Our Philosophy page describes Arne Naess’s call for “therapies which heal our relations with the widest community, that of all living beings”, and notes that the processes answering that call were developed largely by his coauthors on Thinking Like a Mountain. What follows traces that development more closely: how a workshop first conceived in response to the nuclear threat became, over four decades and in two hemispheres, the body of practice now generally offered as the Work That Reconnects.
Despair and empowerment
Joanna Macy’s Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, published in 1983, addressed the psychological weight of living under the threat of annihilation. Drawing on Robert Jay Lifton’s studies of “psychic numbing” among survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Macy observed something similar in people facing a catastrophe that had not yet arrived, and developed a series of group exercises through which fear, grief and anger could be given voice in a setting safe enough to bear them. The work at this stage was not yet ecological; its subject was humanity and the bomb. A fuller account is given in our page on Despair and Empowerment.
A conversation in the bush, 1985
Macy travelled to Australia in 1985 offering these workshops. John Seed, then in the thick of the rainforest campaigns that had begun at Terania Creek, attended one, and found both that the work was genuinely powerful and that something in it was missing. The grief expressed in those circles, as he has since described it, remained largely a grief for one species and its descendants, while the ten million others equally affected received little more than passing acknowledgement.
Macy, it turned out, had been arriving at a similar reservation. The two talked afterwards, walked for a long time in the bush, and out of that conversation came the Council of All Beings — in Seed’s phrase, a synthesis of despair and empowerment with deep ecology, which brought a biocentric quality to the despair work and gave deep ecology a process through which it might become more than an idea passing through the mind. They held the first Council the following weekend, some forty people taking part at a camp north of Sydney. Seed’s full workshop introduction recounts all of this in his own voice; Macy gives her own account of the same afternoon.
The shape of the work
Thinking Like a Mountain appeared in 1988, written by Seed, Macy, Pat Fleming and Naess. The workshop it sets out moves through three stages: the Mourning, in which pain for the world is felt and spoken; the Remembering, in which participants recover something of their deep evolutionary inheritance; and the Council itself, in which people speak on behalf of other beings. Much of the material on John Seed’s older website assumes this structure, which is why references to “the Remembering” appear there without further explanation.
A decade later, Macy and Molly Brown’s Coming Back to Life (1998, revised 2014) set the work out as a spiral of four movements: coming from gratitude, honouring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and going forth. The spiral absorbs the earlier form rather than replacing it. Gratitude, previously implicit, is named as a stage in its own right and placed first; going forth, which in 1988 received comparatively little attention, is considerably developed. The Truth Mandala, which emerged at a large and difficult workshop in Frankfurt in 1992, has since become the form in which pain for the world is most often honoured, so that the older Mourning circle is now less frequently used.
From therapy to ritual
Somewhere within these years Seed made a shift in language he has returned to often. Visiting Third Mesa, he was able to witness a Hopi ceremony which struck him as remarkably close in spirit to the Council of All Beings, conducted by a community that had been performing it without interruption for a very long time. A therapy is something one expects eventually to complete; yet the Hopi had been at this for ten thousand years and had not come to the end of it. “Ritual” seemed to him to describe more accurately what the Council was for — not a treatment to be finished, but a return to be made again. His essay on ecopsychology touches on this, and the workshop transcript treats it more fully.
The Australian forms
The Australian lineage meanwhile developed its own material, particularly for the seeing with new eyes stage. The Cosmic Walk, which Seed adapted from Sister Miriam Therese McGillis of Genesis Farm and, behind her, Thomas Berry’s work on the universe story, and Earth as Peppercorn, adapted from the astronomer Guy Ottewell’s Thousand-Yard Model, have both become characteristic of workshops in this part of the world.
Why the work is cyclical
One further finding is worth recording. Eshana Bragg’s doctoral research at James Cook University, completed in 1995, examined the Council of All Beings empirically and found that its effect on participants’ sense of ecological self tends to diminish after something like six months unless renewed. The Council of All Beings workshop manual states the same conclusion plainly, noting that these experiences “need to be practiced, like regular festivals”.
This returns us, by a rather different route, to Seed’s observation at Third Mesa. That ritual has no natural endpoint turns out to be not only a matter of how such things are best understood, but a practical consideration in how the work is offered — and it is the reason this site sets personal practice alongside group process: what a gathering opens, daily practice can help to sustain between gatherings.
Reading the older material
A few correspondences follow from all this, and are worth holding in mind when moving between the earlier and later literature. The Mourning belongs to what is now called Honouring Our Pain for the World, though in current practice it has largely given way to the Truth Mandala. The Remembering names the same territory as seeing with new eyes, but more narrowly: it refers to the recovery of deep time and evolutionary kinship, through practices such as the Evolutionary Remembering, Our Life as Gaia, the Gaia Meditations, and in the Australian setting the Cosmic Walk and Earth as Peppercorn. Seeing With New Eyes, as the spiral now uses the term, also takes in perception of a more social and systemic kind, of which Three Stories of Our Time is a good example — see also the Work That Reconnects Network’s own teaching points for this stage.
Principal sources: Seed, Macy, Fleming and Naess, Thinking Like a Mountain (1988); Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (1983); Macy and Brown, Coming Back to Life (1998; second edition 2014); Bragg, Towards Ecological Self (James Cook University, 1995); Craig S. Strobel, “The Council of All Beings: Origins and Innovations of a ‘Re-Earthing’ Ritual” (2001); and John Seed’s own workshop transcripts.