What if the climate crisis is an invitation to deepen our spiritual selves?

This article What if the climate crisis is an invitation to deepen our spiritual selves? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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What if the climate crisis is a powerful invitation to relate to ourselves and the Earth differently? What if it’s an invitation to raise human consciousness and deepen our spiritual capabilities so that we can rise to the devastation and loss of life differently? 

As a climate activist, I have often found it uncomfortable delving into things like spirituality, as it can feel like a luxury when people and ecosystems are suffering so much. However, as I’ve sat with the grief of climate change for more than two thirds of my life, noticing my own and others’ cycles of burnout from repeatedly over-stretching our limits, spirituality has come increasingly knocking on my door. 

Like a wise old friend, it has tapped me on the shoulder and whispered: “Perhaps the way we address this existential issue, including how we relate to ourselves and each other in the process, is just as, if not more, important than the outcome.” As philosopher Bayo Akomolafe asks: “What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?” 

This feels like a particularly poignant question at a moment when wildfires of unprecedented ferocity are burning through Los Angeles County. The sight of whole neighborhoods being destroyed conjures feelings of immense distress and helplessness. But what if there’s room for more than just those emotions? By turning to an under-explored resource like spirituality, it’s possible to see that climate change is also inviting us to cultivate the very traits that will enable us to confront a crisis with greater compassion.

What is spirituality and why is it important?

Many conflate religion with spirituality, but they are not the same. We can have spiritual experiences in the context of organized religion but, for many, spirituality occurs outside of this — from experiencing awe in nature, deep meditative states, the locked-in feel of a creative pursuit, endurance exercise, blissful moments with loved ones, etc.

There are many definitions of spirituality, but I like psychologist and researcher Lisa Miller’s, who described it as “an inner sense of relationship to a higher power(s) that is loving and guiding” and the sense that we are “loved, held, guided and never alone. Researchers Susan Baker and Robin Morrison emphasize that spirituality is an active process — a journey of finding meaning, wholeness and peace, which traverses through contemplation and reflection to action.

We know that spirituality is core to human well-being. Research shows that people who identify as spiritual, experience greater mental and physical health. Spirituality mediates feelings of greater connectedness with nature, with ourselves and one another. In Miller’s research, she makes the case that humans are biologically hardwired for spiritual experiences, and that when we don’t have enough of this in our life, it comes knocking on the door in the form of anxiety, depression and addiction. 

What might spirituality have to offer the climate crisis?

As we delve deeper into the spirituality literature, four core features emerge, each of which could be valuable in addressing the climate crisis:

1. A sense of meaning and purpose larger than all of us. This could counter the hopelessness and fear that many experience when confronted with climate change. 

2. Experiences of interconnectedness and oneness. Interestingly, when someone is having a spiritual experience, the parts of the brain that distinguish between self and other, soften, towards a place of greater oneness. We see experiences like this occurring in collective action and social movements as well, and they are positively correlated with psychological well-being and motivation to take climate action.

3. A sense of inner love, strength and compassion. This could counter the depression and anxiety often induced by growing rates of climate despair.

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4. Experiences of self-transcendence. This could encourage more of the collective action and collaboration that climate change requires, in turn lessening the individual burden of responsibility felt by so many climate activists, which fuels cycles of burnout. 

As I sat with this, I began to form a working hypothesis that the climate crisis is actually an incredible invitation to grow our spiritual capacities. What if climate change was actually like a spiritual gym in which we are called to evolve our awareness, consciousness and action, such that we can rise to the challenge at a spiritual level?

6 spiritual traits that the climate crisis might be inviting us to cultivate

Building on this, I read more about the intersection of spirituality and environmental crises, while also reflecting on my own experience and chatting with other activists. From that emerged the following six spiritual traits that I think the climate crisis is inviting us to cultivate more of in ourselves:

1. Honoring our pain and grief

The poet Stephen Levine says that “if sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.” To transform injustice, we must first let ourselves be moved by its pain, yet most of us live in cultures that teach us to repress painful emotions. Too often, when we contemplate being with our own suffering, we think of it as self-indulgent; we worry that the house of sorrow will become our final resting space, that we’ll be swallowed up by our feelings. 

But as therapist and activist Francis Weller reminds us: “Our grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground.” Weller talks about five gates of grief, one of which is “sorrows of the world,” a type of grief that is often marginalized by mainstream culture, leading to unattended sorrows accumulating, which are then often pathologized. He points out that, whether we register it or not, the daily loss of species, habitats and cultures is registered deep in our psyches. In other words, so much of the grief we carry is not personal, but collective.

Opening up to and embracing this reality can be so liberating, as Buddhist Monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh knew all too well when he invited us to: “Hear within ourselves, the sounds of the Earth crying.” Environmental activist and Buddhist Joanna Macy reminds us that all spiritual traditions have mourning practices, and that letting ourselves grieve is actually a precondition to effective action. She also invites us to see how communing with our own suffering builds our capacity to be with the world’s suffering, noting that: “The heart that breaks right open can hold the whole universe.”

Ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning talks about the idea of “Earthgrief.” She says that “to open our hearts to the sad history of humanity and the devastated state of the Earth is the next step in our reclamation of our bodies, the body of our human community and the body of the Earth.” 

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Building on this, psychologists Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman talk about non-redemptive mourning in their work on social injustice and violence. This is the idea that some losses should never be allowed to settle but instead be kept present in our communal memory and mourned in an ongoing way — such as species that have disappeared forever, collective traumas, cultures that have been devastated or eroded. 

Too often, in our efforts to “save” and “protect,” we forget to mourn, to grieve, to feel the pain of loss. As journalist Mark Jerome Walters noted so poignantly, “When the tiny wings of the last Xerces blue butterfly ceased to flutter, our world grew quieter by a whisper and duller by a hue. … Rarely, in turning our attention from a recently extinct species to our last ditch effort to save another, do we pause to say goodbye.”

It’s really only when we give ourselves permission to pause, to be with our pain and to follow it back to its source that the transformative work can begin.

2. Embracing our ecological selves

We are nature. We’re not separate from it. Costa Rican climate negotiator Christiana Figueres (who turned to Buddhism to help her navigate her climate despair) says that we were always “wilderness before we decided we were civilization.”

This idea of the “ecological self” was popularized in Western culture by deep ecologists who believed that spiritual processes of self-actualization naturally lead to transcendence of the self, and a place of deep interconnectedness with nature. It should be emphasized, however, that this is an idea which has featured in Indigenous cultures for far longer than Westerners have written and talked about it.

Thinking about this trait together with the previous trait on honoring our pain, Western psychology often tends to teach us that our grief is personal. However, given that we are part of nature, what if the feelings of despair and pain we experience when witnessing climate and environmental devastation were also arising from the Earth itself? What if it was the grief of a burnt-out forest registering in our bodies and psyches? What if the emptiness we feel is actually our soul trying to register the loss of species and ecosystems?

This disconnection from the Earth and nature is what Glendinning refers to as “the original trauma,” and it carries with it all the characteristic symptoms of psychic injury — anxiety, depression, disassociation, hypervigilance, etc. 

As such, I see acting on the climate crisis as a journey of re-understanding and resuming one’s place in the natural world, which also cultivates the humility needed to work effectively on a challenge as multifaceted as climate change. 

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3. Gratitude and compassion

Compassion and gratitude are practices that are core to most spiritual and religious traditions. Emotions researcher Robert Emmons describes gratitude as: “a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness and appreciation for life,” as well as a state associated with greater well-being and increased capacity for action. 

Gratitude is counter-cultural in a world that breeds insatiable appetites for consumption and tells us we are never enough — the very same attitudes at the root of the climate crisis. 

I see compassion as crucial to working on climate. Compassion is the capacity to suffer with the Earth, without allowing its suffering to overwhelm us and stop us from taking action. Compassion is also essential to metabolizing shame — a state which psychology professor Gershen Kaufman describes as leaving us feeling “unspeakably and irreparably defective.” Shame leads us to excise parts of ourselves, sometimes our entire selves, from feeling, from loving, from being connected to each other and the rest of nature. Shame can make us do awful things to ourselves and each other. So to transform the climate crisis, I think we have to find a way to transform our shame, and compassion is a key part of that. 

An incredible example of the power of compassion is the research of psychologist Jeanne Achterberg. In the study, Indigenous Hawaiian healers were invited to choose a person with whom they held a compassionate bond. These people were placed in functional MRI scanners and isolated from all forms of sensory contact with the healer. The healers then entered scanners in a building away from the receivers and were invited to start sending healing intentions to their subjects at two-minute intervals. The receivers had no way of discerning when these intentions were being sent, yet 10 times out of 11, at the exact time the healer sent the intention, specific areas of the brain associated with receiving loving emotions were activated. This is one of many examples of the power of compassion and how it can influence people and places far away from us.

4. A more expansive view of time

The scale of shifts occurring with climate change are so enormous compared to the short duration of our human lives, that we can and often do overlook them. Yet, to address the climate crisis, we must work with time scales that don’t center humans, welcoming in a more post-humanist lens. 

Spirituality might help us do just that. Modern neuroscience shows us that space and time assume different forms — less hard, rigid and linear forms — in the altered states of consciousness that are elicited by spirituality.

Many spiritual teachings are brimming with depictions of immensity that offer us a way of opening up to these often unfathomable time scales.

