This group workshop format has developed from The Work That Reconnects, and its Active Hope programme, both inspired by the teachings of Joanna Macy, who has written that it -

“helps people discover and experience their innate connections with each other and the self-healing powers of the web of life, transforming despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action”.

Originally called Despair and Empowerment,  sharing our pain for the planet together in a group is empowering, liberating energy locked in despair or numbness.

I am now developing this work, with colleagues, combining it inter alia with the approach of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira– in, for example, her 2021 book Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism - and Mindfulness practice.

Its exercises and rituals still follow a spiral of practices: Gratitude, Honouring Our Pain for the World, Seeing with New/Ancient Eyes, and Going Forth…and Active Hope.  It remains a transformational body of theory and practice ‘for developing adaptive resilience, motivation, agency and wellbeing when facing concerns about the world’.  This work can support us in facing the crises of our time.  It is sometimes used by activist groups of various kinds, to recharge the batteries away from the front line.

This work offers the opportunity for ceremony and celebration, as well as ritual.

‘What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it  is.   Radical hope anticipates a good for which those that have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.’  (Jonathan Lear (2008). Radical Hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Harvard University Press, loc 1026.)

This approach done one-to-one is essentially ecotherapy.

For scheduled groups, see Events.