The Eco Sattva Training

The challenge of ecological crises is all around us—as well as within us. Our practice can support us not only in meeting this difficulty, but healing and transforming it. Join us in this journey to cultivate wisdom, connection, and compassionate action.

Course materials are available now. It is never too late for you or your group to begin this self-scheduled course.

Course Status and Key Dates

• Group and individual registration are open. Create a Group | Find a Group | Connect with People Seeking Groups | Register for the Training
• All session materials are available now. You will not lose access to these materials, so you can start when you like and move at your own pace.
• January 14: Join us for our next monthly EcoSattva Training Live Gathering, open only to participants in the training.

The future is here.

Humanity is contending like never before with a world in radical transition. More than ever, we find ourselves weathering extreme ecological impacts, even as we grapple with escalating costs of living, political instability, and isolation. Adding to this suffering, many of us feel in ourselves a lack of sufficient response. No matter how clearly we see the systems of harm in which we are embedded, dismantling them can seem beyond our reach.

What do we do with the enormity of this moment? How might we develop a compassionate understanding of how we got here, learn to hold the full dimensions of our situation, and nourish an appropriate response? How can we discover the wisdom, determination, and engagement that can meet the suffering of our world—and free our own hearts?

The EcoSattva Training is a journey of brave and tender confrontation with our social and ecological reality. As we cultivate clear seeing, supported by radical Dharma wisdom, justice-informed analysis, and a growing community of engaged practitioners, we may discover new pathways opening to us. No matter how vast the challenge, we can face it together—with sobriety, vigor, and kindness. We lovingly invite you to join us as we sense our way into right relationship with our world.

‘For anyone who’s yearning for a way to meet the often agonizing challenges of this time with a clear mind, a steady heart, a resilient body and a ferocious spirit, One Earth Sangha’s EcoSattva Training is a beautifully-designed and meticulously-crafted container. I can’t recommend it enough.’

Contents

‘As a queer climate and social justice activist on the buddhist path, the EcoSattva Training jumped out at me as a unique offering. Access to ongoing trainings, the centering of Black, brown, and queer voices in this space, and the thoughtful dialogue encouraged by Kristin and Lou are all huge assets of this offering. Much gratitude for holding space for deep, difficult conversations that enable the possibility of hopeful solutions.’

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Overview of the Course

The EcoSattva Training is an eight-part series designed to support you in developing your response, internal and external, to a changing world. We’ll offer new insights from multiple Dharma traditions as well as the growing field of climate psychology as we soothe these tender bodies, hearts and minds. Supported by these teachings and one another, participants can discover and cultivate a way forward.

The course will begin at the level of our internal experience, a good place to start given our pervasive stress. Climate psychologists are demonstrating that these crises are traumatizing, with the attendant adaptations to trauma showing up in both our individual and collective defenses. We will spend time in this course understanding that dynamic and then bring in specific Dharma and trauma-informed practices that can relieve our ecological distress.

Having cultivated an inner landscape of kindness and calm, we’ll begin to challenge the views and patterns that only contribute to suffering, individually and collectively. We will explore the intersections between ecological harm with other forms of objectification and exploitation, especially in regards to race, revealing their common roots. We’ll then open to the spaces of potent uncertainty, allowing ourselves to lean in, let go, and listen to what wants to emerge. In the latter section of the course, we will explore diverse forms of response: changes to our individual habits, necessary refusals to cooperate with systems of domination, and gateways to collective action.

Session Topics

There are eight core sessions that together create an archetypal journey to a place out beyond our familiar ways of looking, knowing, feeling and identifying. Guided by some of our community’s most profound leaders, we’ll be supported in opening up, letting go, and coming to terms.

