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 approach done one-to-one is essentially ecotherapy.

For scheduled groups, see Events.