Resilience and wisdom to stay happy in the years ahead
Where are you? Where’s your community? As the times get more confusing, mapping your situation becomes more important, and so does calibrating it. By this, I mean some kind of validation that helps you to feel that your view of your situation is realistic and appropriate. As Joanna Macy, creator of the Work that Reconnects, … Read more
If you’re working with hazardous materials, you need good methods and equipment. The future really is hard to face: it can easily feel bleak and overwhelming. Many people feel pain and despair about the state of the world and the environment, and blank out to avoid these feelings. One of the best processes I’ve found … Read more
Don’t despair! Choose your climate response from our wide range of options.
Learning from Boiled Frog syndrome Climate psychologists tell us that humans aren’t good at dealing with complex, diffuse threats whose timing is uncertain. It seems we’d be great at handling a woolly mammoth attack, and our evolution is way behind reality. If you compare the latest five years to the previous five, what do you … Read more
There must be some kind of way outta hereSaid the joker to the thiefThere’s too much confusionI can’t get no relief In this time of big troubles, it’s easy to feel hopeless. And if you’re an anxious type, like me, you’ll always find plenty to unsettle you. Yet the wellbeing experts tell us that some … Read more
Back in 2018, the sense of urgency about the climate crisis rose sharply, helped by several key voices, including Greta Thunberg, and Professor Jem Bendell. Whilst he strongly supports all efforts to reduce climate change, he cites extensive scientific evidence that it is too late to avoid serious worsening. Jem uses the term Deep Adaptation … Read more
There’s a widespread view that strengthening local communities will be crucial in the years ahead, to help us all to live with increasing levels of disruption, e.g. to food supplies, utilities, weather patterns, and probably social cohesion. During a recent pilgrimage walk , I was slowly pondering how we can learn to live with the … Read more
I’m writing this in April 2022: we’re into the third year of the covid time, and over 70% of us in the UK have had covid at least once. This is the biggest global pandemic since 1918… so what can we learn from it? Probably all of us have had many conversations where someone tells … Read more
I’m a big fan of Bob Doppelt’s book, Transformational Resilience, which sees individual and collective trauma as one of the biggest, most pervasive issues of our times. Doppelt defines trauma as “an experience (that) seriously undermines or shatters at least some, if not all, of an individual’s core assumptions and beliefs.” He adds “climate disruption … Read more
There’s so much talk about resilience these days, but little of it explores spiritual sources. My focus is resilience in everyday life: how we can stay steady, and grow through daily stress and bigger crises. There’s plenty of research to show that people who feel a higher sense of purpose, who have a spiritual path, … Read more