Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to The Work that Reconnects
379
Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to The Work that Reconnects
379Overview
Inspiration, practices, and meditations to empower us in the face of planetary suffering: “True wisdom for tough times.” —John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America
Deepening global crises surround us, causing many to fall prey to denial and despair. Coming Back to Life shows how grief, anger, and fear are healthy responses to the harsh realities of our time, and that when honored through the revolutionary practice of the Work That Reconnects, they can free us from paralysis and move us toward creative action.
This new, completely updated edition of the classic text illuminates the extraordinary Work that has inspired hundreds of thousands to make strides towards the creation of a life-sustaining human culture. Buddhist scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown introduce the Work’s theoretical foundations, revealing the angst of our era with remarkable insight. Pointing the way forward out of apathy, they offer personal counsel as well as easy-to-use methods for group process that profoundly affect people’s outlook and ability to act in the world.
“If you want to connect with your joy even in the midst of sadness, if you want to see new life arise out of despair, Coming Back to Life has my highest possible recommendation.” —John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America and co-founder and president, The Food Revolution Network
“A must for all who want to mobilize humanity in service of all beings. These concepts, exercises, and meditations have proven to work across generations, religions, ethnicities and races.” —Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, Director of Social Justice Organizing, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550925807 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Society Publishers |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 379 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 16 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How shall I begin my song in the blue night that is settling? In the great night my heart will go out, toward me the darkness comes rattling. In the great night, my heart will go out.
- Papago Medicine Woman ChantI call heaven and earth to record this day to your account, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your seed shall live.
- Deut. 30.19
We live in an extraordinary moment on Earth. We possess more technical prowess and knowledge than our ancestors could have dreamt of. Our telescopes let us see through time to the beginnings of the universe; our microscopes pry open the codes at the core of organic life; our satellites reveal global weather patterns and hidden behaviors of remote nations. And our electronic surveillance capacity leaves no aspect of anyone's life safe from corporate and governmental scrutiny. Who, even a century ago, could have imagined such immensity of information and power?
At the same time we witness destruction of life in dimensions that confronted no previous generation in recorded history. Certainly our ancestors knew wars, plagues and famine, but today it is not just a forest here and some farmlands and fisheries there. Today entire species are dying, and whole cultures, and ecosystems on a global scale, even to the oxygen-producing plankton of our seas.
Scientists may try to tell us what is at stake when we burn rainforests and fossil fuels, dump toxic wastes in air, soil, sea and use chemicals that devour our planet's protective ozone shield. But their warnings are hard to heed. For ours is an Industrial Growth Society.i Our political economy requires ever-increasing extraction and consumption of resources. To the Industrial Growth Society, the Earth is supply house and sewer. The planet's body is not only dug up and turned into goods to sell, it is also a sink for the often toxic products of our industries. If we sense that the tempo is accelerating, we are right - for the logic of the Industrial Growth Society is exponential, demanding not only growth , but rising rates of growth and market share. The logic of ever-expanding need for resources and markets is generating what is increasingly recognized as a global corporate empire, secured by military threats, interventions and occupations.
Just as a continually growing cancer eventually destroys its life-support systems by destroying its host, a continuously expanding global economy is slowly destroying its host - the Earth's ecosystem.
- Lester Brown State of the World, 1998
The Industrial Growth Society generates great suffering worldwide. Buddhist social thinkers see that what is at work here are institutionalized forms of the three mutually reinforcing poisons at the root of all human suffering: greed, aggression and delusion. Consumerism can be seen as institutionalized greed, the military-industrial complex as institutionalized aggression and state- and corporate-controlled media as institutionalized delusion. It follows that we are confronting in the Industrial Growth Society universal errors to which all humans are prone, rather than evil or satanic forces. It also follows that once these errors become institutionalized as political, economic and legal agents in their own right, they attain a degree of autonomy extending beyond the control and the conscious choices of any individuals involved. This understanding can motivate us not to condemn so much as to work to free ourselves and others who are in bondage to these institutionalized poisons.
In any case, we are wreaking unparalleled destruction on the life of our planet. What will be left for those who come after? What is in store for the future ones? Too busy running to think about that, we try to close our minds to nightmare scenarios of struggle over what's left in a wasted, contaminated world.
We've come so far. The life that is in us has survived so many millennia of trials and evolved through so many challenges, and there is so much promise still to unfold - yet we can lose it all as the web of living systems unravels. Yahweh's words through Moses now bear a literal truth: "I have set before you life and death; therefore, choose life."
We Can Still Opt for a Life-Sustaining World
We can choose life. Even as we face global climate disruption, world-encompassing nuclear contamination, hydro-fracking, mountaintop removal mining, tar sands extraction, deep sea drilling and the genetic engineering of our food supply, we can still choose life. We can still act for the sake of a livable world.
It is crucial that we know this: we can meet our needs without destroying our life-support system. We have the scientific knowledge and the technical means to do that. We have the savvy and the resources to grow sufficient quantities of real, unaltered food. We know how to protect clean air and water. We can generate the energy we require through solar power, wind, tides, algae and fungi. We have
birth control methods to slow the growth of, and eventually reduce, human population. We have the technical and social mechanisms to dismantle weapons, deflect wars and give everyone a voice in democratic self-governance. We can exercise our moral imagination to bring our lifestyles and consumption into harmony with the living systems of Earth. All we need is the collective will.
To choose life means to build a life-sustaining society. "A sustainable society is one that satisfies its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations,"1 according to Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute. In contrast to the Industrial Growth Society, a Life-Sustaining Society operates within the carrying capacity of its life-support system, regional and planetary, both in the resources it consumes and the wastes it produces.
To choose life in this planet-time is a mighty adventure. As people everywhere are discovering, this adventure ignites more courage and solidarity than any military campaign. From high school students restoring streams for salmon spawning, to inner-city neighbors creating community gardens on vacant lots, from First Nations peoples blocking oil production and pipelines on their ancestral lands to village women bringing solar and water-purifying technologies to their communities - numberless people are organizing, learning, taking action.
This multifaceted human activity on behalf of life may not make today's headlines or newscasts, but to our progeny it will matter more than anything else we do. For, if there is to be a livable world for those who come after us, it will be because we have managed to make the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life- Sustaining Society. When people of the future look back at this historical moment, they will see more clearly than we can now, how revolutionary our actions were. Perhaps they'll call it the time of the Great Turning.
They will recognize it as epochal. While the agricultural revolution took centuries and the industrial revolution took generations, this ecological revolution has to happen within a matter of years. It also has to be conscious - involving not only the political economy, but the habits, values and understandings that foster it.
Choosing Our Story
By story is meant our version of reality, the lens through which we see and understand what is happening now in our world. Often our story is largely unconscious and unquestioned, and we assume it to be the only reality.
All together, we are changing from a society whose organizing principle is the pyramid or hierarchy to one whose image is a circle. Humans are linked, not ranked. Humans and the environment are linked, not ranked. - Gloria Steinem
In the industrialized world today, the most commonly held stories seem to boil down to three. We have found it helpful in workshops to present these three stories as all happening right now; in that sense, they are all "true." We can choose the one we want to get behind, the one that seems to hold the widest and most useful perspective.
- Business As Usual is the story of the Industrial Growth Society. We hear it from politicians, business schools, corporations and corporate-controlled media. Here the defining assumption is that there is little need to change the way we live. The central plot is about getting ahead. Economic recessions and extreme weather conditions are just temporary difficulties from which we will surely recover, and even profit.
- The Great Unraveling is the story we tend to hear from environmental scientists, independent journalists and activists. It draws attention to the disasters that Business As Usual has caused and continues to create. It is an account backed by evidence of the ongoing derangement and collapse of biological, ecological, economic and social systems.
- The Great Turning is the story we hear from those who see the Great Unraveling and don't want it to have the last word. It involves the emergence of new and creative human responses that enable the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society. The central plot is about joining together to act for the sake of life on Earth.
