CANCELLED: Climate Dharma Workshop

Given the urgency of doing all we can to reduce to social contact due to coronavirus, we are cancelling our Climate Dharma workshop on March 21.  A tentative 3-hour program is scheduled for April 25, but cannot be confirmed at this point.

Presenters

Living Earth founder Betsy Toll will frame the workshop and facilitate meditations, discussions, and exercises. Kavita MacMillan will bring movement and sound to balance our practices. Participants will bring their hearts, concerns, and love of the world into the mix.

Betsy Toll is a community activist, hospice volunteer, and founder of Living Earth. She brings a background in theater, art, and environmental activism to her social action and service, including hospice and grief chaplaincy with individuals who are dying and their loved ones. Her commitment to the path of compassion in action is rooted in devotional practices and teachings from the  nondual and Buddhist traditions.

 

Kavita Kat MacMillan is a performer and yoga instructor, and her background in music, dance, and yoga will remind us that we’re fully alive, here and now, in our bodies as well as hearts and minds. Kat’s performance background includes butoh dance with Vangeline in New York City, musical study in the Indian musical tradition of Pandit Pran Nath, and active practice of yoga and bhakti devotional singing, as kirtan.

What do we mean by Climate Dharma? 

The Climate Dharma workshop will honor the deep-time cycling of our planet, and look honestly at the beauty and the pain that are so present in this time. We’ll use skillful practices to cultivate ease, resilience, strength, and compassion that will enrich the work that lies ahead.

In our program, Climate encompasses the escalating global crisis we’re facing. It includes the coronavirus and the tattered basket of systems that sustain life, as well as the climate that sustains all species and living systems, as well as the political, social, economic, and cultural systems that affect climate, and are affected by climate. It holds the high-wire political tensions, prisons, war, injustice, violence, immigrants and refugees, genderism, misogyny, poverty – all systems that are unraveling today. And it holds beauty, possibility, all of nature and love. All are interwoven, all one.

Dharma, from the Sanskrit, can be understood as “that which holds.” As the unconditioned nature of “what is,” Dharma is the self-determined great unfolding constantly at play throughout the universe, holding all phenomena and consciousness. For the individual, one’s dharma is the path our life takes, relative to the moment and conditions we live in and the principles and practices we live by. It shapes the actions we engage in that move us more fully into being “who we really are,” our essential true nature, our boundless heart.

Climate Dharma  invites us to learn and use wise practices and processes that nurture expansive awareness, stability, courage, and compassion. It enables us to engage in creative, courageous, loving ways rather than succumbing to fear, anger, or despair, turning our backs on pain and dysfunction all around us. These tools will help to untangle the unraveling web, so we can reweave the broken threads into new patterns to mend and serve our world.