Joanna Macy conducts workshops around the world bringing people together to recognize, and express to each other, the depths of their pain and despair. In the process, they become empowered to combat (peacefully) the powers that be. Simply by sharing in small groups we develop the capacity to join with others to change society.
Her book is Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. The first half of the book succinctly expands on her ideas. The second half of the book contains exercises groups can use to bring them to life.
Our experience of pain for the world springs from our inter-connectedness with all beings, from which also arises our powers to act on their behalf.
When we deny or repress our pain for the world, or treat it as a private pathology, our power to take part in the healing of our world is diminished. This apatheia need not become a terminal condition. Our capacity to respond to our own and others' suffering--that is, the feedback loops that weave us into life--can be unblocked.
Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only intellectually validated, but experienced. Cognitive information about the crises we face, or even about our psychological responses to them, is insufficient. We can only free ourselves from our fears of the pain--including the fear of getting permanently mired in despair or shattered by grief--when we allow ourselves to experience these feelings.
Only then can we discover their fluid, dynamic character. Only then can they reveal on a visceral level our mutual belonging to the web of life.
When we reconnect with life, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity. Not only do we experience our interconnectedness in the community of Earth, but also mental eagerness arises to match this experience with new paradigm thinking.
Concepts which bring relatedness into focus become vivid. Significant learnings occur, for the individual system is reorganizing and reorienting, grounding itself in wider reaches of identity and self-interest.
The experience of reconnection with the Earth community arouses desire to act on its behalf. As Earth's self-healing powers take hold within us, we feel called to participate in the Great Turning. For these self-healing powers to operate effectively, they must be trusted and acted on. The steps we take can be modest undertakings, but they should involve some risk to our mental comfort, lest we remain caught in old, "safe" limits. Courage is a great teacher and bringer of joy.