The Great Turning ii
Let us borrow the perspective of future generations and, in that larger context of time, look at how this Great Turning is gaining momentum today, through the choices of countless individuals and groups. We can see that it is happening simultaneously in three areas or dimensions that are mutually reinforcing. These are:
- Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings
- Analysis and transformation of the foundations of our common life
- A fundamental shift in worldview and values
Many of us are engaged in all three, each of which is necessary to the creation of a life-sustaining society. People working quietly behind the scenes in any of these three dimensions may not consider themselves activists, but we do. We consider anyone acting for a purpose larger than personal gain or advantage to be an activist.
1. Holding Actions in Defense of Life
Perhaps the most visible dimension of the Great Turning consists of the countless actions to slow down the destruction being wrought by the Industrial Growth Society. These take political, legislative and legal forms, as well as direct action. We call them holding actions because they attempt to hold the line, to buy time for systemic changes to take place. Holding actions can take various forms:
- Documenting the deleterious effects of the Industrial Growth Society on ecosystems as well as on animal and human health and rights
- Blowing the whistle and exposing illegal and unconstitutional corporate and governmental practices
- Circulating petitions, writing letters to the editor and to officials, writing articles, blogs and books, lobbying legislators
- Giving talks, showing films, tabling in public places, organizing study/action groups
- Vigils, marches and other demonstrations of protest
- Bringing legal actions against corporations and government agencies
- Divestment campaigns
- Boycotting and picketing institutions and businesses to protest unfair and dangerous practices
- Maintaining a long-term protest camp, such as climate camps in the UK
- Blockading construction of ecologically destructive and military installations
- Civil disobedience, including trespassing and symbolic sabotage on government or corporate property, tax resistance, refusing to move when ordered to do so
- Providing sanctuary to people in danger of unfair arrest
- Fasting and hunger strikes
- Providing shelter, food, clinics and legal assistance for people especially victimized by the Industrial Growth Society
Practices, policies and institutions targeted by these holding actions include:
- Extraction, transport and refining of fossil fuels
- Nuclear power, nuclear bomb production and testing
- Hydro-fracking
- Uranium and other heavy metal mining
- Mountaintop removal mining
- Deforestation
- Genetic modification
- Dredge fishing, drift nets and factory ships
- Privatization of water (extraction and bottling)
- Chemically-based agriculture and factory farming
- Animal abuse
- Secret international trade agreements (e.g. Transpacific Trade Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership)
- Decimation of civil liberties and Constitutional rights, including reproductive rights, along with mass surveillance by corporations and government
- Military invasions and occupations
- Torture and rendition
- Drone warfare
- Arms industry and trade
- Abuses of First Nations sovereignty
- Mass incarceration, solitary confinement, forced feeding and the prison industrial system
- Extended detention and deportation of undocumented people, including children
- Human trafficking and slavery
- Homelessness, hunger and joblessness
- Profit-based health care and Big Pharma, including their campaign against herbalists and midwives
- Assaults on state-funded social and medical supports such as Social Security and Medicare in the US
- Corporate financing of political campaigns
- Predatory financial capitalism in all its forms: credit card debt, student loan debt, subprime mortgages, hedge funds and derivatives
This first dimension of the Great Turning is wearing. It is heroic work. When we're in the spotlight, it can bring respect and applause from the many who see what's at stake. We can also get stressed out of our minds by nonstop crises, battles lost, constant searches for funding and escalating threats and violence against activists. Protests and civil disobedience become ever more dangerous as law enforcement officers - and the laws themselves - treat activists as terrorists, repressing dissent, abusing demonstrators and punishing whistle-blowers. Shock tactics, arbitrary arrests and police brutality are condoned, even encouraged. As the corporate empire is exposed and threatened, the violence of its response becomes more naked and indifferent to public opinion.
Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. - Rebecca Solnit
So we often take a lot of punishment for this kind of activism, and may need to step back to take a breather. Let's not feel guilty in doing so, for in truth we are not abandoning the cause. We are choosing to continue the work of the Great Turning in another form - the way the head goose, when she's tired, repositions herself to fly in the wind stream of the others, and another flyer takes her place.
Holding actions are essential because they buy time and save some lives, ecosystems, species and cultures, as well as some of the gene pool, for the life-sustaining society to come. By themselves, however, holding actions cannot bring that society about. For that, we require systems and structures more appropriate to our collective needs.
2. Transforming the Foundations of Our Common Life
The second dimension of the Great Turning is also essential in order to free ourselves and our planet from the damage inflicted by the Industrial Growth Society. It has two aspects:
- Understanding the dynamics of corporate capitalism, including the structures of law and governance that support it
- Generating structures based on the inherent authority and rights of We the People to govern ourselves and to protect the grounds of our common life
What are the assumptions and agreements that create obscene wealth for a few, while impoverishing the rest of humanity? What indentures us to an insatiable economy that uses our larger body, Earth, as supply house and sewer? What are the structures of law that make it illegal for local communities to define their own future and protect themselves from corporate harm?
This is not a pretty picture. It takes courage and confidence in our own intelligence to look at it clearly; the rewards are great when we do. As citizens are discovering in a plethora of websites, blogs and publications, we can demystify the workings of the Industrial Growth Society. For all its apparent might, we also see its fragility - how dependent it is on our obedience and on deception, secrecy, surveillance and force.
We are in an era of profound change that urgently requires new ways of thinking instead of more business as usual; capitalism, in its current form, has no place in the world around us. - Klaus Schwab, founder World Economic Forum
In this second dimension of the Great Turning, we are not only studying the structural causes of the global crisis; we are also learning old and new ways to better serve the common good. These two efforts go hand in hand. They use the same mental muscles, the same kind of knowledge, the same itch for practicality. In countless localities, like green shoots pushing up through the rubble, social and economic arrangements are sprouting to free us from injustice and ruin. They may be hard to see at first, because they are seldom featured in the media. Not waiting for our national or state politicos to catch up with us, we are banding together, taking action in our own communities. Paul Hawken, in describing this upwelling of grass roots initiatives, called these actions "the largest social movement in human history." In the early 20th century, the Wobblies (as Industrial Workers of the World were known) struggled to "build the new within the shell of the old." The actions that burgeon from our hands and minds may appear marginal, but they hold the seeds for the future.
Some examples of the second dimension of the Great Turning include:
- Study circles and symposia to explore and understand the workings of the global economy
- Retrieval and creation of laws to protect the commons from privatization and industrial harm, formulating and claiming Community Rights, the Rights of Nature, the Rights of Future Generations
- Establishment of the Precautionary Principleiii as the legal basis for health and environmental policy
- Cultural recognition and legal definition of the rights of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) persons
- People's Tribunals and Truth & Reconciliation Commissions
- Restorative justice and conflict resolution to replace litigation and punishment
- Holistic measures of wealth and prosperity, e.g. the Genuine Pro-gress Indicator (GPI), Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), Social Progress Indicator (SPI), Gross National Happiness (GNH) to replace the dangerously misleading index called the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
- Renewable, localized, non-polluting energy generation such as wind, solar and tidal technologies
- Land trusts serving the needs of local ecosystems and future generations
- Intentional sustainable communities, such as cohousing and ecovillages
- Permaculture courses; family and community gardens; farmers' markets, local food clubs; Community Supported Agriculture
- Municipal composting, recycling and zero-waste programs
- Citizen restoration projects reclaiming streams, watersheds, wetlands and arable land Holistic health and wellness programs; locally grown herbal medicines
- Local currencies, Time Banks, tool sharing and skill banks that cycle resources within the community
- Cooperative forms of ownership, including food co-ops, worker- owned enterprises, credit unions and state banks
- Citizen radiation monitoring networks such as SafeCast, measuring nuclear contamination from Fukushima in the absence of government monitoring and reporting
- The Occupy movement, demonstrating radical democracy in the center of town, occupying public spaces, providing free food, health care, education and talks; exploring consensus decision-making
The broadside below from the Community Rights movement in the United States, circa 2014, illustrates the originality and practicality of campaigns in the second dimension of the Great Turning.2
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i. We are indebted to Norwegian eco-philosopher Sigmund Kwaloy for this term.
