Harnessing the Inner Fire

Fear and Anger as Holy Messengers

Dharma teacher Zac Ispa-Landa led this EcoDharma Exploration on August 25, 2024. We offer the recording below and welcome your support for Zac’s teaching as well as this program.

Bonfire against white clouds - Hawaiian’s most active volcano in Big Island.
Photo by guille pozzi on Unsplash

Collectively, life on earth is entering a new epoch that is bringing profound disruption to global ecologies that have remained relatively stable for a millennia. As these earth systems are becoming destabilized, so too are our social systems, economies, geo-politics, and more.

In the face of disruption and uncertainty, fear and anger often arise as habitual and instinctive reactions. These energies can easily become overwhelming and consuming if we get lost in them. Reacting with aversion or grasping, we lose touch with the naturally fluid and spacious of all phenomena, including anger and fear, As experiences of fear and anger become solid and concretized, the experience of suffering and confusion naturally follow. Our ability to respond from a place of compassion and wisdom diminishes.

In this EcoDharma Exploration, we explored teachings and practices that allow us to experience the energies of anger and fear in a radically different way. Through the wisdom of the Dharma, these powerful emotions can be honored, allowed, and even harnessed as a natural resource to power our practice of awakening so that we can show up in the world as empowered agents of liberation and compassion.

Zac Ispa-Landa is a Dharma teacher and a Senior Lecturer in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. At the University, he teaches courses on ecology, environmental justice, mindfulness in the Anthropocene, natural history, critical reflection and dialogue, honey bee biology and beekeeping, and sustainability. He teaches mindfulness at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Inward Bound Mindfulness, MIT Sloan School, the Burlington Dharma Collective, and Bhumisparsha. He began meditating and studying Dharma twenty years ago, inspired by a vision of personal and collective liberation, and has spent thousands of hours in meditation and hundreds of days on retreat since. He began mindfulness practice with vipassana (Insight) meditation and, in recent years, has been practicing Vajrayana (tantric) Buddhism with Lama Rod Owens, who he’s worked and taught with since 2017. Zac lives Winooski, Vermont with his partner, son, and tens of thousands of honeybees.

     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

Additional Resources

Deeply Experiencing Our Senses: A Guided Meditation with Charisse Minerva

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.