When No Thing Works

Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse

Join Norma Wong Roshi and One Earth Sangha for this EcoDharma Exploration on Sunday, July 27, at 10:30am PT/1:30pm EST to 12:30pm PT/3:30pm EST. All are welcome. Learn more about this upcoming gathering in the description below.

For the rest of 2025, our EcoDharma Explorations will be co-created by Braided Wisdom and Spirit Rock as part of a new initiative, the EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program. Look for more programming from this collaboration over the next few months and years. We at One Earth Sangha are honored and excited to work with our new partners.

Registration is now open.

© StockSnap from Pixabay

Talking story, weaving poetry, and offering wisdom at the intersections of strategy, politics, and spiritual activism, When No Thing Works is a visionary guide to co-creating new worlds from one in crisis. It asks into the ways we can live well and maintain our wholeness in an era of collective acceleration: the swiftly moving current, fed and shaped by human actions, that sweeps us toward ever uncertain futures.

Grounded in Zen Buddhism, interconnection, and decades of community activism, When No Thing Works explores questions like:

  • As we stand at a threshold of collective change, what leaps must we make?
  • How can we push through discord and polarization and meet these critical changepoints collectively?
  • What practices, strategies, and spiritualities can align to vision a sustainable future for our communities and descendants?
  • How can we step out of urgency to tend to our crises with wisdom, intention, and care?

Zen master and Indigenous Hawaiian leader Roshi Norma Wong’s meditation holds our collective moment with gravity and tender care. She asks us to not only imagine, but to live into, a story beyond crisis and collapse—one that expands to meet our dreams of what (we hope) comes next while facing with clarity and grace our here and now in the world we share today.

For more information on Norma Wong Roshi, go to www.normawong.com.

Norma Wong (Norma Ryuko Kawelokū Wong Roshi) is a Native Hawaiian and Hakka life-long resident of Hawaiʻi. She is the abbot of Anko-in, an independent branch temple of Daihonzan Chozen-ji and serves practice communities in Hawai‘i, across the continental U.S., and in Toronto, Canada. She is an 86th generation Zen Master, having trained at Chozen-ji for over 40 years.

In earlier years, Wong served as a Hawai‘i state legislator, on the policy and strategy team for Governor John Waihee with federal and Native Hawaiian portfolios. She led teams to negotiate agreements on the munitions cleanup of Kahoʻolawe Island, ceded land revenue for Native Hawaiians, and the return of lands and settlement of land issues for Hawaiian Home Lands. She was active in electoral politics for over thirty years.

In recent years, Wong has been called back into service to facilitate breaking the impasse and transforming policy and governance on issues of seeming contradiction. In the conflict between native culture/science and western discovery science posing as a dispute over the construction of a telescope on Mauna Kea, Wong was a team member narrating and facilitating a path forward through mutual stewardship. She is currently an advisor to Speaker of the Hawai‘i House of Representatives Scott Saiki, serving in policy development and facilitation roles on issues such as the protection of the aquifer from fuel contamination at Red Hill, and the long-term response to the Lahaina wildfires.

Norma has spent many years in the applied space – the direct application of indigenous and Zen ways, values and practices to living and transformational change critical to our times.

     Pieces on One Earth Sangha

This Exploration is part of a short series in collaboration with Braided Wisdom, Spirit Rock’s ecoDharma & Transformational Culture Program and One Earth Sangha. We’re honored and excited to work with our new partners.

Registration for this exploration is open now. This program is donation-based, with no required registration fee. We welcome your contributions to support this program and the work of One Earth Sangha.

More EcoDharma Explorations

Upcoming

Can Indigenous Wisdom Help Us Heal Our Minds, Communities, and Planet?

After over a decade as a leading climate scientist, Zen Buddhist teacher Kritee Kanko embraced "Reindigenizing". Here, she explores the polycrisis’s roots, trauma-climate links, tipping points, and Indigenous knowledge systems, inviting us to reconnect with ecosystems and communities for resilience.

Past

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?

Past

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.