We use it as a more inclusive term than capitalism, because it also applies to state-controlled industrial economies premised on growth.
ii. This term, the Great Turning, is a cultural meme that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s to convey the revolutionary nature of the changes seen as necessary for the survival of life on Earth. Craig Shindler and Gary Lapid used it as the title of their 1989 book (Craig Schindler and Gary Lapid., The Great Turning: Personal Peace, Global Victory. Bear & Co, 1989) advocating a turn away from war and toward peace. The term arose again spontaneously from role-plays in the Work That Reconnects, as people spoke for future beings in Deep Time practices.
iii. "When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof. The process of applying the precautionary principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action." "The Wingspread Consensus Statement on the Precautionary Principle." Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle, January 26, 1998. [online]. [cited June 8, 2014]. sehn. org/wing.html.
Table of Contents
Permissions
Message from Dalai Lama
Foreword by Matthew Fox
Preface by Joanna Macy
Preface by Molly Young Brown
We Can Still Opt for a Life-Sustaining World Choosing Our Story
1. Business As Usual
2. The Great Unraveling
3. The Great Turning
The Great Turning
1. Holding Actions in Defense of Life
2. Transforming the Foundations of Our Common Life
3. Shift in Perception and Values
What is Pain for the World?
What Deadens Heart and Mind?
Fear of Pain
Fear of Despair
Other Spiritual Traps
Fear of Not Fitting In
Distrust of Our Own Intelligence
Fear of Guilt
Fear of Distressing Loved Ones
View of Self as Separate
Hijacked Attention
Fear of Powerlessness
Fear of Knowing - and Speaking
Mass Media
Job and Time Pressures
Social Violence
The Cost of Blocking Our Pain for the World
Impeded Cognitive Functioning Impeded Access to the Unconscious
Impeded Instinct for Self-Preservation
Impeded Eros
Impeded Empathy
Impeded Imagination
Impeded Feedback
Coming Back to Life
Living Systems Theory
How Life Self-Organizes
Water, Fire and Web
Gaia Theory
Deep Ecology
Beyond Anthropocentrism
The Ecological Self
Asking Deeper Questions
Ancient Spiritual Teachings
Abrahamic Religions
Asian Traditions
Indigenous Spirituality
The Miracle of Mind
Self as Choice Maker
Positive Disintegration
We Are the World
The Nature of Our Power
Power Over
Power With
Power Over Blocks Feedback
The Power of Disclosure
Synergy and Grace
History of the Work
Aims of the Work
Basic Assumptions of the Work
The Spiral of the Work
The Shambhala Prophecy
The Work That Reconnects in Corporate Settings
The Value of Working in Groups Tasks of the Facilitator
Foundations of Good Facilitation
Capacities of an Excellent Guide
Engaging Full Participation
Working With Strong Emotions
Guidelines for Conducting Rituals
Workshop Setting and Arrangements
Money
Opening The Workshop
Closing The Workshop
Evaluation
Follow-Up
Ongoing Support for the Guide
Gratitude: Teaching Points
Practices
Becoming Present through Breath, Movement,Sound and Silence
Introductions with Gratitude
Open Sentences
Open Sentences on Gratitude
Gratitude Rounds
Mirror Walk
Open Sentences on the Great Turning
The Wheel of the Great Turning
The Elm Dance
The Presence of Gratitude Throughout the Work
Our Inner Responses to Suffering and Destruction Practices
Small Groups on the Great Unraveling
Open Sentences on Honoring Our Pain
Breathing Through
The Milling
Reporting to Chief Seattle
The Bestiary
We Have Forgotten Who We Are
"I Don't Care"
Cairn of Mourning
Truth Mandala
Despair Ritual
Bowl of Tears
Spontaneous Writing
Imaging with Colors and Clay
Brain Food
Key Teaching Points
Advice for Conveying These Concepts
Practices
The Systems Game
Riddle of the Commons Game
When I Made a Difference
Widening Circles
The Cradling
Who Are You?
