Council-of-All-Beings on deep ecology

Profile: Pat Fleming

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Pat Fleming is a deep ecology facilitator who co-authored Thinking Like a Mountain (1988) with John Seed, Joanna Macy, and Arne Naess. She has conducted experiential deep ecology workshops for over forty years.

Born in England to a Northern Irish family, Fleming holds British-Australian nationality and currently resides in northern Lutruwita (Tasmania). Her background includes mental health counseling, conservation botany, organic farming, and environmental education. She holds an MA in Psychology from Edinburgh University and an MSc in Botanical Conservation from Plymouth University.

The Development of the Deep Ecology Process

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Council of All Beings Workshop Manual (complete)

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The full text of the Council of All Beings Workshop Manual, prepared by Eshana (Elizabeth Bragg, PhD) in January 1998 with updates through February 2001 by Ruth Rosenhek, published on John Seed’s Rainforest Information Centre site. Its stated aim: “to provide potential facilitators with enough material to facilitate a weekend length Council of All Beings with no previous experience or additional resources.” Reproduced in full here, section by section, so that individual practices already ported to this site — The Milling, The Cairn of Mourning — can link back to their original, complete context, and so nothing in the manual is lost to link-rot on the source site. As the manual itself says: “facilitators should by no means limit themselves to the processes outlined here” — different versions of this workshop exist all over the world, including the Work That Reconnects Network’s own page on the practice Macy and Seed developed together.

The Council of All Beings

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

By Joanna Macy, Ph.D. Written for The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Full source page: rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Joanna Macy.htm.

The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form. A simple structure for spontaneous expression, it aims to heighten awareness of our interdependence in the living body of Earth, and to strengthen our commitment to defend it. The ritual serves to help us acknowledge and give voice to the suffering of our world. It also serves, in equal measure, to help us experience the beauty and power of our interconnectedness with all life.

The Council of All Beings Instructions

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Below is a script and set of instructions in brief for the Council of All Beings process, excerpted from the facilitator’s manual and John Seed’s full workshop-introduction transcript. See also Joanna Macy’s own history and reflections on the practice she and Seed invented together, and the Work That Reconnects Network’s own page on it.

Soon we will enter one of the central practices of this work together: the Council of All Beings.

In our ordinary lives, we humans speak almost endlessly. We explain, debate, argue, analyse, persuade. We have become very practiced at occupying the centre of the conversation. In the Council, however, we experiment with something different. We step quietly to one side and make room for the voices of the more-than-human world.

The Milling

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A facilitation script by John Seed, shared with permission as part of the Council of All Beings process he developed with Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming and others. Usually run as an opening/bonding sequence before the deeper stages of the work — the Truth Mandala and the Council of All Beings ceremony typically follow. Full manual context: Milling section of the complete Workshop Manual.

This is a series of exercises designed to create group bonding, and to focus our whole attention (heart, body, mind) on the subject of the workshop: our relationship with the rest of the natural world. Feel free to be creative with this series of exercises — any group-bonding and trust-creating activities will be effective.

John Seed's Introductions to the Council of All Beings Workshop (full transcripts)

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Transcribed by Chris Lehman from the Council of All Beings workshop at Northern Pines Lodge, Maine, USA, 24–25 October 1992, and reproduced here as the numbered sequence in which John gives them over the course of a workshop (I–VI), to be read in conjunction with the full workshop manual. Reproduced with permission as part of John Seed’s shared process materials — the first section is the fuller companion to the excerpt already published in Despair and Empowerment: Joanna Macy’s Foundational Work and to John’s own essay referencing the same Hopi encounter. Sections II–VI are reproduced with only obvious transcription typos corrected; John’s live, spoken register — asides, digressions, the parenthetical notes he added afterward — is otherwise left as he gave it.

The Cairn of Mourning

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A facilitation note by John Seed, drawing directly on Joanna Macy’s Despair and Empowerment work. These days the Truth Mandala, is usually used, but the Carin of Mourning can be a useful replacement in a shorter process, or in contexts where the intensity of the Truth Mandala may be difficult to present safely or deeply. See also hope’s place in that process. Full manual context: Mourning section of the complete Council of All Beings Workshop Manual.

Video: “Wild Earth, Wild Mind, Wild Heart” with John Seed

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this video, filmed in the spring of 2005, John Seed performs some songs and poems. He also offers detailed introductions to some of the group processes he has developed and taken around the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-onPzlVxc

Essay - Council of All Beings – John Seed

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

![/images/council-of-all-beings.jpg) ‘Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one release one’s sadness’

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The Council of All Beings is a series of re-Earthing rituals created by myself and Joanna Macy to help end the sense of alienation from the living Earth that most of us feel, and to connect us with new sources of joy, commitment and inspiration that follow from union with Gaia.

I had been working for the rainforests since 1979 first in Australia and then elsewhere around the world. Although many of our early efforts were crowned with success, I couldn’t help but notice that for every forest we were able to save, worldwide 100 disappeared. Clearly we weren’t going to be able to save the planet one forest at a time. One green Earth or a bowl of dust, unless somehow a profound change of consciousness was to sweep the globe we could kiss the forests goodbye, the ones we had “saved” alongside the rest.