Everything ported into the “Honouring Our Pain for the World” section of this site — the Truth Mandala, the Mourning — has one direct ancestor: Joanna Macy’s Despair and Empowerment workshops, developed in the early 1980s in response to the psychological toll of living under nuclear threat. This is the historical foundation, with sources.
The book
- Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (New Society Publishers, 1983) — free to read at the Internet Archive. Forty-seven exercises for working through despair, isolation and powerlessness in the face of nuclear war, environmental destruction, and social injustice, developed from Macy’s own workshops of the same name.
- A later, freely available essay covering similar ground: Joanna Macy, “Working Through Environmental Despair”.
The psychological grounding
Macy’s central insight drew on psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s research on “psychic numbing” — the emotional shutdown Lifton documented in survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Macy recognised the same numbing in people living under the threat of nuclear war: a widespread, anticipatory retreat from unbearable knowledge. Rather than responding with more facts and statistics, she built group exercises that gave fear, grief and anger a structured, safe space to be spoken aloud — the direct template for what later became the Truth Mandala and the Mourning.
How it reached Australia — and became deep ecology
Macy toured Australia in 1985 running Despair and Empowerment workshops (an original event poster survives in the ANU archives). John Seed attended one of these workshops in the mid-1980s while deep in the Terania Creek rainforest campaign, and has described the meeting as the missing piece he needed. In his own words, quoted in Craig Strobel’s academic study of the ritual’s origins (Strobel, The Council of All Beings: Origins and Innovations of a “Re-Earthing” Ritual, 2001):
“I had the good fortune to meet Joanna Macy when she came to Australia doing workshops called Despair & Empowerment… It really encouraged us to feel things that we had been denying… But it still seemed as though there was something important missing — deep ecology. Joanna, it seems, had been coming to similar conclusions and we talked afterwards, we went for a long walk in the bush, and out of that grew the idea of the Council of All Beings — a synthesis of despair and empowerment and deep ecology.”
That walk in the bush is the direct hinge between Macy’s nuclear-age despair work and everything on this page: the Mourning, the Truth Mandala, and the Council of All Beings itself all descend from it.
Further reading
- Craig S. Strobel, The Council of All Beings: Origins and Innovations of a “Re-Earthing” Ritual (2001) — the fullest documented account of this history, drawn from Strobel’s doctoral fieldwork.
- John Seed himself, still telling this story decades on: “Honoring Our Pain for the World,” a webinar with John Seed and Skye Mandozay on the Work That Reconnects Network.
- Joanna Macy obituary on this site.