Dance to Dismember the Ego
Bodhisattva Check-In
Council of All Beings
To Reinhabit Time
Practices
Invoking the Beings of the Three Times
Open Sentences on Time
The Evolutionary Gifts of the Animals
Harvesting the Gifts of the Ancestors
Audio Recording to the Future
Letter from the Future
The Seventh Generation
Field Work on the Great Turning
The Storytellers Convention
Discoveries Made So Far in the Spiral
Practices
Networking
Communicating Our Concerns and Hopes
Life Map
Imaging Our Power
The Sword in the Stone
Callings and Resources
Consultation Groups
Corbett
The Clearness Committee
Dialoging with Mara to Strengthen Our Resolve
Bowing to Our Adversaries
Creating Study/Action Groups
The Four Abodes
Five Vows
Circle of Blessings
Two Poems for the Road Ahead
What Do Children Know and Feel?
The Effects of Silence
Suggestions for Overcoming the Fear and the Silence
Using the Work That Reconnects
Generation Waking Up
Practices for Children and Teens
Mothers and Daughters Follow the Spiral
Talking Circle
Gratitude
The Human Camera
Honoring Our Pain for the World
Open Sentences
Milling with Open Sentences
Two Stories of the Truth Mandala with Children
Boom Chicka Boom with Feelings
Seeing with New Eyes
The Web of Life
Our Life As Gaia
The Robot Game
The Council of All Beings in a School Setting
Going Forth
Open Sentences for Going Forth
Starfish Story and Ritual
The Galactic Council
Planning Actions
Part One by Joanna Macy
Getting Started
Honoring Our Ancestors
The Immensity of the Pain
How the Pain of People of Color is Pathologized
Seeing the Industrial Growth Society with New Eyes
Time for Deep Cultural Awakening
Part Two by Patricia St. Onge
Walking Toward the Work That Reconnects
Deep Culture as a Lens
Weaving the Threads Together
Part Three by Adelaja Simon, Adrián Villaseñor Galarza and Andrés Thomas Conteris.
Part Four: Sharing the Work That Reconnects with First Nationsby Andrea Avila
The Web of Life
Gaia Meditation
Death Meditation
Loving-Kindness
Breathing Through
The Great Ball of Merit
The Four Abodes
Two Litanies
Appendix A: Chief Seattle's Message
Appendix B: The Bestiary by Joanna Macy
Appendix C: Ethics and Declarations of Rights
Appendix D: Bodywork and Movement and Using the Spiral in Writing
Workshops
Endnotes
Resources
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
What People are Saying About This
"Here is a blueprint for our present time-an honest and openhearted appraisal of our globally destructive and abusive behavior, and the work required to transform, to shift into a life-sustaining culture. Joanna Macy and Molly Brown outline the simple and essential choices we need to make, and give us the tools to make this shift. A vitally necessary book."
—Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee Ph.D., Sufi teacher and author, Spiritual Ecology, the Cry of the Earth
"The Dalai Lama nailed it: a timeless manual for Earth healers, inspires actionable hope. The new edition reminded me again how to replace despair with constructive optimism; blame with imagination, innovation and collaboration. As a former middle-school teacher, I say "Hooray!" for the new chapter designed to aid mentors and teachers on whom it will fall to guide those likely to suffer the worst consequences of the Great Unraveling: Generations X through Z and beyond. The meditations at the close of the book are both balm and goad. From their unique and clear-eyed analysis of our present crises and their causes, through exercises to catalyze the Great Turning, Macy and Brown's book models the changes it aims to facilitate in our hearts and minds. A heart-lifting read."