For example, consider Buddhism. The Saṃyutta Nikāya (a collection of Buddhist scriptures), talks about the length of an eon as longer than the time it would take to wear away an enormous mountain by rubbing it just once every hundred years with a fine piece of silk. And The Lotus Sutra invites us to imagine “hundreds of thousands of billions of myriads of countless eons.” 

Of course, Indigenous cultures are rich with wisdom on different relationships to time. Aboriginal cultures on the continent where I live talk about understandings of “deep time,” stretching far back, far before humans existed and far forward beyond when we cease to exist here. In the words of Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaraay woman Frances Peters-Little, deep time is this understanding that: “All things will outlast us, the land will change, and survive. … Yes, the land will be different. But new things will come of it.”

Deep time is inherent to Aboriginal understandings of The Dreaming (the spiritual world that accompanies the physical world). According to these understandings, ancestors speak to us in the present through climate events, as though those ancestors are still living today. This breaks down concepts of linear time, and seeks to warn us that the way we are living is out of balance with nature. 

I believe that key to climate recovery is this larger view of time, in which we draw on wisdom from ancestors, as many Indigenous cultures do, while also embracing our role as ancestors for future generations.

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5. Connection with something larger than us

Research shows that spiritual experiences are characterized by a sense of oneness and deep interconnectedness with others and the Earth. Feeling connected to something larger than one’s self bestows meaning, and purpose. It counters loneliness, depression and anxiety, and it’s critical to sustaining the long arcs required to work on systemic injustices like climate change. 

This connection could look like belief in a god (or gods), ancestors or the divinity of nature itself. And it cultivates in us a sense of being held, of being protected by something larger than ourselves. It grows a sense of awe and respect for the power of the natural world, and supports a more eco-centric view, in which humans are embedded within nature, rather than in control of it. 

Francis Weller says: “When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world … we become acutely aware that there is no ‘out there.’ We have one continuous existence, one shared skin.” Interestingly, Freud also reflected on this state of interconnectedness, saying that, at the beginning of life, the ego includes everything, then over time, it individuates. He noted that what remains is: “a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing — feeling, which corresponded to a once intimate bond between the ego/self and the world around it.” In other words, our well-being is intimately connected to our sense of interconnectedness to the world around us. 

6. Inner fluidity and diversity

As a part of nature, we are always changing. We are not one self, but a multitude of selves. Like fractals, we are part of the world and the world is part of us. 

Facilitator and systems thinker Michael Ventura says: “You’re not one person, you’re many people, you’re a community of moods and selves under one name. Parts of you aren’t even human, they’re part mammal, part reptile, part rose, part moon, part wind.”

To address the rapidly changing nature of our Earth, I think we have to embrace our own inner-changing natures, and learn to work with rather than against our inner fluidity and diversity. 

To do this, I think we have to let go of calcified thought patterns and identities, which are the very same drivers of the oppressive systems underpinning the climate crisis. We need to open up to witnessing techniques common to spiritual practices like meditation, where, rather than identifying with painful emotions and feelings, we notice and observe them and bring some compassionate understanding to them.

In this vein, I think we also need to be able to lean more into that beautiful fluid space between stimulus and response that Viktor Frankl so poignantly points out contains our freedom. 

Questions to ponder moving forward

Reflecting upon these traits, I am left wondering how we might embed more of these capacities into the climate movement today. Here are some questions I will leave you to ponder:

1. Honoring our pain and grief: How can we carve out more heartfelt spaces to hold and be with our pain and grief collectively, while not letting it overwhelm us?

2. Embracing our ecological selves: How do we treat ourselves and each other more like nature, rather than machines? How do we make sure we are giving ourselves enough time to be in nature as a means of nourishing ourselves so that we can continue to do the unending work needed to transform the climate crisis?

3. Leaning into gratitude and compassion: What practices can we build into our work and spaces to center gratitude and compassion despite the enormous loss and suffering that so many are experiencing?

4. Taking a longer view of time: How do we learn from ancestors and act in a way that honors our own role as ancestors for generations to come?

5. Connecting with something larger than you: What gives you a sense of connection to something larger than yourself? How can you connect with this regularly and help others do the same?

6. Working with your inner fluidity and diversity: Where might we be holding views and ways of being that are too rigid? How can we open up to parts of ourselves that have been marginalized and disavowed, such that we can be with and work with the diversity and complexity that is at the root of the climate crisis and its transformation? 

In conclusion, what if the climate crisis is an invitation to relate to ourselves, each other and the rest of nature more compassionately? What if it’s an invitation to embark upon a deep and powerful spiritual journey — to love more deeply, to hope more courageously, to welcome in parts of ourselves that we have marginalized, to find a way to be more aware, to journey to a place inside ourselves of greater wholeness? Ultimately, we will only find out if we are brave enough to take the first step.

This article What if the climate crisis is an invitation to deepen our spiritual selves? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/01/what-if-the-climate-crisis-is-an-invitation-to-deepen-our-spiritual-selves/