Our May 4 day-long workshop will be rescheduled soon.
Courage and Compassion in a Troubled Time
Beauty, creativity, tenderness, and joy are natural to the human experience. But we know life also holds impermanence, conflict, stresses, and grief.
The existential scope of the metacrisis unfolding in the world today outstrips our collective experience. There is so much to love and celebrate in the world, but escalating climate distress, political rupture, global violence, social unraveling, and economic instability are impossible to ignore.
Many find that contemporary social structures offer very few meaningful opportunities to grapple with our pain, fear, outrage, and despair. And few opportunities to explore how we can find balance and skillfully respond.
The workshop
The day will include discussion and meditations, plenary sessions and small group processes, music and movement. We’ll have space to reflect and speak and also to listen quietly. Letting down our guards, we can cultivate a fresh, resilient sense of belonging.
Renowned Buddhist scholar and social activist Joanna Macy has long noted that our despair or fear, outrage or distress over global conditions are not personal problems we need to “get over.” And our solutions don’t lie in withdrawing or shutting down, but together we can do this.
In fact, together is how we do this.
The monumental concerns of our time can find us feeling isolated and overwhelmed. Connecting in community for the purpose of expressing and exploring our complex responses refeshes our ability to flourish and enlivens our natural ability to engage creatively in the world, just as it is, here and now.
Suggested donation is $85, but all are welcome.
A self-set sliding scale option is available.
Advance registration is encouraged.
Presenter:
Betsy Anjani Toll, founder, Living Earth Gatherings
Betsy treasures Ram Dass’s teachings on compassion and service, and his extensive work with suffering and dying. She has studied end-of-life care with Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski, and has been a student of Buddhist scholar and eco-activist Joanna Macy.
Betsy volunteered for ten years as a hospital chaplain serving dying patients and their loved ones, and continues this work with individuals facing death or trauma at home. For 20 years, she has offered retreats and workshops on resilience, compassion, grief and dying, drawing on spiritual practices from the Bhakti and Buddhist traditions that enrich our lives and deepen our love for the world.
Questions? Contact Living Earth
regarding self-set sliding scale or workshop questions.
