If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

When I did a retreat with Joanna Macy (a renowned Buddhist scholar and activist) many years ago, I was shocked to discover that pretty much all my personal suffering is funnelled down from a more universal, collective suffering related to what is not wholesome, healthy and well in our culture and eco-systems. My uncomfortable thoughts, emotional struggles, physical tensions, my sadness, numbness and frustration, are not only mine I realised. What a revelation! I believe reuniting with what Rilke calls ‘Earth’s intelligence’ was what enabled me to see this. It’s an intelligence that sees interconnectedness, that feels part of the Earth.

The infuriating and heartbreaking reality facing us at this time, is that humans have entered an age where our survival and the survival of the earth as we know it, are hanging in the balance, due to our own actions. Rilke’s words above were written in the early 20^th Century. Much further down the line, as a species, we are still drastically spinning off from living with this kind of intelligence.

I would love to believe we can turn this around, but in reality I have no idea if this is possible. So where does this leave us? Well, here’s my answer: I choose to live as if it is possible, because the alternative, hopelessness and giving up, is not an option. This is what Joanna Macy calls ‘active hope’ – living the hope of a better world, because without hope there is no hope.

Fascinatingly there are several prophesies that predicted this world situation. This one below, which is of Buddhist origin, is in the words of Joanna Macy. It was given to her by her teacher Tibetan Buddhist monk Dugu Choegyel Rinpoche of the community of Tashi Jyong in North-West India. While some similar prophecies have been discredited or consigned to cultural appropriation, I’m happy to give this one my attention, because I know and trust its origins.

‘There comes a time when life on earth is in great danger. At that time, great powers have arisen…there are weapons of unfathomable destructive power and technologies that lay waste to the world. It is just at this point that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges…You can’t go there because it is not a place, it emerges in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors.’ (From the book Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone)

The Kingdom of Shambhala. This myth sends shivers down my spine. These shivers tell me that I need this myth to live by. I need it to lift my spirits, to kindle vitality in my body, to give me a sense of being part of a movement to ‘rise up rooted, like trees’ and be powerful. We need to be galvanised by a narrative that inspires us to act. The narratives we’re exposed to these days often only serve to dampen, disempower and send us back to sleep. I need this myth to give me hope that transformation on a mass scale is possible, with the force of compassion and love. This is what Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning. Will you be part of it?

PART II

So, with this myth to live by, what will I do? I will nurture my ability to bring love and compassion into action. Here are some things that I didn’t know I needed, which nurture me to be able to engage in compassion in action.

• I need to let myself off. You don’t have to give perfect, unconditional compassion for it to count as compassion. Feel the inner judgement, resentment, reticence, defiance or fear and be compassionate anyway.
• I need to fill my own cup by bolstering joy, appreciation and creativity in my life. It’s not selfish to allow yourself pleasure. Pleasure, joy, beauty, creativity – these are essential to the human spirit too, if we are to thrive. They also give us resilience and the inner resource to face what is difficult.
• I need to feel the pain of the world. On the retreat with Joanna Macy on Holy Isle, when I realised that our historic global inheritance is a shared one, that my suffering is everyone’s suffering, it was a big surprise to me and very liberating, as well as tragic. My suffering is not personal!
• I need community. If I engage in community experiences (celebrations, volunteering, friendship groups etc.), not only do I have more people to be compassionate to, but compassion naturally flows out of me more easily and spontaneously.

So it’s worth focusing on growing your capacity to give to others both for others and for the world, and for yourself.

The Dalai Lama once famously said something along these lines – an unwise selfish person is selfish and a wise selfish person is compassionate. The key point that I believe he was making is that we flourish when we can fulfil our need to contribute.

The need to contribute is fundamental to all human beings, and if frustrated it becomes hard for us to thrive. In the end compassion is not for you or for me, but is shared by all human hearts that need to give and receive in order to fully live. By participating in the endless network of giving and receiving we feel ourselves embedded in the web of life. So, we give because it is essential to the human spirit to do so, for all of us.

Even the NHS now advocates giving as one of its Five Steps to Mental Wellbeing. The NHS website says that acts of giving and kindness can improve your wellbeing by

1. increasing positive feelings and a sense of reward

2. bringing a feeling of purpose and self-worth and

3. helping you connect with other people

When I first encountered this idea many years ago, I began to do something for others whenever I felt low or out of sorts. It worked. And it worked when all else failed. Sometimes I had to force myself, but I came to rely on this strategy. It’s actually very common sense – if I focus on others, I’m breaking the self-referencing loops of thinking that hold me stuck in a slump of my own making. I find a sense of self-value again, my nervous system enters into a pro-social mode and the inner weather system shifts correspondingly.