—Ellen LaConte, author, Life Rules and Afton: A Love Story
"In a time of catastrophic climate change, Joanna Macy and Molly Brown offer a treasure-trove of principles, practices, poems, and prayers that must become as natural to us as breathing. Only this quality of spiritual nourishment can sustain us in our planetary hospice condition. These tools not only fortify us for the long haul, but intimately join us with the Earth, our bodies, and one another, thereby enabling us to experience an exuberant aliveness."
—Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author, Collapsing Consciously and Love In the Age of Ecological Apocalypse
"Joanna Macy's and Molly Young Brown's new book is a spectacular and accessible blueprint for conflict resolution, environmental sustainability and a planet we all hope to embrace collectively and enjoy. The measures recommended in this book are ones that every individual and community can get behind. Coming Back to Life is a perfect title for a marvelous book."
—Michael Charles Tobias, president, Dancing Star Foundation
"We live in truly perilous times. If you want to face what is happening with an open heart and mind, if you want to use your suffering to awaken to greater aliveness and compassion, this book is for you. Coming Back to Life doesn't just teach that our suffering can be the birthplace for a greater capacity for healing. It shows you how. It's a brilliant guidebook to the power you have at your core to let your light shine its brightest even in the presence of fear and planetary anguish. If you want true wisdom for tough times, if you want to connect with your joy even in the midst of sadness, if you want to see new life arise out of despair, Coming Back to Life has my highest possible recommendation."
—John Robbins, author, Diet For A New America and co-founder and president, The Food Revolution Network
"A must for all who want to mobilize humanity in service of all beings. These concepts, exercises, and meditations have proven to work across generations, religions, ethnicities and races."
—Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, Director of Social Justice Organizing at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
"Modern civilisation has brought the planet and untold numbers of species, including our own, to the brink of existence. To honestly witness this with our hearts, minds, and spirits wide open and remain able to react, adapt, and, when necessary, resist, often seems impossible. Coming Back to Life , the wisdom, clarity and urgency of Joanna Macy's lifelong body of incredible work shines brighter and more important than ever before. Our very lives now depend on being present in order to stay sane amidst this suicidal culture, and Macy shows us the way."
—Dahr Jamail, journalist and author
" Coming Back to Life is the aptly-titled compendium of what has been learned over many years and can be shared with us all from the successful Work That Reconnects workshops that Joanna Macy and associates have offered to thousands of people from all walks of life. The book ranges from the purpose of such work and its role in what's called the "Great Turning" to the most specific details of how to conduct a successful workshop of this kind. It's a fine example of something the progressive world often lacks: a way to pass on what's been learned in one successful project or another so that this work can grow."
—Michael Nagler, president, Metta Center for Nonviolence
" Coming Back to Life is for me a treasured core text and I am among the many who are delighted with this upgrade. It distils a further sixteen years of experience, names more clearly the context we face and broadens the reach of this work with important new chapters. Thank you Joanna and Molly."
—Chris Johnstone, co-author, Active Hope
"The earlier edition of Coming Back to Life has been a roadmap to me and to others at the Gandhi Institute for years, especially for strengthening our systemic thinking in relation to social injustice and for increasing our capacity to practice mourning in community settings. This new edition is a gift, like a visit from an old friend during a rough time. I feel so grateful to Joanna and to Molly for choosing to return to and refresh this work - a more timely, practical book is unimaginable. I pray that it strengthens our collective ability to lovingly take action on behalf of our descendants."
— Kit Miller, Director, MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence
"Every generation needs its sacred texts, its scriptures. Our journey through the damaged landscape and perilous time on this precious Earth requires a new kind of soul guide. Coming Back to Life gives voice to our generations' psalms, praises, and lamentations, our call for justice. It provides practices and meditations so we can make sense of who we are. This book is our wisdom text."
— Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director, Science and Environmental Health Network, and co-founder, Women's Congress for Future Generations
"Reading this blessed treasure of a book is a healing experience. It names and honors the overwhelming emotions, paradoxes, complexities and desires that swirl deep in us as we face the reality of this time. And with gentle assurance it offers us actions that reconnect us to our deepest sources of well-being, energy and love, no matter the external realities. I am forever grateful that this book returns to our world at this time."
