Caring Practice
Caring for the earth and all beings, human and non-human, is caring for ourselves. In this stream, we explore the various forms of practice that embody that care:
- Earth Meditations
Practices for individuals to undertake on their own or in sangha to cultivate connections to the earth, our larger body. - Living Green
Inspiration, strategies and resources for reducing our carbon emissions and waste as well as other ways of contributing to a healthy planet. - Wise Speech & Action
Opportunities for speaking and acting with others on how we can respond to the reality of climate change with wisdom and compassion.
A Prayer at a Time of Ecological Crisis
The wandering yogi Chatral Rinpoche composed this pithy and galvanizing prayer in response to the deteriorating conditions for life on Earth.
Go DeeperAn Aspiration to Protect the Earth
In this prayer, Dudjom Rinpoche III calls on inner and outer protectors to help us transmute our destructive habits, which water the roots of our deepening ecological crises, into healing.
Go DeeperSensing with a Tree
A hurricane-ravaged landscape offers inspiration and a lesson on resilience to a photographer and student of the dharma.
Go DeeperSeeing Clearly
Instead of click rates and ad buys, what if media outlets were guided by the ethics of “right speech”? Buddhistdoor Global explores the role of media in giving voice to the world.
Go DeeperSmall Relief in Ongoing Crises
Buddhists from around the world have been coming together in an effort to provide aid to those battling COVID-19 on the front lines, including indigenous communities in the American Southwest.
Go DeeperNo Time to Lose: The Four R’s of Deep Adaptation
One of our treasured teachers and elders, Joanna Macy, guides us in considering how cultivation of resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation can help us find a way through the civilizational collapse we see all around us.
Go DeeperAwakening to the Suffering of Animals
Throughout the pandemic, the slaughterhouse has been a hotbed of virus transmission among its workers. But our compassion can’t stop there. We are called to confront and remedy the horrific treatment of animals raised to feed us.
Go DeeperThe Crab Grass and the Wave
Recent events of racial violence by state actors reveal but one aspect of the tendency towards domination that is latent in our culture. Our work to end ecological devastation then necessarily includes the eradication of the persistent, shape-shifting, and devastating pattern of white supremacy, starting with our own minds.
Go DeeperEco-Chaplaincy – In Service to a Suffering World
“The growing field of eco-chaplaincy reflects the increasing awareness that our care and attention must extend beyond the human.” The directors of a new Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy Training Program at the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies aspire to cultivate the chaplains who bring compassionate response to all of nature.
Go DeeperBefriending Eco-Anxiety (Part Two: Practices)
Kaira Jewel Lingo offers a set of practices to help us cultivate individual calm and support community connection, and encourages us not to give up on our collective capacity to effect social change.
Go DeeperSit and Help, Help and Sit
The devastation wrought by the wildfires shook one of the fundamental practices of some Australian Buddhists. An Australian Buddhist chaplain answers their question: “How can I meditate when the world literally burns around me?”
Go DeeperGreen Himalayas and an Eco-Spiritual Future
Buddhistdoor writer Raymond Lam describes a promising initiative that connects inner and outer practices in a region both at the heart of the Buddhadharma and on the front lines of the climate emergency.
Go DeeperFrom Disruption’s Front Line, Mark Øvland’s Courtroom Statement
What will it take to change a society’s confused stories that have been building over millennia? The embodied practice of a few protesters at the heart of Extinction Rebellion UK positions non-violent civil disobedience as disruptive response to business-as-usual.
Go DeeperLoving the Earth by Loving One Another
Kaira Jewel gives us a lens on the healing that is possible when we see our practice as deeply relational, whether interpersonal, with one another or regarding the rest of nature.
Go DeeperComes the Night: Gifts and Risks of the Winter Dark
One Earth Sangha’s director takes a moment to reflect on the precious unique gifts offered by our particular orientation within the cosmos.
Go DeeperEarth Care Week and Living the Change
Once again, as part of Earth Care Week, we invite Sangha’s around the world to turn the light of the Dharma towards the ecological crises we all face and the possibility of an empowered, connected and even joyful response.
Go DeeperConfronting Whiteness and Privilege in Eco-Dharma
Eco-Dharma…must confront whiteness and privilege in order to “create earnest inter-dependent communities that understand that different people have different privilege and abilities,” and seek to act on that understanding.
Go DeeperA Plea For the Animals
In writing about the ecodharma of not eating meat, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says, “The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering.”
Go DeeperWhen the Tree Stops Bearing Fruit
Buddhism emphasizes that our individual actions affect the world around us, and it follows that caring for the natural world begins with each of us.
Go DeeperGreen Vesak: Ebullience and Emergence
On the annual occasion of Vesak, Amelia Willaims uses poetry to explore our relationship with nature and our own Buddha nature.
Go DeeperMobilizing on Behalf of Life
As Buddhists we are committed to the “timeless values of compassion, peace and wisdom.” Ven. Bikkhu Bhodhi calls on us to mobilize in “inspired action to protect the climate.”
Go DeeperMindfulness in Action at the People’s Climate Mobilization
Let’s gather a strong, mindful presence this April for the People’s Climate Movement. Save the dates of April 2 and 29 and then start organizing your communities for this opportunity to stand for all children of all species.
Go DeeperConfirming our Interdependent Destiny
Join One Earth Sangha and the mindfulness community in walking together at the Women’s March in Washington DC and in sister marches around the world.
Go Deeper