In our weekend on Compassion in Action (26-28 April at Samye Ling) we will create a temporary community of togetherness which will be the crucible for our discoveries about how we each can engage in giving. We will ground ourselves in gentle, supporting mindfulness practices that provide a refuge for us to over and over return to self-connection, which is so important as a basis for acting in the world. And we will look at fostering our sense of connection to people and planet in a wider sense, nurturing interconnectedness as a way of being and seeing.

Fay

effective action comes from love. It is unstoppable, and it is enough.”

Joanna Macy

Is it possible to make a difference in a way that gives inspiration and fulfilment and doesn’t cost us too much? Can we fill rather than drain our batteries, through balanced heart-charged action that matches our capacity?

Engaging in compassion in action will take you on a journey to find out how you can meaningfully make a difference within the life you have, being the person that you are.

It’s all about balance. Balancing our own needs with what we see is needed around us.

Resourcing ourselves is the magic ingredient which enables us to actualise the ‘effective action that comes from love’ that Joanna Macy speaks of in the quote above and this is a key component of our Compassion in Action course. One of the greatest resources available to us is nature, which can give us space, peace and joy. Many people find that spending time in nature provides a reset, improves mood and brings feelings of calm. The potential of this is being talked about a lot at the moment – nature sustains us – not just nutritionally, but also emotionally and spiritually. Being present in nature and feeling our belonging within nature, can teach us important lessons about how to be in the world. In lives where we feel rattled and pressured a lot, time in nature can bring us back to ourselves.

At the same time, we may be painfully aware that us human beings are causing drastic imbalance in the natural world. Our appreciation for nature and our awareness of it being in trouble, against the backdrop of a busy life, makes for an unsettling cocktail of feelings. We may feel powerless, angry, numb or sense a loss of meaning. We may feel disconnected from where or what we are meant to be. Perhaps mindful awareness of the unrealistic expectations we may place upon ourselves might help to burst this painful bubble.

And, as we contemplate how our inner practice of compassion can translate into outer practice, our connection with the Earth matters. If we can feel our gratitude and care for the Earth, we will find a wellspring of energy to pour into compassionate action in the world. As we journey on with this, we can emerge into fresh insight into our place in the world. From here, the action which is natural to us may become clear.

We don’t have to save the world to make a difference! In fact, the only hope we have of saving the world is if we each work within our sphere of influence and with respect for our own wellbeing as we go along. After all we and the world are part of one whole – our flourishing depends on the Earth and the Earth’s flourishing now depends on us.

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Fay Adams and Kristine Mackenzie-Janson will be delivering a new 5-week course on engaged mindfulness: Compassion in Action.

This evening course begins on the 11th May

The course will be held online via Zoom on a Thursday evening from 18:30-20:45 (UK Time).
The dates of the five sessions are: 11th May, 18th May, 25th May, 1st June and 8th June.

YOU CAN READ ABOUT THE COURSE HERE

Maybe you have questions that arise from your own situation in life. You might be asking:

‘How do I become a compassionate person when a lot of the time I feel anything but?’

‘Do I have to conjure up compassion and won’t I feel like a fake?’

‘What if I feel like I’ve been so caring and compassionate for so long that I’ve had enough?’

‘Is compassion even relevant when the situation I’m in is unacceptable?’

And then fundamentally ‘Deep down, do I even want to be compassionate in the first place?

These are all very important and relevant questions, and if we are going to move in the direction of compassion we will each need to be open to the arrival of these questions, letting go of the judgement of ourselves for having them – ‘If I have this question does it make me a bad person?’ ‘But compassion is one of my core values and I feel terrible that I don’t feel compassionate!’ I hear you say. Can you turn these questions into an inquiry which can lead you towards compassion? This will be our intention in the Introduction to Compassion weekend.

The key here is to begin with self-compassion. This is the missing piece for many of us. Most of us have worthy intentions to be good people, we expect ourselves to be good and then we’re horrified by the uncompassionate thoughts that keep coming – thoughts of hating someone, wanting to hurt someone, scenarios of revenge and blame… Yes I have these thoughts too! If we have these thoughts we conclude, we must be hopelessly uncompassionate, or worse, a bad person. So, what’s the problem here?

The problem is that we expect ourselves to be superhuman, squeaky clean, polished angels, smiling down from the clouds benevolently, always acting with impeccable compassion and never thinking a hateful, irritated or fed up thought. Well perhaps we’re just human! And as Rob Nairn, my first meditation teacher, said: ‘Maybe we all need to let ourselves down from a painful hook and land on our bottoms…we can be a Compassionate Mess!’