— Margaret Wheatley, author, Leadership and the New Science, Perseverance and So Far From Home
"If you ever feel pain or guilt for events in the world, dismay at useless cruelty, rage at environmental damage and waste, or powerlessness because you do not know what to do, this is the book for you. In Coming Back to Life Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown show how these feelings need not be suppressed. Far from being an agonizing companion, they can be a friend and an aid at reconnecting with your heart and taking useful action."
— Piero Ferrucci, author, Your Inner Will
" Coming Back to Life opens our eyes to both the difficulties and the possibilities - while inspiring our hearts and minds with practices that allow us to become wise activists in a very complex world."
— Lynne Iser, founder, Elder-Activists.org
"Joanna Macy and Molly Brown in their expansive new book Coming Back to Life help us understand the urgency of and the steps to take for this necessary journey. This book is as challenging as it is breath-taking. Macy and Brown remind us over and over the importance of not just facing but claiming suffering, our own, other's and the planet's. Not to despair but to live out and embody our spiritual being in mutuality with each other and the world. They offer practical exercises to help us on our way. Rays of joy leap from the pages but without a guarantee that we will prevail. I found myself continually feeling grateful for this book and the wonderful beings who bring up the necessary challenge of reconnecting and coming back to life"
— John Powell, director, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, UC Berkeley
"This legacy edition reflects forty years of highly refined, time-tested experiential group work that has now spread around the globe. Built on the wisdom and principles of Macy's life work, the volume offers a bounty of resources for teachers and facilitators engaged in social transformation. New chapters include insights and progress from expanding the work to children, young people, and activists of color. Macy and Brown provide clear analysis and guidance for cultivating a profound shift in perception critical to a viable future. They express great urgency about what must be done, yet their methods are grounded, powerful, and proven as a path of action. The creative strength of the work lies in its confidence in the human imagination as a basis for hope. This work is wisdom work, an inspired project for healing the wounded parts of the earth and the human psyche. It is filled through and through with the huge hearts and passionate dedication of all those who have been touched by this compelling vision and most visionary teacher."
—Stephanie Kaza, author, Mindfully Green
"Joanna Macy is one of the great teachers of our age. It is cause for great celebration that an updated guide to her Work That Reconnects has now appeared in the form of a new edition of the classic she wrote with Molly Young Brown. As the world spirals ever deeper into disconnect, as we witness the natural world plundered and unravelling into horror, it becomes ever more difficult to muster the psycho-spiritual resources necessary to face the reality unflinching and compassionate, to swim against the current of egoism and denial and to represent life, speak for life, come back to life. The testimony and practices contained in this volume offer us priceless and practical resources for transforming despair into creative action and answer the questions: "how are we to live at such a time? How are we to represent the 4 billion years of living ancestry on whose shoulders we stand and whose future lies in our trembling hands?""
—John Seed, founder, Rainforest Information Center, Australia
"Whenever I am leading group processes to feel both the urgency and revolutionary patience of this extraordinary moment on Earth, I turn to this book. The exercises poetically deposit just right amount of theory in the explanations, and for more depth, one can just flip through the chapters. First introduced to Coming Back to Life and the Work That Reconnects in the context of a 2014 leaders of color cohort with Joanna Macy and Patricia St. Onge, the words and energy of this book illustrate the interconnectedness of social justice, environmental, and liberation theology movements for wholeness."
—Sarah Thompson, executive director, Christian Peacemakers Teams
"Where there is bewilderment, Joanna Macy brings wisdom. Where there are division and discord, she speaks for the Other. Where there is despair, she joins hands to dance. Humankind is about to make a Great Turning in one direction or another. If we find a way to turn toward a deeper, fuller humanity, one of the reasons will be the fiercely compassionate genius of Joanna Macy. [This] book is a great gift to the reeling world."
—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort and co-editor of Moral Ground