Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects - Softcover

Macy, Joanna; Brown, Molly Young

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865717753 ISBN 13: 9780865717756

Verlag: New Society Publishers, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

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

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Joanna Macy, eco-philosopher, activist, and scholar of Buddhism and systems theory has an international following, thanks to 30 years in movements for global justice and ecological sanity. She is the author of 12 books including the original Coming Back to Life and Widening Circles, and she has produced a 2-DVD set entitled The Work that Reconnects. She lives in the United States.

Molly Young Brown combines the Work That Reconnects, ecopsychology, and psychosynthesis in her work: teaching online courses, writing and publishing books and essays, coaching and mentoring, and giving talks and workshops internationally. Her five books include the original Coming Back to Life and Growing Whole: Self-realization for the Great Turning. She lives in Mt. Shasta, California.

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EMPOWERMENT IN THE FACE OF PLANETARY SUFFERING

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

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, co-founder,Women's Congress for Future Generations.

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. Authors 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.

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

JOANNA MACY, eco-philosopher and root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, has authored 13 books including World As Lover, World As Self .

MOLLY YOUNG BROWN, teacher, trainer, and life coach, has authored and edited 6 books, including Growing Whole: Self-Realization for the Great Turning .

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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 Chant

I 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,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New Society Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0865717753
• ISBN 13: 9780865717756
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland