Holding Space for the Great Turning

Daring to dream while we grieve what we've lost

with images from Frieda Nixdorf, Paul Byrne, and Annie Spratt

Listen…

I’ll admit it - sometimes I bury my head in the sand. Sometimes frightening information about climate change is just too much to bear and I choose to turn away from it.

That information became increasingly frightening and increasingly hard to ignore five years ago when my youngest daughter became a climate activist and joined a group of young people filing a lawsuit against the federal government over the failure to protect youth from the impacts of climate change. If I thought about it too much, I would get panicky about the ways in which things will likely escalate and my daughters’ futures will be impacted even more than mine.

In this moment of my life, though, when my children are grown and I am finding myself more and more often sitting quietly in the woods, I turn to the trees beside me and the lake in front of me and I know that my love for them - the trees, the lake, and my children - will not let me turn away. I know that I must face this grief, this fear, this uncertainty about the future. I know, when I glance across the lake at the bare side of a mountain where the forest has been clear-cut for our consumption, that I must step more fully into the story rather than helplessly watch the story unfold.

As I wander these paths, Joanna Macy speaks into my ears and her voice helps to soothe the panic and give me a place to root my love for the natural world and for my daughters. Joanna is brilliant in the ways that she offers hard truths but then guides people through their grief, fear and despair into what she calls “Active Hope”.

At the heart of Joanna’s work is a concept she calls The Great Turning. It’s the “essential adventure of our time,” she says, “the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.” It’s a shift I’ve ached for, deep in my bones, for as long as I can remember. Joanna has given words to my longing.

“The ecological and social crises we face are caused by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth. This self-destructing political economy sets its goals and measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits—in other words by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste.

“A revolution is under way because people are realizing that our needs can be met without destroying our world. We have the technical knowledge, the communication tools, and material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water, and meet rational energy needs. Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now.” (source)

As I walked through the woods and sat at the lake’s edge this summer, I listened to the podcast series, We Are The Great Turning, with Joanna Macy in conversation with Jess Serrante, and it made me feel many things – from grief and despair over the many ways we are harming the earth, to hope and determination about the possibility that a revolution is still possible. The ache in me wants this to still be possible.

Sadly, the industrial growth mindset that we’ve become addicted to, and that we so often assume is impossible to change, has limited our capacity for imagination and disconnected us from ourselves and each other. To survive, we learned to numb the ache and dissociate from the dreaming.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, capitalism was created by hopeful humans but it has turned on us and is attempting to destroy us. What we had the capacity to create, though, we also have the capacity to dismantle. And if we can design a system like capitalism, we can also design an alternative to replace it.

Another person whose voice filled my ears on my lakeside walks is Bill Plotkin, a depth psychologist, wilderness guide and agent of cultural evolution. In his book, Nature and the Human Soul, Plotkin proposes that there are eight stages of natural human development, from birth to death, but that our disconnection from nature, our addiction to capitalism, and our lack of community rituals have kept a large percentage of us stuck at the egocentric third stage, early adolescence.

Capitalism has kept us addicted partly by activating our nervous systems with artificial scarcity, isolation from each other, and (as Astra Taylor calls it in her remarkable Massey Lectures series), “manufactured insecurity”. As I talked about in the video series on The Core Needs Triad, when we stay activated by the threats to our core needs (safety, belonging, and identity), we get stuck in our human development. It’s all that numbing and dissociating and trying to survive while Frankenstein’s monster threatens us with harm. It’s our scared inner children who long to be free but don’t know how to open the door into freedom.

“As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence,” Plotkin says, “the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human maturity. No true adult wants to be a consumer, worker bee, or tycoon, or a soldier in an imperial war, and none would go through these motions if there were other options at hand. The enlivened soul and wild nature are deadly to industrial growth economies - and vice versa.”

How, then, do we create the possibility for more people to evolve past egocentric adolescence into our “wild nature” so that we can collectively bring about The Great Turning? I believe that one of the answers to that lies in the work we do at the Centre for Holding Space.

We can start by teaching people how to practice holding space - for themselves, for the collective, and for the earth. That’s the truth that landed for me as I sat at the edge of the lake staring across at the clear-cut forest and wondering what my role would be if I stepped more fully into the story.

Why does holding space matter? Well, in order for people to evolve beyond adolescence and in order for us to get through the significant disruptions that The Great Turning will continue to bring, we’ll need a lot of people equipped with skills that are at the heart of the practice of Holding Space:

• Supporting grief practices that allow us to process the harm we’ve done to the earth, as well as the loss of the only way of life we’ve ever known.

• Guiding people through times of disruption and uncertainty, and building community so that we’re prepared to meet the collective needs.

• Teaching us how to self-regulate, co-regulate and eco-regulate our nervous systems and guiding us in embodied and nature-based practices that ground us and equip us for crisis.

• Bringing empathy and tenderness back into our collective spaces and systems and resisting the ways the industrial mindset dehumanizes us.

• Gathering people for “brave space” conversations as we grapple with the reality of what this work requires of us.

• Guiding people in processes and rituals that evoke the kind of imagination, hope and collective dreaming needed to move us into a different future.

• Reminding people of what it means to be truly human and bringing us back into right relationship with the natural world we’re part of.

• Slowing down and changing our relationship with time. Moving away from the “tyranny of the now” that capitalism has trained us in, and moving toward longer term thinking and planning with the best interests of the earth (and all of nature, including humanity) at the heart of our decision-making.

Friends, I know that it is hard to take our heads out of the sand. I know that it is hard to face the fear of climate collapse. But I also know that we have the potential to evolve not only ourselves but our systems and our relationship with the earth. I know that we have the capacity to dream of better ways of being that are rooted in care and that cause less harm to our souls, our forests, our oceans, and our animal kin.

I know this because I have sat with trees and asked them what I should do. I know this because I have leaned down to look at mushrooms and let them teach me how their underground network connects the forest. I know this because I have learned to grieve the clearcut forests, but then have also witnessed the bright yellow flowers that begin to grow on the wounded earth.

Will you join me in Holding Space for The Great Turning? A good place to start would be our How to Hold Space – Foundation Program which starts in October.

P.S. I’ll be writing more posts about related topics in the coming weeks, including one next week about why we’re intentionally changing our language at the Centre from “personal development” to “human development”.

Note: Perhaps, post-capitalism, we’ll have figured out how to offer our courses for free, but for now, our bills need to be paid. If you are in financial need, please consider applying for a scholarship. There’s a link at the bottom of the sales page.