weave ourselves into a deep time awareness. From that, we learn to draw on the strengths of the ancestors and keep in heart the future beings who will come after us. This deep time context both strengthens us and helps us to engage wholeheartedly in a process of change in the world that has a long precedent before us and will continue beyond our own individual lifetimes. Similarly, the work offer tools to help us to heal our alienation from the biosphere, the rich community of beings with which we share the planet and our evolutionary heritage. In opening up our ecological consciousness this identification with the community of life also is also a source of nourishment and strength. We can find great joy and inspiration in this renewed solidarity with life.
The Work that Reconnects is intended to support the following goals:
For more see: www.joannamacy.net
The Eco-Dharma Centre is situated in a beautiful and wild part of the Catalan Pyrenees. We offer courses, events and retreats which support the realisation of our human potential and the development of an ecological consciousness honouring our mutual belonging within the web of life – drawing on the Buddhist Dharma and the emerging ecological paradigms of our time.
Site developed by Nick Day.