Cover of Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

Many of us feel called to respond to the ecological destruction of our planet, yet we feel overwhelmed, immobilized, and unable to deal realistically with the threats to life on Earth. Noted spiritual and environmental thinkers Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown contend that this crippling response to world crisis is a psychological defense mechanism that has been endemic since the years of the Cold War arms race, when we had to adapt within a single generation to the horrific possibility of nuclear holocaust.

Read more

Since its publication in 1983, Joanna Macy's book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Agehas sold nearly 30,000 copies and has been the primary resource for groups of men and women confronting the challenging realities of our time without succumbing to paralysis or panic. Coming Back to Lifeprovides a much needed update and expansion of this pioneering work. At the interface between spiritual breakthrough and social action, Coming Back to Lifeis eloquent and compelling as well as being an inspiring and practical guide. The first third of the book discusses with extraordinary insight the angst of our era, and the pain, fear, guilt and inaction it has engendered; it then points forward to the way out of apathy, tio "the work that reconnects". The rest of the book offers both personal counsel and easy-to-use methods for working with groups in a number of ways to profoundly affect peoples' outlook and ability to act in the world.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Mathew Fox

1. To Choose Life

2. The Greatest Danger: Apatheia, The Deadening of Mind & Heart

3. The Basic Miracle: Our True Nature & Power

4. The Work that Reconnects

5. Guiding Group Work

6. Affirmation: Coming from Gratitude

7. Despair Work: Owning & Honoring Our Pain for the World

8. The Shift: Seeing with New Eyes

9. Deep Time: Drawing on Past & Future Generations

10. The Council of All Beings: Rejoining the Natural World

11. Going Forth

12. Meditations for Coming Back to Life

Joanna Macyhas developed an international following over the course of 40 years as a speaker and workshop leader on Buddhist philosophy and the deep ecology movement

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 240 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future Shares environment, ecology, sustainability
  2. World as Lover, World as Self Shares Buddhism, ecology, environment
  3. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered Shares ecology, sustainability, environment
  4. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth/Healing the Mind Shares psychology, environment, ecology

“People who read Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World tend to reach for these next.”

  1. How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization
  2. Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
  3. Animism: Respecting the Living World
  4. The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups

“If you want more of the same (psychology about environment), start with these.”

  1. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy
  2. Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings
  3. Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century
  4. Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

“If it was the environment that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Dream of the Earth
  2. What We Leave Behind
  3. Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
  4. Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The New Ecological Order
  2. Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
  3. Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth
  4. Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis