CLIMATE
CHANGE, DESPAIR &
EMPOWERMENT -
VICTORIAN WORKSHOPS 2011
The
Climate Change, Despair and Empowerment workshop series aims to support climate
action groups and individuals to increase personal empowerment as well
as climate action sustainability and effectiveness.
MELBOURNE
WORKSHOP DETAILS
WHEN:
17th September. Saturday 10am – 6pm,
WHERE:
Kindness House . 288 Brunswick Street St, Fitzroy, 3065 2nd floor
COST:
Suggested donation $100 (or whatever you can afford
All
proceeds to Beyond Zero Emissions, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, and
100% Renewables Campaign.
BOOKINGS:
johnseed1@ozemail.com.au
Please
bring a cushion to sit on and food to share for lunch. Tea and coffee provided.
BALLARAT
WORKSHOP DETAILS
WHEN:
18th September. Sunday 10am – 6pm,
WHERE:
University of Ballarat, Primary Industries Training Centre, Cnr Gillies
and Gregory Streets
COST:
Suggested donation $100 (or whatever you can afford)
All
proceeds to Beyond Zero Emissions, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, and
100% Renewables Campaign and Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions
Inc.
BOOKINGS:
admin@breaze.org.au
5329 1730
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 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 Macy’s “Working Through Environmental
Despair”.http://tinyurl.com/3beae6n Also see more about Climate
Change, Despair and Empowerment workshops http://tinyurl.com/3fu2y4q Rainforest Information
Centre – www.rainforestinfo.org.au
