To reconnect with Soul is to: remember the sacred, the grief, the ecstasy and the deep mystery of being alive.

To reconnect with Deeper Self is to: reclaim agency and integrity, meaning, purpose and juicy, fully expressed aliveness. It is being radically responsible – able to be aware of and respond to, life. 

To reconnect with Other Beings is to: remember and return to Right-Relationship with all beings. It is to return to a profound ability to trust and be trustworthy within those relationships. It is to readily hold the paradox of appreciating our own gorgeous, individual uniqueness and, our obvious, archetypal oneness with all other beings and all of life.

To reconnect with Earth is to: release our uninitiated, adolescent grip on the ecocidal fantasy of our infinite growth and domination on this finite planet. It is to Remember our humble place and deep belonging within the very fabric of the Web of Life.

Reconnection is at the center of all Living Resilience / Deep Academy offerings. Our mission of service is to bring the most potent support, tools and practices to those who are courageous enough to face, full frontal, our predicament-laden world. We offer support, training and safe container for the profound and demanding inner work that these times and this global transformation call for.

Remembering What Matters Most in Life and Living

When working with our coaching or workshop clients we have some important groundwork to do before we get to the creation of resilience practices and accessing higher levels of presence. Often we will start with an inventory of what each person loves about life and being alive. As simple as this may sound, it is an extraordinary practice to adopt, especially when we can share these lists-of–loves with other kindred spirits.

To articulate what matters most in one’s life can be comforting validation. For some it can be a rejuvenating and even surprising process that changes and deepens as a person sincerely takes on practices of reconnection. 

When we have painted a vivid inner picture of what we love about life, we give ourselves access to our hearts, our emotions, our passions. We begin to remember the source each of us has within, the source of what gives our lives meaning.

Presence

We are asserting that life in 20th and 21st Century Business as Usual Culture and our disconnection from self, others and Earth has resulted in us being, collectively and individually distracted and essentially not present in our own bodies, our relationships with others, and our relationship with this miraculous planet we call home.

The first Sober Data topic we assembled was, of course, about climate change, Abrupt Climate Change, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. If you are already aware of this topic then it is unlikely you will be surprised by the articles, videos and tutorial content we offer here on the site. If this topic is new to you there will be much to dig into as you become conversant about this daunting topic. You may want to kick start your research by reading Dean Walker’s, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual.    

Spoiler alert, in The Impossible Conversation, and every other element in this body of work, you will hear me assert that climate change is not our big problem. Certainly it is one relevant and important metric of the existential damage humans are causing on Earth. I’m suggesting that a more powerful, truthful and heartbreaking way to frame our predicament is that we are now facing the current and imminent, human-caused collapse of Earth and Human systems.  

Seen in this context, it quickly starts to make sense why justice and equity activists including author, Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg, have long been calling for the fair inclusion of all peoples around the world. If we see our situation as the reduction of emissions of one greenhouse gas, it seems like just another pesky problem looking for a solution. When we see our situation as a last minute wake-up call regarding our degradation of all Earth and Human systems and affect on all living things on Earth, it is clear that this is a global predicament, that includes all humans and all, beyond-human fellow Earthlings.  

In the “problem to be solved” context it can look like we just replace fossil fuels with renewables and off we go into the next, even larger, growth phase in our Business as Usual Human Operating System. In the “human-caused predicament” context we are facing the realization that our delusion of infinite growth on a finite planet is over.

In the words of science communicator, Kristine Mattis,  

“The climate crisis, as with many other environmental issues, isn’t a scientific problem; it is a social, political, and economic one. As they say, “it isn’t rocket science.” It is greed. A Green New Deal will not cut it because it leaves capitalism, corporatism, imperialism, and consumerism in place. We aren’t going to “science” our way out of these crises. We can’t advertise or market our way out, shop our way out, sing and dance or entertain our way out, fundraise our way out, engineer (and genetically engineer) our way out, protest our way out, text, tweet, snapchat or instagram our way out, pray our way out, or even vote our way out. Our way out is to dramatically alter much of our way of life. It is to prioritize ecological concerns and do our best to conduct every aspect of our lives sustainably, rather than just pay lip service to our belief that climate change is real or that plastic pollution is a problem or that fossil fuel use is unsustainable.

In many, if not most ways, we just simply need to stop. 

Our way of life is incompatible with the continuance of life.”

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In this context (just by the definition of predicament) we are offered no easy solutions. In fact we are offered no solutions at all. The calling of these predicament-laden times is for humanity to literally and figuratively, slow down and stop. We are called to seek out the unvarnished truth of our impact on Earth and on each other. We are called  to turn to our long-ago forfeited roots in right-relationship, spiritual practices and soul, and remember what it is to be a person who is able to discern our own inner truth and exert the agency to turn that truth into right action.

I suggest you go next to the Coaching page of this site. There we will outline some of the ways brave pioneers are learning to live, “With a Foot in Two Worlds.” One foot, of course, in this now collapsing Business as Usual world. The other foot in a world that has not yet been articulated. It has not even been imagined yet. As close as we get (with an optimistic framing) seems to be the phrase made famous by philosopher, author, Charles Eisenstein, “The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”  

In his latest book, The End of Ice, environmental journalist, Dahr Jamail, artfully weaves together his delivery of world-class, vetted sober data, with the intimate and delicate disclosure of his own grief. In this passage he quotes, Grief Walker, Stephen Jenkinson, as he maps out the difficult emotional territory that awaits us all…

“The question is not are we going to fail. The question is how,” author and storyteller Stephen Jenkinson, who has worked in palliative care for decades, states. “The question is, What shall be the manner of our inability to care for what was entrusted to us? The question is our manner of failing.” Jenkinson, who now makes his living by teaching about grief and the acceptance of death as an integral part of living, spoke eloquently about grief and climate disruption during a lecture he gave at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. When he talks about our failure to care for what is entrusted to us, he is also saying that the time to change our ways is long past. “Grief requires us to know the time we’re in,” Jenkinson continues. “The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are unwilling to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless. They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed.”

Using the guidance of grief and rite of passage advocates, Francis Weller, Malidoma Somé, Michael Meade and Stephen Jenkinson we (in Living Resilience / Deep Academy programs and coaching) are committed to regular and deep immersions in the soul-rich territory of grief. We are a global culture that has severed its ties with core connection with life. To do that we have had to override our innate deep senses and sensitivities. The loss implied with our complete disconnection and override is hard to overstate. There is much to grieve in this world. Without that grieving and acknowledgement of great loss, we are at risk of losing our souls.