Earth Hospice
Meeting the Challenge of Climate Change with Beauty, Courage, Spirit, and Community
Facilitated by Trebbe Johnson
7:00 - 9:00pm ET, Thursdays
Jan 9, Jan 16, Jan 23, and Jan 30, 2025
Workshop Credit Cost: 1 credit (Click Here to Purchase a Credit Package)
à la carte Price: General Public - $125.00; One Spirit Alumni - $100.00
Climate change threatens all Earth’s places, plants, animals, people, dreams, and plans. By creating meaningful Earth Hospice practices and ceremonies and sharing them in the community, we discover how both mourning what’s lost and celebrating what remains is vital medicine not just for survival, but for finding new meaning, beauty, and even joy.
The Earth itself isn’t dying, of course. But what we are losing is our relationship to the places, plants, animals, dreams, seasons, and plans we thought could always depend on. In this workshop, you will explore and collect readings, practices, and actions that are meaningful to you and that you can use to create an Earth Hospice ceremony and an ongoing practice.
You will come to understand that, despite this unprecedented crisis we’re facing, we are not doomed to powerlessness and despair. In fact, we all have the power to help ourselves, our community, and the Earth go through it with meaning, beauty, and reverence.
Who this workshop is for
This workshop is for anyone who is deeply worried about climate change and seeking a way to deal with it and, most importantly, share that way with others. Participants will create an actual ceremony that they can lead in their community and serve as a template for other ceremonies.
What you’ll explore
Explore diverse interspiritual practices for confronting and managing grief
Recognize the importance of keeping a daily tally of beauty, grace, and gratitude
Crystalize your thoughts, inspirations, and priorities to develop ways of creating spiritual practices to hospice the Earth and our communities through climate change
Share practices, concerns, and resources with the other members of the workshop
What you’ll experience
Sharing past experiences with grief, caring, and profound encounters with the natural world as a way of clarifying your own unique contribution and finding inspiration from those of others
Exploring ceremony through readings and practices you develop, as well as those from others in the workshop and from diverse spiritual traditions—and a participatory ceremony in Week 3
Creating an Earth Hospice practice and a ceremony that you will present to the class on Week 4 and that you can then offer to others
Through this exploration, you’ll unravel complex, painful emotions about climate change, so you can handle them more creatively and courageously and help others to do so.
Following this workshop, you will be prepared to meet the immense challenge of climate change with courage, creativity, a sense of community, and a stronger spiritual connection. You will complete this workshop with a very practical end result: each student will design an Earth Hospice ceremony and practice that you can bring to your own community, congregation, or colleagues.
Four Sessions | 7:00 - 9:00pm ET, Thursdays – Jan 9, Jan 16, Jan 23, and Jan 30, 2025
Week 1 | What is Dying?
We begin to sort the complex feelings that we carry about climate change, focusing primarily on grief.
Sharing of previous experiences of grief
Exploration of interspiritual practices of managing grief and embracing life
Unravel complex feelings by using Panu Pihkala’s Climate Emotions cards
Week 2 | Hospice for People, Hospice for Places
In some ways, hospice for the Earth is like hospice for people; in other ways it is very different.
Breakout groups to share experiences of caring for a loved one (person, animal, place) who was or is ailing
Discussion of interspiritual practices for honoring the natural world
Developing a climate change practice
Week 3 | Exploring Ceremony
Inspired by the guidelines of ceremony—that is concretizing a long-range intention in a specific time and place and with certain symbols—we turn our ceremonial presence to the Earth.
A group ceremony to launch tonight’s workshop
Discussion of the elements of ceremony
Through breakout groups, with feedback from peers, begin crafting your own ceremony
Week 4 | Sharing Ceremony
This final class is devoted to in-depth, multimedia sharing of your ceremony and practice
Feedback and support from peers in the workshop
A final group ceremony of celebration
Blessing the whole of the complex world, and its creatures as ongoing practice.
About the Facilitator
Trebbe Johnson (she/her) is the author of Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places, and other books, as well as many articles and essays that explore the human bond with nature. She is the founder and director of the global community Radical Joy for Hard Times, devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Trebbe has led contemplative journeys in a clear-cut forest, Ground Zero in New York, the Sahara Desert, and currently with military veterans. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
Where can I access the workshop?
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