Session Resources
Session Leaders
Core Offering
Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality, ecology and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thích Nhất Hạnh, and includes the interweaving of nature, ecology, embodied mindfulness practice, art and play. She has extensive experience offering nature and earth-based retreats with environmental and climate activists, children and families, and mindful hiking retreats. She draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on activists, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of the forthcoming, Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation (Feb 2024).
Guided Meditation
Susie Harrington is the guiding teacher for Desert Dharma and Sky Mind Retreats, teaching both in the Southwest and internationally since 2005. She delights in teaching outdoors, knowing that nature nourishes the heart and inspires wisdom. She encourages, through silence and intimate presence, coming home to our embedded natural aliveness and belonging, and the freedom that is our natural state. Her roots are in the Insight tradition, having trained extensively with Jack Kornfield, Guy Armstrong, and Joseph Goldstein; she is also well practiced in the Tibetan and Diamond Heart traditions as well as in Hakomi Therapy. For more information: www.desertdharma.org.
Opening the Space
Tools for Every Session of the Training
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.
Most if not all sessions also include guided practices tied specifically to that session’s themes. We invite you to use the practices offered here in whatever way is most supportive. You might use Catherine’s guided practice throughout the training, focus instead on the session-specific practices, or simply practice in a way that is already familiar to you.
Establishing Your Group
For those who are participating in the training as part of a group, we recommend that, here in session one, group members take time to get to know one another, perhaps using the inquiries above, as well as establish shared agreements.
Shared agreements remind group members of their shared intentions, build authentic connections, and protect members from harm. Here in session one, you might place the selection, discussion and agreement of a set of commitments ahead of or instead of the inquiries. We offer here some starting points that you might use along with the invitation for each member to share their response to this question, “What do you want or need to feel safe in this group?”
- One Earth Sangha’s Shared Agreements
- Brooklyn Zen Center’s Community Agreements
- East Bay Meditation Center Agreements for Multicultural Interactions
- An Inclusive Space is a Better Place for Everyone (from Designing For Inclusion)
Finally, you might decide how the group will use these agreements in subsequent sessions, e.g., by confirming them at the beginning of each gathering (following your opening of the space?) and encouraging members to invoke them when they feel that the group’s intentions are at risk.
Dharma Offerings
Welcome
In the first video of this session, One Earth Sangha co-founders Lou Leonard and Kristin Barker welcome us to the training.
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Course Overview
Kristin provides an overview of our journey and the resources that will support us along the way.
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Core Offering
As we begin our journey together, Kaira Jewel Lingo invites us to start investigating the mistaken notions that perpetuate collective harm. To sustain ourselves in this challenging reckoning, she encourages us to invoke the support of our ancestors, and to deepen into our reverence for the living Earth.
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Guided Practice (Optional)
For those who find it helpful, Susie Harrington leads us in a guided practice intended to help us settle, ground ourselves, and connect to the inspiration and intentions we bring to this training.
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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.
Inquiry is its own practice and an especially important part of the EcoSattva training. Inquiry invites us to making our learning personal, embodied, and direct. With inquiry, we consider a question and then explore our responses to that question, perhaps with repeatedly, with as much genuine curiosity as is available to us.
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 deepest aspiration as I embark on this journey?
What brings you here? What motivated you to take the EcoSattva Training? What might sustain you when you encounter internal obstacles (resistance, pain, boredom) or external obstacles (interpersonal challenges, complex situations, systems of oppression)? - What resistance is present as I enter this training?
Are there concerns or even blocks that you sense as you begin, having to do with the course itself or other internal or external circumstances? Can you just notice and be with whatever arises without judgment, not trying to change anything? - What is an experience that inspired a sense of reverence, connection, or deep belonging in me?
In Kaira Jewel’s offering, she shared a memory of lying on a branch of a huge tree in Kenya and feeling profoundly at peace, supported by the Earth. In your own life, what is a place, being, or experience that nourished you? As you return to that memory, what feelings and sensations arise? If no such memory arises, can you imagine an experience you would have liked to have? How might such an experience, real or imagined, support you in this journey?
Format for group inquiry: For those who are participating in the training as part of a group, you might at this stage choose a go-to or default structure for sharing that you can use as part of every meeting to explore members’ response to inquiries. Liberating Structures is an excellent resource and we especially like 1-2-4-all and Conversation Café.
Supplemental Resources (Optional)
- To establish a regular practice in a natural or semi-natural setting throughout the course, you might consider choosing a single place in a natural or semi-natural setting to return to with each session in the series. For more on this possibility, see this Sit Spot Practice Guide from John Rockwell and Adam Lobel.
- Earth Holder Community is a mindful Earth Justice initiative in the Plum Village tradition, which follows Thích Nhất Hạnh’s teachings on engaged Buddhism and interbeing.
- You can find here the full text of the Diamond Sutra and the 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, referenced by Kaira Jewel in her offering.
- If you’re curious to learn more about the structure of this course, you can read about Otto Scharmer’s Theory U method, which inspires the shape of this journey.
Support these Teachings
Dana, or generosity, is considered an essential part of practice and situates us in the unbroken line that seeks to bring the gifts of Buddhadharma, wisdom and compassion, to our world. One Earth Sangha offers dana directly to our session leaders, and we invite you to join us in supporting them if you value what is offered here.
You may also wish to support One Earth Sangha. We offer this series at minimal cost in order to maximize participation, and any contribution you share is greatly appreciated.
Another way to support the training is to share your first-hand experience in a way that we can use to help inspire others to participate. We invite you to share your testimonial here.