Proposed Eco-Advisory Projects 2023-2024

In 2023-2024, I will be developing and leading a new Spanish-language meditation retreat focused on Emotional Resilience in the Anthropocene. This retreat will comprise a week of teachings and guided meditation, and it will be offered online, free of charge, and entirely in Spanish. Its aim is to raise or sharpen awareness of the ecological crises and to offer tools for facing climate-related crises and for sustaining compassionate action on behalf of the more-than-human world.

Our community is setting aside 2024 as a year to locate the climate and other ecological crises on people’s radar as a spiritual matter, while giving them tools to act on it. With this initiative, we would like to see a larger portion of our practice community engaging more actively in climate and ecological issues, and to be able to support them as they do so.

Comunidad Dharmadatta had a substantial online presence even before the pandemic. It was developed a decade ago when we lived and trained in India, serving a practice community spread across Latin America and Spain. Our weekly Dharma talks on Youtube are routinely viewed by 5,000 to 10,000 people, and our online meditation retreats generally fill a 500-person Zoom space. However, our monthly EcoSangha gatherings bring together about 50 people committed to EcoDharma. We take this as a sign that we have not sufficiently communicated the centrality of our care for the earth to Dharma practice, and we want to direct energy to doing so in a way that inspires more engagement.

It is no surprise that people are often far more likely to feel a need for tools for working with their emotions than for hearing more about climate. With this retreat, I hope to address the numbing or evasive responses with which we often receive the latest news of the climate crisis, while also drawing a compelling trail from the personally felt concerns that drive us to seek meditation instruction, to the strength of a collective commitment to care for the world we form together on and with this earth.

After the retreat, the guided meditations will form the basis for a new virtual meditation hall in our “Salas de meditación Dharmadatta” online platform. Like our retreats, the meditation platform is also open to all, free of charge, entirely in Spanish, and currently has over 40,000 subscribers. The teachings will be posted after the retreat on our Spanish-language YouTube channel, faceBuda, which reaches more than 185,000 subscribers.

The support from the BESS Family Foundation will specifically allow me to set aside time to develop the new series of guided meditations for this retreat.

Building a Community of Agency

It is a heartbreaking paradox that although a large majority of people in the world are concerned or alarmed about eco-social crises, many of us feel disempowered, isolated, or unable to talk about these issues even with loved ones. In collaboration with the rest of the One Earth Sangha team, I am developing plans for an EcoSangha Network, or alternatively, an Earth Community Network, to help people in creating and finding EcoDharma groups, discovering resources, and making crucial connections to support their compassionate response. Being a part of this Eco-Advisory cohort will benefit this work in two ways: the generous stipend will allow me to use more of my personal time and energy for research, design, and experimentation; and the group itself will be a crucial source of inspiration and ideas. I look forward to using this year to find new ways to connect, inspire, and support those who, like myself, wonder what it means to live a good life in an age of planetary crisis.

I am aspiring to co-develop and support with my colleague and friend, Jeanne Corrigal, a Nature-based Sangha offering on the IMS platform. This builds on the momentum of our year-long Touching the Earth course, aiming to offer a space for connection, dialogue, and teaching around the relationship between Dharma and nature, as well as themes of Buddhist engagement, eco-activism, and meeting the challenges we face together in practice. I also aim to develop and offer a BIPOC wilderness/nature retreat in the future. Additionally, I want to continue to deepen into the exploration of how Nature, Dharma, and Devotional expression come together in one’s practice and path, and how it might inform the ways we show up and respond to what’s needed in our world and our lives.

LOVE THY NATURE SUMMIT
Healing Ourselves and Our World through The Power of The Heart

Format: Online summit – in partnership with Eric Forbis, the creator of BuddhaFest and Wisdom for Life, whose summits reach 50,000 participants on average. The speakers we are inviting include David Loy, Jack Kornfield, Valarie Kaur, John Powell, Vandava Shiva, Bill McKibben, among others. Each session will be pre-recorded in Nov/Dec/Jan and the summit will be aired on Earth Week – April 15th-22nd, 2024.

Brief summary: The “Love Thy Nature Summit” will inspire and motivate participants to practice a heart-centered, unifying, and compassionate form of eco-activism – from the inside out. It starts with the personal and the relational – sessions on nature therapy, releasing grief (individual and collective), and mindfulness / conflict resolution practices. Segments on reclaiming the feminine power, fostering diversity, and reinventing leadership elevate the conversation to the collective realm. Ancient knowledge, including Indigenous voices, permeate the summit with wisdom. April 21st is a journey into the Imaginal Realm with interactive sessions where participants help create new visions – leading to Earth Day 2024 where a new form of “environmentalism” emerges – one that is centered in compassion to melt divisions and presence to embody nature’s wonders and genius on how to restore ourselves, communities, and our spellbinding natural world.

