Session Resources
Session Leaders
Willa is the Founder and Spiritual Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, MA and its retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, NH. She is Visiting Lecturer in Buddhist Ministry at Harvard Divinity School. As a writer and editor, her work has been published in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Buddhadharma, and the Tibet Journal. Willa’s teaching interests include compassion, non-dual embodiment and contemplative care.
Opening the Space
We invite you to open your engagement with each session (or group gathering, if applicable) by practicing a Living Earth Acknowledgment. A Living Earth Acknowledgement can nourish our relatedness and avail us to truths beyond domination. Incorporating our ecological nature as well as the calls of justice, it is an exploration, not a formula, to recognize and remember. Through practices like this, we are setting the conditions for shifting minds that are conditioned by domination into more skillful ways of seeing, speaking and acting.
Living Earth Acknowledgment and Prayer
Meditation is an integral part of the EcoSattva journey. If you do not have a meditation practice, now is the perfect time to start. We invite beginners and seasoned practitioners alike to view this guided meditation grounded in our relationship with Earth, created especially for EcoSattva Training participants by our guiding teacher Catherine McGee.
Dharma Offerings
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Inquiries
We offer here a set of inquiries and group practices that support this step in our journey. Consider these suggestions and feel free to customize, replace and augment. But we strongly suggest that you explore at least one inquiry with each session.
Below are this session’s inquiry questions in bold, followed by a short commentary. We invite you to gently hold these questions. If this form of exploration is new to you or you would like a refresher, you can learn more about inquiry practice here.
- What is my relationship with the uncertainty of the future of our planet?
What is your personal relationship with so much uncertainty, not-knowing, and groundlessness? Really give space to explore how you relate with not knowing whether global society will be able to face our ecological challenges. What are the default habits for you when you feel such uncertainty? What emotions arise? Here we are simply noticing and observing our style of relating to deep uncertainties, without judgement. We are turning the gaze inwards, curious to gently see and understand ourselves so that we can hold our being with care and skillfulness. - What feels most challenging about facing the groundlessness of our ecological situation?
How do you resist the uncertainty, impossibility, and groundlessness of the ecological crises of our times? What are the fears? What feels most difficult to metabolize? When there is an “inner storm” for you around ecological issues, what happens? Again, gently notice and explore without judgement. - What would it be like to embrace the inner storm with compassion?
What is most supportive for you to stay with the truth? What practices or attitudes are available to support your response to the truth of climate change? What allows you to metabolize and stay? Have you noticed the possibility or longing to connect with yourself and connect with others, so that you feel less alone? What might it mean for you to rest in the open mind of a beginner, rather than the mind of the expert with certainties?
Format for group inquiry: Liberating Structures is an excellent resource and we especially like 1-2-4-all and Conversation Café.
Supplemental Resources
- Lama Willa’s practices that support transformation of difficulty:
- Titrating – experimenting with and discerning the timing, duration and level of connecting with difficulty
- Turning the gaze within – maintaining full sensitivity to the embodied experience and going slow, invite and befriend the difficultly
- Metabolizing – staying with the difficulty long enough to allow a shift
- Throughout, bringing fundamental kindness and resolve to remain with uncertainty
- Article: Comes the Night: Gifts and Risks of the Winter Dark
- Lama Willa’s EcoSattva Vows:
Gaia is in peril; I vow to protect her.
Climate change is relentless; I vow to end it.
Gaia’s teachings are infinite; I vow to hear them.
Awakened love is inconceivable; I vow to embody it.