Loving the full catastrophe and the many wonders of this world is a phenomenal source of joy and connection. It is also a deep well of grief and despair. We cannot avoid it.
What is an ecological spirituality that attends not only to the fantasy of a lost Garden of Eden, but is able to open to the actual planet of which we are a part? A mature love for a person is to love them as they are, not as we remember them or wish they were. What does it mean to love our Earth as our Earth is; to be in a genuine relationship?
To fully experience this planet which is our home, these beings we encounter, and our own sojourn through this inconceivably intricate and wondrous world is an ethics of love—one where three facets fit together: The first facet is the sadness of feeling ecologically, which means sensing the beauty as well as the contamination and mutation. Not needing to control or constrain it, and not needing to manipulate our own anxieties and pain, allows for openness, vulnerability, connection, and relation. The second is the pure awe of participating fully in this wonder, not holding back as a separate outsider. The third is knowing that we are all in solidarity and connection and trusting that vast solidarity with ecosystems, people, animals, elements, and space itself—in all of the complexity and simplicity that surrounds each life-giving, breathing, intertwined moment.
The program is an opportunity to connect with your body, heart and senses, and to connect to this actual world of beings and ecosystems. Our world is a place of grief, pleasure, strangeness, terror, and laughter: all dancing as ongoing communication.
This EcoDharma Exploration took place on March 19, 2023. The recording can be found below.
Adam Lobel, PhD, practices at the intersections of ecodharma, meditation, and psycho-social political transformation. He is a scholar-practitioner of philosophy and religion, a Guiding Teacher for One Earth Sangha, an environmental justice activist working to resist the petrochemical buildout in his region, and a professor of Ecopsychology. Adam served as a teacher (acharya) in the Shambhala tradition from 2005 until resigning in 2018. A speaker on ecology and spirituality at the United Nations, he leads ecodharma workshops called “Silent Transformations,” has taught in the Ecosattva Training, and is a Greenfaith fellow. Adam’s teachings focus on Great Perfection Tibetan Buddhism, modern phenomenology, and inoperative studies (Heidegger, Foucault, Agamben). He has a longstanding interest in progressive contemplative education and transformative pedagogy. Adam teaches a critical style of contemplative training that seeks to avoid enclosure in neoliberal mindfulness while still disclosing effortless awareness. He is currently developing what he calls “four fields” of contemplative practices for potential worlds. For more on his teachings: https://www.releasement.org.
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