Honouring-Our-Pain on deep ecology

For the healing of ourselves and the world, we need to be able to stay open

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“For the healing of ourselves and the world, we need to be able to stay open, to be present to our world and other beings, and all that it is going through. This is a great necessity, a great secret and a great freedom for us.” – Joanna Macy

Despair and Empowerment: Joanna Macy's Foundational Work

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Role of Hope in the Truth Mandala

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the Truth Mandala process, it’s common for participants to observe that while there is a quadrant for Doubt, Fear, Anger and Sadness, there does not seem to be a place for Hope in the mandala. It’s important to understand that this type of process is precious precisely because it is a place where we give ourselves and others permission to express our more difficult feelings — even the deepest and darkest ones. Bringing words of hope and comfort and a more positive perspective can often prevent others in the circle from expressing their “bad” feelings, because — as in our normal lives — they feel expected to repress any negative feelings and look on the bright side. We are invited to visualise hope as the ground of the mandala: we wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for our hope, but we make space during the process for the other, more difficult emotions that often don’t get voiced.

The Shambhala Warriors — A Prophecy

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

From World as Lover, World as Self (Joanna Macy, Parallax Press, 1991). For more of Joanna’s own telling and context, see the Work That Reconnects Network’s page on this prophecy — the primary home for her work online, and the first place to look for anything of hers referenced on this site.

I often tell this story in workshops, for it describes the work we aim to do and the training we engage in. It is from a prophecy that arose in Tibetan Buddhism over twelve centuries ago. I learned of it from my Tibetan friends in India when, in 1980, I heard many of them speaking of this ancient prophecy as coming true in our time. The signs it foretold, they said, are recognisable now, in our generation. Since this prophecy speaks of a time of great danger — of apocalypse — I was, as you can imagine, very interested to find out about it.

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.

Breathing Through (training video)

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

This is Joanna Macy’s own version of tonglen, the Tibetan Buddhist practice of breathing in suffering and breathing out ease. In her written instructions for it, she describes the exercise as “adapted from an ancient Buddhist meditation for developing compassion.” Here she teaches it directly, in a training recorded in 2005.

See also Macy’s written instructions for this practice, and our own guided recording of it.

The Truth Mandala

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Joanna Macy’s Truth Mandala, reproduced from Coming Back to Life (Macy & Brown, 1998). The dominant “Honouring Our Pain for the World” practice in current use — see also The Cairn of Mourning and The Role of Hope in the Truth Mandala as companion pieces, and the Work That Reconnects Network’s own introduction to this stage of the spiral for the wider context. Full source page: rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/truthm.htm.

Purpose & Background

This ritual exercise provides a simple, respectful, whole-group structure for owning and honoring our pain for the world, and for recognizing its authority and the solidarity it can bring. The practice emerged in 1992 amidst a large, tension-filled workshop in Frankfurt, on the day of reunification between East and West Germany; since then it has spread to many lands. To many participants it has been the most significant experience in a workshop, if not in their lives.

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.