Bess Family Eco Mindfulness Project

My project will involve facilitating a weekend of Mindfulness at The Marine Mammal Sanctuary in Estero Hondo, Dominican Republic. The sanctuary is a protected area of mangroves that serve as food, shelter, and growth areas for various species, including whales and manatees. The place was founded by The Caribbean Biodiversity Fund (CBF) through Fondo Marena and the Ministry of Environment. A weekend of mindfulness at the sanctuary will create awareness of the increasing need to sustain the sanctuary while teaching about the four foundations of mindfulness and its resemblance to the Taino way of living in interconnection and the principle of vincularidad (we are part of a web of inter-relationality).

Relational Ecodharma

As we recognize the profound importance of knowing and cultivating a sense of interconnection or interbeing between the human and the “natural” world, I propose to investigate the urgent importance of reclaiming or restoring human-to-human interrelatedness in the context of the great web of planetary life. What can be cultivated of our “natural” or “radical” relatedness beyond constructions of “self” and “other” – beyond separation, disconnection, and isolation? The practice of Insight Dialogue and the teachings of the Buddhadharma will be offered to investigate what is in the way, and relational meditation will support this investigation and cultivation of wholesome and liberative human connection.

Eco-Compassion Training

My intention is to create a template for an ongoing Eco-Compassion Training to provide a context for climate activists to deepen their process of awakening and healing, and enhance their capacity for skillful climate action. I will offer a 10-week online training in the fall, reflect on the impact and iterate, offering it again in spring 2024, perhaps accompanied by an in-person retreat for those local to the Bay Area. This training will incorporate awareness and compassion practices, inner parts work (Internal Family Systems and Process Work), and somatic practices. The training will invite a deepening recognition of our innate boundless awareness and compassion, working kindly with conditioning and core limiting beliefs, and discerning ethical and skillful action in response to climate injustice and our ecological crises. A core part of the cohort will be creating conditions for deepening trust, intimacy, and compassion among the group such that there is a safe container for some of the more difficult and vulnerable challenges of facing our crises—and by meeting these, to enable each person to authentically express their own unique and wise response. I will make this training accessible to those of all income levels, and invite those who may not usually have access to such programs.

2024 Ecodharma Course With New York Insight Meditation Center

Purpose: Cultivate Climate Resilience through Volunteering and Ecodharma

Class Description:
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

As the climate crisis intensifies, society and life on earth are changing in ways we’ve never imagined before. Life as we’ve come to know it is in the midst of massive change and upheaval. While facing impermanence has always been part of the Buddhist teachings, how do we hold this with the particular intensity of climate change? How do we face our anxiety, fear, anger, grief, guilt, and overwhelm with compassion and wisdom, and cultivate a sense of resilience? What are our individual and collective responses? Where do we fit into what Joanna Macy has called The Great Turning?

Over the 6 months of this course, we will discover how our embodied Buddhist practices can help us face difficult emotions with compassion and how that impacts our response to the crisis. We will explore healing and cultivating compassion, wisdom, resilience, equanimity through our practices. Embracing the climate crisis is as much a spiritual, sacred path as healing from our personal crisis. We will explore diverse voices who have been thinking through the responses – diversity that includes gender, race, and age – to provide a wide range of perspectives. We will also explore nature-based practices – integrating wisdom from our natural environment into our practices and understanding.

Also integral to the course will be hands-on volunteering at the Battery Park Urban Farm (or another urban farm similar in nature) during our monthly daylong class. We will volunteer from the planting season through harvest time (April to October). We will get to know the Earth through connections with soil, water, plants, and to learn about regenerative practices. Through experiential learning, we will cultivate an intimate connection with the seasons and elements, and understand the intricate web of ecosystems.

The course will include six daylong-retreats, ongoing small groups, and regular readings. This is an in-person course, with the intention to build and nurture community throughout the course. The outdoor classes will be taking place regardless of weather conditions, unless it’s dangerous weather. It will be our practice to work with a wide variety of conditions.

• Applying psychological skills that emphasize values-based mindfulness to eco-anxiety, climate distress, and engaging effectively with the climate crisis and related crises.
• Organizing and co-facilitating small groups and workshops where people can gather to learn and practice the above psychological skills and share about their experiences of climate distress.
• Further study and personal work on the above topics, including on how to support and counsel people who are struggling with these themes.
• Encouraging networking, discussion, and collaboration amongst local counselors, psychologists, mindfulness teachers, and facilitators relating to climate-aware psychological resources and services.

I am excited to craft a study/action series on climate & our bodhisattva vow. This would look like 6-10 virtual sessions to reflect on our ecological crisis and the complexity of working towards systemic change. What does it mean to hold a commitment to save all beings in a culture and economy of separation and alienation? I am excited to hold this series first in my zen sangha, with a container that supports participants in executing their own action project.