I think this was for me the most important endorsement of my life and ‘Be a compassionate mess’ is still my favourite mantra. Join me and bring your whole self along – the irreverent, the pedantic, the rebellious, the forgetful the messy, the angry, the cynical, the critical, the numb, the jaded, the vulnerable. All of it will be grist for the mill. And this is the alchemy of compassion, that nothing needs to be left out. Nothing that is human will be unwelcome! Us human beings are so endearingly contradictory and mixed, isn’t that fascinating and so very worth getting to know better.

And perhaps, just perhaps, beneath all this there is a compassionate heart full of love and care. We are all wired to be compassionate after all. We are all sometimes neurotic, clumsy and downright awful, and we can all cultivate compassion for ourselves and others in the midst of it all!

Come and join the Compassionate Mess Club!

with warm wishes,

Fay

UPCOMING COMPASSION COURSES

APRIL 3 • Monday Evenings Online with Jacky Seery 

APRIL 21-23 • Introduction to Compassion Weekend with Fay Adams at Samye Ling or Online

MAY 12-14 • Compassion over 3 weekends at Samye Ling or Online with Fay Adams & Choden

JUNE 24-25 • Introduction to Compassion Weekend in London

Read this blog to find out why compassion in action can be key to lifting this feeling.

Within our Engaged Mindfulness course, we will look with fresh and mindful eyes at how we engage with the state of the world. Many of us feel reluctant to engage because we don’t feel we have it in us – we’re too tired, stressed and busy already or we imagine we must do grand things to make engaging worthwhile.

But what might be revealed if we release these beliefs? What if we grant ourselves rest, nourishment and joy as essential to our engagement with the world? What if compassion in action could be a seamless extension of our inner compassion practice?

Perhaps what is really needed is to step down, and then step forth?

Curious? Then read on.

In the last few years, the story of the times we live in has changed. We are now in a world where uncertainty about the future, alongside fast and complex lives, is the new normal. Contrast this with the optimism and slower pace that pre-technology generations felt and the difference is stark. Naturally, finding ways to step down can feel more urgent than stepping up. Perhaps this points to why mindfulness has become a part of our new normal.

Many of us have got used to managing our individual distress – mindfulness is a great way to do this of course! But this can turn our gaze away from some of the true causes of how we feel. There’s a sense that it’s all somehow our problem that we feel lower levels of wellbeing, and therefore it’s our responsibility to ‘sort ourselves out’. But what if much of what haunts and stresses us is generated by the wider ‘systems’ we live in, and is not due to our own failings? If fish live in polluted waters, they will not thrive after all. This is a sign of our being radically interconnected – we each feel what is in the collective on an individual level.

Seeing with new eyes can be a bit like the ‘Non-identification’ stage of the RAIN practice from our Level 1 training, where we zoom out and see the bigger picture with a wide-angle lens, no longer held hostage in ‘the problem’. If we do this on a societal level, we may see two things 1. That how we feel is not our fault and 2. That we can’t fix it alone. How often do you sit in your practice feeling like it’s your fault and your responsibility to fix it – whatever ‘it’ is on a given day? Take the pervasive presence of anxiety these days. This is part of a huge trend with complex interconnected causes and yet as individual satellites we so often feel it’s our problem and give ourselves a hard time.

Might it be true that we need to balance our focus on individual wellbeing with a candid look at what is happening systemically and how this is interconnected with individual wellbeing. What would happen if we experimented with releasing the intensity of the individual project in favour of practicing and thinking in terms of ‘we’ (at least sometimes and in some places – let’s keep it real after all!)? (Research backs up how groups can help with climate anxiety, see Heather’s blog here for details 

And so, we come to the possibly surprising realisation that we may, at least in part, find the wellbeing we need by turning aside from our individual struggle and towards an outward looking path – a path of community spirit and compassion to self and others, rather than self-preservation. Compassion in action is great for our well-being! There’s even a phrase for this that has emerged in academia – ‘compassion satisfaction’ (see below for an example of research that looks at this). And, let’s balance this with that crucial piece of the jigsaw: self-compassion. Might a path of rest and gratitude rather than the ‘Grind Culture’ and the myth of never enough, also transform how we feel about engaging with our world?

This all points to the different way of being, seeing and doing that we want to share with you in our Engaged Mindfulness course beginning in September.

By moving through a mindful inner journey in the company of others, we will enable this shift of orientation around stepping forth. We will do this by coming together and reconnecting with what gives us joy and hope, by standing beside each other in these uncertain times and acknowledging our individual concerns as particular and universal, and by letting all this bring us ‘new eyes’.

In the Engaged Mindfulness course we will draw on the Work That Reconnects and the inspirational guidance of academic, spiritual practitioner and activist Joanna Macy. In parallel we will replenish ourselves with mindfulness practices which emphasise grounding and connecting with the earth as a resource for resilience and compassion.

