I was first inspired by Joanna about 20 years ago, at a Work that Reconnects workshop led by her in London. I had come across her work during my therapy training. The Work That Reconnects was one of the two really powerful elements of that course. The other was Family Constellations. Both look at the collective healing of pain, as a symptom of systemic rather than individual problems.
I feel blessed to have met Joanna on several further occasions when I was working for the Transition Towns movement, creating community scale responses to the multiple crises of our time. My role was to anchor practices which brought depth, emotional understanding, curiosity about shadow and unconscious dynamics and more into a movement that could often be focused on material issues. Joanna’s clear and powerful teachings were a key part of what I shared with groups around the world.
These are some of the key insights that shaped my thinking about The Great Turning, Joanna’s phrase for the times we are in:
- It’s not apathy or lack of care that prevents people from taking action for good; as well as lack of opportunity for many, it can be simply too overwhelming to turn towards the scale of harm being done to ecologies, animals, landscapes and groups of humans.
- We feel sadness, outrage, fear and more precisely because we are part of the interconnected living system of life, and at some level we know that damage done to rivers, creatures, and other groups of humans also affects our well being, and that of future generations.
- Therefore we need to come together to face collective issues in collective practices, strengthening our sense of interconnectedness.
- There are three dimensions to the Great Turning –
- Stopping the destruction – saying NO
- Building the new structures
- Creating the shift in consciousness that move us towards interconnectedness
Joanna’s work started when she engaged with the impact of the nuclear industry, both the widespread fear of annihilation through nuclear war, and realising how uncontainable the toxic waste, is both geographically and in time, that the damaging radiation will continue for thousands of years. Together with others she sat with the question of how to help people engage with such a widespread problem, on a scale that humans have not had to deal with before. The first version of her work was called “Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age”, which later evolved into the Work that Reconnects, and Active Hope.
She also drew strongly on the teachings of Buddhism, in particular the understanding of interconnectedness or interdependence, that we are not separate from each other or all the flowing moving relating parts of life.
I remember her fantastic lecture called “from Stuff to Flow”, contrasting two ways of seeing the world which have both been around for a very long time.
In one view life is made up of stuff, matter, separate entities which bounce around and impact on each other. If I have more stuff there is less for you. If I am bigger and more powerful I can exert my will, making others move to my agenda; life is a zero sum game, if you win, I lose.
In the other view life is made up of relationships with constant flows between beings. If I have more flow, there is more flow for you, so it’s a win-win situation. Or lose-lose: if I stop things flowing there is less flow for everyone. To exert my will I need to be in relationship with those around me to persuade others to move in the same direction. Here is the economics of abundance vs the economics of scarcity; here is the basis of designing society for relationship rather than domination. Here is an end to the madness that we can create toxic waste and dump it somewhere else without consequence, because whatever flows in the system flows through all of it, eventually.
For those who have not enountered her work, here’s a brief outline of the stages of the work, known as “The Spiral”:
Gratitude: The start, following the wisdom of most indigenous cultural ways, is to remember what nourishes and inspires us, giving thanks for beauty, life, and support.
Honouring pain: Remembering what sustains us and building trust together, we can turn towards our pain for the world and honour it as a healthy response to the damage we perceive. Together we express and witness our feelings for the harm done to our world, past, present and future.
Seeing with new eyes: Giving voice to our pain allows us to touch how deeply it matters to us, allowing our true sense of connection with all of life to be restored or strengthened.
Going forth: Feeling this sense of interconnected caring and responsiveness we consider how to take this back into our lives and our families, workplaces and communities.
I have offered Joanna’s practices to groups around the world, as part of the two day Transition Training. We would invite groups to experiment with taking the roles of future beings, come back from a liveable future, to meet those people waking up or already taking action to change the course of destruction the industrial growth system is on. For many in the present time there would be a sense of worry, of not doing enough. The feeling from the future ones was usually one of deep gratitude; that without every single action taken today, their lives would not be possible.
I met Maeve Gavin, the weaver of the practices I have been offering for over a decade now, at a Joanna Macy workshop in Findhorn in 2009. My colleague, Jeremy, and Liz Day who organises grief tending in Norfolk, were also there. I remember Maeve’s amazing bright curly hair, and her telling me she was heading to America for a year to gather practices. To my surprise she got in touch a year later, wanting assistants to run Grief workshops in Scotland and Devon. This was the birth of the Grief Tending in Community work that Jeremy and I, and now many others, are holding.
I remember being in a Truth Mandala led by Joanna, where a kind of duet occurred between someone singing a beautiful and powerful song (“I have dreamed on this mountain, since first I was my mother’s daughter, and you can’t just take my dream away”) which just opened a channel of grief in me, bursting through without knowing or needing to know what I was grieving for.
She taught us the Elm Dance, from eastern Europe, where they remember the trees that their lives depended on, and the destruction of the forest.
When Joanna came to Devon in 2010 with her long time assistant, Annie Symens-Bucher, we met in less formal ways. I think she found my concern for her well being quite irritating – just because she was in her late 80s and near the end of a fully scheduled 2 week tour didn’t mean she needed to rest! I want to also honour Annie’s work, that there is often someone supporting a well known leader or teacher, whose work is less visible, but whose generosity, organising skills and service is also invaluable. Thank you Annie for all have done, and still do, to support this work in the world.
Above all I want to honour Joanna. Your fierce intelligence, dedication to being alive, responsive and responsible in these times, your bright humour and poetic beauty continued to the end. May your spirit travel well, and your work continue to flow through the many many channels you opened for it in your lifetime. It is powerful, and so vital in these times.
You can find information about Joanna’s work on her website. There are global networks of facilitators of the Work that Reconnects, and you can read about her insights and practices in her books. For a general guide to the Work that Reconnects I recommend Coming Back to Life, or the more recent Active Hope.
