Weathering the Storms

Caring for Inner and Outer Turmoil

This EcoDharma Exploration featuring meditation teacher and author Kaira Jewel Lingo took place on October 16. Find the recording below. We welcome your support for this program.

Special Notice

This session also marked the opening of the 2022-23 season of the EcoSattva Training. This online course is revised every year to stay attuned to our rapidly changing situation and to integrate new findings and fresh perspectives. If you would like to learn more about the training, this EcoDharma Exploration provides a helpful introduction.

The scale and intensity of ecological crises can be overwhelming. As human impacts on the Earth drive extreme weather, “natural” disasters, and global conflict, the Dharma provides much-needed tools for working with inner turmoil. How can our practice bring relief… not only to ourselves but our relationships and community? From the ground of inner stability, can we begin to heal environmental injustice and other collective wounds?

In this gathering, Kaira Jewel Lingo offers wisdom and practices to help us ground in steadiness when crisis and confusion threaten to unseat us. Drawing from her extensive spiritual training, including 15 years as a nun in the Plum Village Zen tradition, she guides us in discovering what lies beneath reactivity—both within and between us—and responding with authenticity.

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality, ecology and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thích Nhất Hạnh, and includes the interweaving of nature, ecology, embodied mindfulness practice, art and play. She has extensive experience offering nature and earth-based retreats with environmental and climate activists, children and families, and mindful hiking retreats. She draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on activists, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation (Feb 2024).

     Pieces on One Earth Sangha

Support this Offering

One Earth Sangha and our featured speakers offer these explorations on a donation basis, with no required registration fee. We invite you to participate in the tradition of offering dana, or generosity. Your support makes these gatherings possible, and any amount offered is greatly appreciated.

Another way to support us is to share what this exploration has meant to you in a way that we can use in our materials. We invite you to share a “testimonial” here! (select “EcoDharma Exploration Participant” from the dropdown menu.)

Recording

More EcoDharma Explorations

Upcoming

Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse

As we face the poly-crisis, how do we escalate our actions without escalating a worldview that keeps us from interdependence? How can we view injustice as a manifestation of collective trauma? How can the Dharma support us in a skillful response?

Upcoming

A Work that Reconnects Spiral Gathering

What might the Earth desire from us this Earth Day? Alex Julie guides a Work That Reconnects spiral practice to ground in gratitude, lean into grief, and clear our heart-minds enough to listen for the Earth.

Past

Standing in Fierce Compassion in this Age of Reckoning

As extractive systems collapse and uncertainty rises, how do we stay present and act with wisdom? This session explores Dharma teachings and meditative grounding for meeting grief and the call to disrupt and reimagine with courage.