Join us on a 5 week course called Engaged Mindfulness beginning in September 

The course will be held online via Zoom on a Thursday evening from 19:00-21:00 (UK Time).

The dates of the five sessions are: 8 September, 15 September, 22 September, 29 September and 6 October 2022.

* Compassion satisfaction – the satisfaction that comes with being compassionate, as well as mindfulness and self-compassion, correlate with wellbeing amongst community nurses in the UK.

READ ABOUT COMPASSION SATISFACTION HERE

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Wamsler (2018) reviews and assesses current research on how mindfulness may be linked to climate adaptation and points to a lack of relevant research. Climate adaptation is described as adapting to increasing risk and climate change. Wamsler also conducted a survey to complement the literature review about how individual mindfulness is linked to climate adaptation. This survey found that levels of higher individual mindfulness correspond to increased motivation to take (or support) climate adaptation actions. The paper concludes that mindfulness has the potential to facilitate climate adaptation at all scales, individual to collective.

Stollberg & Jonas (2021) is a review of research focussing on the emotional processes of individuals and groups which explain motivated responses to the global threat of climate crisis. They propose that climate anxiety can be reduced by mindfulness, connectedness to nature and a sense of common humanity. They suggest that collective emotions of anger, guilt and ‘being moved’ can increase positive individual and collective engagement and that working in groups can help to reduce anxiety and when combined with pro-environmental norms can promote pro-environmental action.

Baudon & Jachens (2021) reviews research literature on approaches to eco-anxiety. They identified several themes across interventions including: fostering inner resilience, encouraging clients to take action, helping clients find social connection and emotional support by joining groups, and connecting clients with nature. Fostering inner resilience included self-care and cognitive, emotion-focussed and meaning-focussed interventions, including shifting from catastrophising to a more balanced perspective and fostering optimism and hope. They found that the interventions targeted different layers of an individual’s wellbeing, from inner experiences to connecting with others and connecting with the natural world. They recommend interventions that are holistic, multi-pronged and grief informed, which include eco-anxiety focussed group work.

To counter the lack of research specific to climate anxiety, there is a growing and convincing body of research, including several meta-analyses and systematic reviews that mindfulness meditation can reduce anxiety in general.

The engaged mindfulness approach we follow, based on Joanna Macy’s (2012) spiral of the Work That Reconnects, fits well with the research findings so far. This approach is based on practising mindfulness meditation and reflection together and then sharing our experiences with each other. The process begins with resourcing and nourishing ourselves with joy and gratitude, before turning mindfully towards what is difficult in the world with mindful awareness. From here we look together for a new perspective from which we can mindfully and practically go forth. To find out more or to join a course, please click here.

Written by Heather Regan-Addis

Heather Regan-Addis is a Founder Member and Director of the Mindfulness Association.

Heather delivers training for the Mindfulness Association on our two Post Graduate Master’s degree courses as well as on our regular courses in Mindfulness, Compassion, Insight and on our Teacher training programmes.

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Our Engaged Mindfulness Course begins on September 8th

We have an Introduction to Compassion Retreat weekend coming up on 23-25 September, in the wonderful peaceful Samye Ling Tibetan Centre for World Peace in the south of Scotland. Find out more about that HERE

• To help support your practice on this life journey we have a daily guided meditation practice Monday to Friday 10.30am and 7pm
• The Mindfulness Association has in place a widening access policy so we can help you attend courses if you are struggling financially, we don’t want this to prevent you from your practice.
• Try our FREE 4 WEEK email Course HERE
• Mindfulness Association Membership is also a great way to support your practice on this journey. For only £10 for a 6 month trial you can have access to fortnightly teachings, access to free recorded practices and a free members weekend packed full of teachings and opportunity to network with other mindfulness practitioners.
• Post Graduate Studies. 2 Msc. courses. 
• UPCOMING COURSES

In-Depth Mindfulness • Compassion • Insight • Wisdom • Teacher Training • 2 Post Graduate Master’s Degrees.

References

Baudon & Jachens, 2021. A Scoping Review of Interventions for the Treatment of Eco-Anxiety.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/18/9636

Macy & Johnstone, 2012 (Revised Ed. 2022). Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power.

https://www.goodreads.com/tr/book/show/13235686-active-hope

Wamsler, 2018. Mind the Gap: The role of mindfulness in adapting to increasing risk and climate change.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-017-0524-3

Stollberg & Jonas, 2021. Existential threat as a challenge for individual and collective engagement: Climate Change and the motivation to act.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21001962

Image by NOAA on Unsplash