WHEN: 15TH October . Saturday 9.30am - 6.30pm
WHERE: Parramatta Lake
COST: Suggested donation $100 (or whatever you can afford)
All proceeds to Beyond Zero Emissions, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, and 100% Renewables Campaign.
Please bring a cushion to sit on and food to share for lunch. Tea and coffee provided.
WORKSHOP FACILITATOR
John Seed OAM is an environmental activist who has worked with Joanna Macy since 1986 and co-authored with her the book Thinking Like a Mountain Towards a Council of All Being. He has been facilitating Despair and Empowerment for 25 years and in 2006 helped in the formation of numerous Climate Action Groups in the US, Canada and Australia with a series of Climate Change, Despair and Empowerment workshops.
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
We in the climate movement know better than anyone the horror of what climate change will mean for humanity. Yet we live in a culture where there is a profound denial of feeling - and this affects our energy and effectiveness to make change happen.
We are conditioned to repress feelings of grief, fear and anger and avoid their expression. We also learn to deaden ourselves and try to avoid feeling them at all. This repression takes a heavy toll and causes us to burn out, shut down, become shrill and ineffectual or burdened by quiet despair.
Yet these feelings are an important part of our intelligence. For billions of years our pre-human ancestors used feelings alone to determine what was safe and what was dangerous, and natural selection honed the accuracy of these feelings at every turn. Thinking augments this intelligence but does not replace it. Without robust feelings to back it up, thinking is shallow and lacks authenticity and passion.
To sustain our own work and reach out to other people in the community, we need to draw on our feelings for energy, not fight them. In her books Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (1983) and Coming Back to Life (1998) Joanna Macy teaches us how to create a safe container of fellowship to invite these banished feelings back into our lives and explore the wisdom, energy and empowerment that this inevitably brings.
For more about Despair and Empowerment see Joanna Macys Working Through Environmental Despair. www.rainforestinfo.org.au/
Rainforest Information Centre www.rainforestinfo.org.au
