When No Thing Works

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

Norma Wong Roshi led this EcoDharma Exploration on July 27, 2025. We welcome your support for this program. A recording is available 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.

© 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.

 

This program is donation-based, with no required registration fee. We welcome your contributions to support this program and the work of Braided Wisdom and 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

More EcoDharma Explorations

Upcoming

Upcoming

The EcoSattva Journey

How might we not just be with the collectives troubles, but take them up on the invitation for collective transformation?

Past

The Power of Remembering the Indigenous Design of American Democracy

What’s at the core of American Democracy? What might The Great Law of Peace have to say about our perilous time of today?