Spiritualities of Resilience: Aligning with Earth

In a fractured, fracturing world, when human insanity is threatening the health and future of life on the planet, where do we find a deeper, wilder sanity? What would it mean to root into this sanity, to listen with our bodies and hearts and relationships to the holy in it all and shape our worlds accordingly? On a personal level: What is resilience – what is spirituality – in this liminal time, in the body and place and multi-species communities you inhabit?

This symposium invites you deep into these questions: to listen and journal, to encounter land and water and wind and movement, to let the world’s reality find and soften and open you. Ultimately, we are curious about how we (personally, communally, in each particular place) can learn to participate in the world’s resilience and wild spirituality in creative new ways. What might emerge for you?

This symposium is sponsored by the Center for Transformative Spirituality at HIU.

Schedule:

8:30-9:00 Arrival and coffee
9:00-9:15 Opening Welcome and Centering
9:15-10:15 Keynote: Erik Assadourian - Understanding Ecological Realities to Better Navigate Collapse and Heal in its Aftermath
10:15-10:30 Break
10:30-11:30 Keynote: Bill Baue - Bioregional Relationality & Regeneration as Collapse Resilience
11:30-12:15 Outdoor/ Journaling + Reflective Conversation
12:15-1:15 Lunch
1:15-2:15 Keynote: Lisa Dahill - Loving the Wild: Earth-Centering Spirituality
2:15-2:30 Break
2:30-3:45 Outdoor Experiential Time (Choice of Workshops)
3:45-4:15 Wrap-Up
4:15-4:30 Closing Ritual

Understanding Ecological Realities to Better Navigate Collapse and Heal in its Aftermath

The current moment appears grim. Climate denial has become normalized, and the capacity to address the climate crisis, let alone broader converging ecological disruptions (plastic pollution, persistent chemicals, biodiversity loss) is being lost (or even actively dismantled). Meanwhile, the root cause of all of this — growth beyond Earth's limits — remains for most a taboo topic. But still on the table, though getting harder to imagine, is a soft landing, as is an ability to make choices that not only help to bring that about but set up a better reality once the disruptions die down. Sustainability researcher Erik Assadourian will explore the global trends that have brought us here and some of the activities and shifts that could be and are being made to help us navigate the polycrisis with less suffering and hopefully our humanity intact.

Erik Assadourian is founder and director of the Gaian Way (gaianway.org), an eco-spirituality organization working to heal humans' relationship with the living Earth we're part of and utterly depend on. He is also a sustainability researcher and has been studying the sustainability crisis and a variety of solutions for the past 20+ years.

Bioregional Relationality and Regeneration as Collapse Resilience

Given the advanced states of ecological and social collapses, how can we respond in self- and community-empowered ways? Building on the psychological, emotional, and spiritual flexibility afforded by Collapse Acceptance, a next step in the Collapse Response Continuum is Collapse Resilience, which seeks to 1) mitigate the severity of collapses; 2) adapt to emergent post-collapse scenarios; and 3) re-pattern ways of being that reinforce social and ecological integrity. In this presentation, we will explore bioregionalism as reinhabitation of our geographic terrains as well as our terrains of consciousness (to paraphrase bioregional progenitor Peter Berg) through relationality between peoples & cultures, living species, and earth, and regeneration of all living systems. Bill will share examples from his work both at the bioregional scale here in the Northeast Woodlands, where he collaborates closely with the InterTribal Alliance, and his work globally enhancing coherence in the emergent bioregional movement.

is Senior Director of r3.0, a global common good not-for-profit platform focusing on Redesign for Resilience and Regeneration. Bill helps design transformation to align with living systems principles from the personal to the global level, specializing in questions of bioregional resilience.

Loving the Wild: Earth-Centering Spirituality

Climate change and ecological destabilization are bringing about what Buddhist activist and visionary Joanna Macy called “The Great Unraveling” of the systems of life we depend on. In order to contribute to (or even have) a flourishing human future, we all need to find our place in what she calls “The Great Turning”: the move away from the legal, economic, political, and religious forms of life that are bringing us to the point of collapse – and into radically new local and bioregional forms of life. But this is not easy. This presentation will explore four facets of what Earth-centering our spirituality might mean: 1) Facing and feeling (alone and together) the huge range of emotions accompanying these losses; 2) Expanding our perception of the world’s sacredness and our own soul-depth; 3) Tending the kinship networks that comprise the more-than-human world; and 4) Stepping into our own vocation of contributing to the most generative wild future we can: loving the wild. Each of these facets will include discussion of practices fostering them.

is Miriam Therese Winter Professor of Transformative Leadership and Spirituality at HIU and director of the Center for Transformative Spirituality. She is a scholar, teacher, and lover of eco-spirituality in diverse forms across religious traditions and in many wild contexts, bioregions, and waterways.

Choice of Several Afternoon Workshops: Indoors, Outdoors, Woods, River, Movement, Arts

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Hartford Seminary