• Session One: Arriving and Setting a Course with Kaira Jewel Lingo
  We’ll begin by gathering and reflecting on our global situation, mapping out our journey, and setting the conditions for empowered, compassionate response.
• Session Two: Preparing for the Journey with Damchö Diana Finnegan
  In this journey we are likely to meet fear, grief, anger, and other difficult emotions. In investigating these strong energies, we can discover spiritual resources that can help us hold them.
• Session Three: Meeting Just this Heart with Britt Wray
  Here we open to the suffering we may find in our own experience. We explore how it is to be with this world as we perceive it and allow the impacts to be named and honored. We explore the narratives that we carry about ourselves, others, and this world, both helpful and unhelpful.
• Session Four: Reckoning with Entangled Structures with Dr. Michael Yellow Bird and Drs. Larry and Peggy Ward
  Ecological harm is inextricably tied to systems of oppression. Participants are invited to explore, with compassionate accountability, how the dominant structures objectify Earth and all her beings, ultimately harming all.
• Session Five: Making a Home in Uncertainty with Lama Willa Blythe Baker
  To be authentically helpful necessitates radical comfort with the unknown. We must metabolize our mind-boggling, heartrending situation and learn to recognize the endless possibilities contained therein.
• Session Six: Creating and Discovering The Way with Adam Lobel
  Continuing in the relational spiritual task, attunement with the unknown, we’ll open further to so much more than the conventional holding of that truth. We’ll welcome whatever arises, from nothing to mystical everything.
• Session Seven: Expressing Our Awakening Agency with Kritee Kanko and Tim Ream
  Equipped with a deeply rooted sense of our belonging and calling, we turn outward, discovering the domains of our EcoSattva action.
• Session Eight: Affirming and Resolving with Mark Coleman and Myokei Caine-Barrett
  In the closing session, we’ll return to our individual aspirations or visions to refine and affirm, and explore the boundless potential of Sangha as the heart of our engagement.

You’ll access each session on its own resources page including:

• Opening ritual
• Welcome from Kristin Barker or Lou Leonard
• Core Dharma offerings: video teachings from the session leader(s)
• Contemplations, inquiries, and other practices to help you internalize the teachings with body, mind, and heart.
• Resources for groups and individuals to make the most of the materials.
• Supplemental articles, videos, and Dharma sources relating to the content of the Session.
• Closing ritual

‘The Ecosattva training has been immensely satisfying. It has enlarged my understanding of how I can relate open heartedly and open mindedly with ecological crises. I have more tools, and a sense of expanding community, to support me as we go forward into the uncertain future.’

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Who is this for?

This course is for you if:

• You are suffering from ecological crises manifesting around us, and you don’t want to hold this pain alone;
• You are interested in a response to climate crises that goes beyond both aversion for the supposed enemies and retreat into spiritual bypass;
• You are willing to contend with the ways in which we are personally and collectively entangled with modernity even if that brings up feelings of discomfort;
• You see the possibility of being hospitable to challenges, without rushing towards a sense of resolution;
• You are interested in nourishing a spiritual practice that can in turn support wise and wholesome action for a radically changing world with various unknowable futures, without solidifying apocalyptic ideologies;
• You see the potential for creating a sacred container that can hold your own uncertainty and support others in doing the same;
• The prospect of a brave and tender confrontation, supported by community, calls to you.

To understand the full context of the training, some interest in or experience with Buddhism will be helpful. But we encourage participants of any (or no) spiritual background to join.

What’s new in this version of the training?

We’re excited about this year’s updates to the training, including:

• New featured guests, including Britt Wray, Michael Yellow Bird, Larry and Peggy Ward, Damchö Diana Finnegan, and Mark Coleman.
• New offerings from previous contributors such as Kritee Kanko, Kaira Jewel Lingo, Adam Lobel, and Lama Willa Blythe Baker.
• New embodied practices tailored to course content
• A new tool for individuals seeking groups to connect, and an updated guide for group facilitators
• Updated supplemental readings and materials

Registering for this new version also gives you access to our live monthly gatherings (held on the second Sunday of each month, 12:30 – 2:00 PM Eastern US Time, starting in November).

Read More here