The ecological crisis has severely affected all species on this planet. Humans have the duty and accountability to address and bring meaningful solutions to protect and help all species thrive. Several organizations are working diligently in this regard to slow down or reverse the effects of climate change. At the same time, humanity is experiencing a great deal of suffering that is manifesting as mental (emotional) and bodily health issues. As a participant in the Eco Advisory group, my goal is to serve the communities with skillful offerings that enable humans to be more aware of their personal suffering and the suffering of the extended ecosystem and to explore meaningful tools to alleviate their sufferings. This work will be based on Buddhist teachings and practices and is targeted at both Buddhist practitioners as well as a secular audience.

Project components:

1. Research the causes of personal sufferings and gain in-depth understanding of relationships to nature and climate change.
2. Analyze and make available a Buddhist approach to finding solace and yet be resilient.
3. Bring offerings to the community through a few platforms. The platforms will be created as safe and loving containers for people to bring their voices and approaches and share within the context of Buddhist frameworks.

Tactics: (Initial Thinking…):

1. Offer training and retreats to chaplains and eco dharma teachers the research findings and provide tools for serving the communities to find solace and to cultivate resilience. I’m working with Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center to bring this offering.
2. Develop and scale community groups (like meetups, etc.) to bring Buddhist practitioners and Eco chaplains to the frontlines to serve the communities.

Note: I expect this project will be an ongoing project and certainly will morph and evolve over time.

I look forward to this unique opportunity to learn from, and work with, others who are exploring how the practices of Buddhism and mindfulness can support well-being and efficacy in these challenging times of environmental and social disruption. My personal project is eco-dharma curriculum development for the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. Being part of the cohort will enable me to bring a more informed, integrated approach to eco-dharma program development at CIMC as I learn what others have found to be most effective for their communities and what new ideas and approaches they are exploring. My intention is to bring all I learn back “home” to benefit and support the CIMC sangha and teachers through program development and planning. I will be working with the CIMC teachers and the Executive Director to bring new programs to the Center in 2024, building on the eco-dharma programs we have offered over the past two years and are assessing their effectiveness. Over the course of the year, I plan to deepen my own engagement and learning by engaging in other programs as well, including those offered by members of the first BESS eco-dharma cohort. I will be attending Willa Blythe Baker’s “Rewilding the Soul” retreat at BCBS in September as a first step on this path.

If the Buddha left his palace grounds today and encountered old age, sickness, and death, would he be discovering our living Earth being consumed, growing hot with warming, with a Sixth Extinction underway? This project reveals a fourth jewel: this generous, forgiving, and now wrathful living Earth. This project takes what we have learned in living a ‘life that harms less’ and scales it to the Sangha. Please see David Takahashi’s BESS Eco-Advisory Project for a complete project description.

Bioregional Contemplative Protection in Western PA

Responding to entangled ecological crises can be overwhelming and meditators/contemplatives often hesitate to engage. In order to foster new styles of contemplative-based ecological action, this project includes three overlapping phases, grounded in the Western PA bioregion, and the Ohio River valley in particular. First, we bear-witness to the petrochemical buildout in our region by bringing interfaith leaders, academics, activists, students, and other citizens to the site of the Shell Polyethylene “Cracker” plant in Beaver County; second, we build an engaged, contemplative community by focusing on an ongoing relationship with the river and the natural ecosystem around the plant; and third, we develop creative, nonviolent, artistic interventions to raise awareness and protect the ecosystem.

Summer 2024 retreat for active organizers/activists working on the frontlines of power building for climate action/solutions, with the intention to create a majority BIPOC space. I’d like to use the grant money to fund the “healing” portion of the retreat, incorporating grief rituals, trauma processing, and practices to foster a deeper reconnection to the Earth and self.

Creation of an Eco Dharma Black Trauma Healing course. This 6 to 8-week course would be aimed at addressing and opening the Healing process of trauma stored in Black and Brown bodies in preparation for a greater conversation about our role in climate justice. It would be structured as weekly (2 hour) sessions of mixed meditation, insight dialogue, somatic movement, body scans, reiki healing, as well as grief and healing circles. Midway through, there would be a weekend retreat away to connect with nature and deepen the poly-crisis discussion.

The vision for the work in mind is an online un-conference (shared learning skill swap space) centering the wisdom traditions of Global Indigenous Earth Stewards. The offering will include daily contemplative practice (meditation and accessible ceremonial offerings), talks, and a series of panels.

Exploring collective land-based practices, drawing from Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching on interbeing, the brahmaviharas, and ancestral healing rituals. Seeking to create accessible and embodied practices to orient visitors and community gatherings at Kibilio Community and Farm.