Work-That-Reconnects on deep ecology

Quote: Joanna Macy; "The work that reconnects helps us transform despair into constructive action."

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“The work that reconnects helps us transform despair into constructive action.”
– Joanna Macy

Source: Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy (with Chris Johnstone)

In Memoriam: Joanna Macy (1929-2025)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is with great sadness that we acknowledge the passing of philosopher, mentor, teacher, activist and visionary, Joanna Macy. Joanna died peacefully at her home in Berkeley on July 19, 2025, at age 96, surrounded by family and friends. Her passing marks the end of a life devoted to weaving together Buddhist wisdom, systems thinking, and ecological awareness.

Joanna’s work synthesized principles of Buddhism, systems theory and deep ecology philosophy, creating frameworks that helped countless people transform despair about planetary crisis into engaged action. Her doctoral thesis, “Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory,” linked codependent arising with systems thinking, offering intellectual grounding for what would become her signature teaching methodology.

Bio: Pat Fleming

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

[ Pat has been has been facilitating Deep Ecology and the Work that Reconnects workshops, and giving talks, trainings and webinars in a number of countries over some 40 years. She’s a plantswoman, musician, writer and poet, and her writing includes co-authoring ‘Thinking like A Mountain – towards a Council of All Beings’ with John Seed, Joanna Macy and Arne Naess, and contributing a chapter to the recent book ‘A Wild Love for the World – Joanna Macy and the Work of our Time’. She has been a student of zen Buddhism with Buddhist Peace Fellowship co-founder Robert Aitken Roshi.

Profile: Joanna Macy

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

Joanna Macy (1929-2025) was a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. Born in Los Angeles, she earned her PhD and spent five decades developing the Work That Reconnects, a group methodology for addressing ecological grief and cultivating engagement.

Macy studied at Wellesley College and conducted doctoral research on systems theory and Buddhist philosophy. Her academic work explored connections between Buddhist concepts of dependent co-arising and contemporary systems thinking. In the late 1970s, she began developing what she initially called “Despair and Empowerment Work,” proposing that people needed structured ways to acknowledge grief about ecological and social conditions.

Bio: Eshana Bragg

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Eshana is a pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, and has been facilitating deep ecology workshops and the Council of All Beings since the mid-1990’s. She even wrote her PhD about it! As a director of Sustainable Futures Australia, and university lecturer in ecopsychology and action for social change, Eshana is passionate about bringing deep ecology and other ecophilosophies and practises to mainstream communities.

Bio: Inna Alex

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Inna Alex is a passionate deep ecology facilitator, community organizer, and sustainable living educator. Her earth-based lifestyle in Tui Community, New Zealand, has provided her with many practical skills in permaculture living, organic gardening, healing foods, group facilitation, relationship and women’s work.

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2022: Online Workshop of “The Work That Reconnects”, with Inna Alex

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2022 AT 2:30 PM – 4:45 PM UTC+10

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How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy? DEEP ECOLOGY Online Workshop in the Work That Reconnects facilitated by Inna Alex. Join us as we build community exploring the complex nature of our times!

TIMING: 2.30-4.45pm AEST / 4.30-6.45pm NZST

Spaces limited to 18. $20 non-refundable admin fee to secure your place. Dana/donation for Inna’s facilitation of the workshop to be made after the course.

Book: “World As Lover, World as Self”, by Joanna Macy

Sat, 21 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“An enduring classic of the environmental movement, Joanna Macy’s poetic, groundbreaking call to action is poised to inspire a new generation“

https://www.parallax.org/product/world-as-lover-world-as-self-a-guide-to-living-fully-in-turbulent-times/#product-content

Parallax press has released a 30th anniversary edition of Joanna Macy’s important book, outlining her approach to practices for engaging with the global ecological situation.

It’s official: humanity is in crisis. Facing the magnitude of our global situation as individuals leaves us feeling powerless and despairing. When we need wisdom and solace, there is no better than Joanna Macy, one of the grandmothers of modern environmentalism, whose life’s work has been to hear and heal our pain for the planet. World as Lover, World as Self draws on a lifetime of deep awareness that re-focuses us on the natural world, where readers can find the spiritual nourishment to envision a future built on a sustainable relationship with the earth. Rooted in the Buddha’s teachings of paticca samuppada or “interdependent co-arising,” Macy’s reflections were radically relevant for activists who wanted to address the underlying mindset of fear, greed, and selfishness that give rise to overconsumption and the ultimate destruction of our world. Drawing comparisons to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, this definitive 30th Anniversary edition gives a new generation of readers the real reasons we cry out, and the depth to make a difference.

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.

Book: “Active Hope: how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy” by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The challenges we face can be difficult to even think about. Climate change, pandemic uncertainty, extreme inequality, economic upheaval, and mass extinction together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face this crisis so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach know as the Work that Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we’re in and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining society.

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.

Three Stories of Our Time

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

Rather than offering its own analysis of causes and solutions for the crises of our time, the Work That Reconnects invites us to take a fresh look at what we see happening around us. The model of “Three Stories of Our Time” helps us do this. Each of these stories reveals a profoundly different lens through which people understand the world we all live in. Taken as a whole, they help us make sense of what we see and experience, and choose how we want to live our own lives and engage in the work of change.

Corbett Process - Strengthening Our Intentions

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

From Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy & Molly Brown (2nd ed., 2014, Chapter 10). Full instructions and further resources at the Work That Reconnects Network — the primary home for Joanna’s work online. “Corbett” is a place name — a town in the Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, where the practice was first workshopped — not a person. Please acknowledge the source when you use this practice.

The Work That Reconnects recognizes the intrinsic organizing power of intention. This practice amplifies a personal intention by testing it against several perspectives at once — roughly 45–60 minutes.

Gratitude as a Revolutionary Act (training video)

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Gratitude as a Revolutionary Act (Joanna Macy, 2006) is a training video made as a companion to Coming Back to Life, for facilitators — both those new to this work and those more experienced — wanting to ground a group in gratitude before moving into the harder stages of the spiral. See also the accompanying teaching points drawn from the same chapter.

Watch it via the Work That Reconnects Network — the primary home for Joanna’s work online (may require free registration).

Coming from Gratitude: Teaching Points

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Paraphrased summary of Chapter 6 of Coming Back to Life (Joanna Macy & Molly Brown, 2nd ed., 2014). Full teaching points at the Work That Reconnects Network — the primary home for Joanna’s work online. See also the companion training video.

The spiral of the Work That Reconnects begins with gratitude, not because the world’s condition doesn’t warrant grief and anger — those come next — but because gratitude is what grounds everything that follows.

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.

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.