Session Four

Ecological harm is inextricably tied to systems of oppression. Participants are invited to explore, with compassionate accountability, how the dominant structures objectify Earth and all her beings, ultimately harming all.

Session Three

Here we open to the suffering we may find in our own experience. We explore how it is to be with this world as we perceive it and allow the impacts to be named and honored. We explore the narratives that we carry about ourselves, others, and this world, both helpful and unhelpful.

Session Two

In this journey we are likely to meet fear, grief, anger, and other difficult emotions. In investigating these strong energies, we can discover spiritual resources that can help us hold them.

Session One

We’ll begin by gathering and reflecting on our global situation, mapping out our journey, and setting the conditions for empowered, compassionate response.

Session Eight

In the closing session, we’ll how the process of letting go, going deep and reforming ourselves can become a regular part of our practice. We’ll also look at how we can create sacred and nourishing spaces in our Sanghas that support authentic investigation and diverse forms of engagement. We might take our own EcoSattva Vows together and discover how connections we’ve made here can go forward.

Session Seven

Equipped with a deeply rooted sense of our belonging and calling, we turn outward. In earlier sessions, we opened up some of the habitual but limited ways that we engage with others around social transformation. Now we’ll look at what does work supported by research and our own honed wisdom. We’ll clarify in particular our agency in relationships (implicit and explicit) and groups (social norming) as well as what sabotages that agency.

Session Six

Continuing in the relational spiritual task, attunement with the unknown, we’ll open further to so much more than the conventional holding of that truth. We’ll welcome whatever arises, from nothing to mystical everything.

Session Five

To be thoroughly aware of the dramatic changes underway and to set ourselves up to be authentically helpful is to learn to stay with profound uncertainty. This session takes on that spiritual task.

Session Four

Having opened up internally and individually, we rise to the collective and historical, understanding how objectification accumulates over time in the form of dominant institutions, how delusion is codified and how domination spreads that delusion. Participants are invited to explore, with compassionate accountability, how the dominant cultural body conquers, colonizes, and exploits not only Earth and other peoples but its own members. This is where we let it all in, the full catastrophe.

Session Three

Our ultimate goal is transformation at depth but we can’t get there unless we recognize ourselves with compassion. We need to understand how it is we found ourselves in this astonishing situation. In a process that involves not just mind, but heart and body, we are looking back, remembering both for ourselves and our people the causes and conditions that led us here. With great care and attention, we begin to untangle the tangle.