These last few days have been filled with a lot of work, a process of gradual adjustment, and a lot of joy associated with all the support I’ve received from many of you and Dharma friends from all over.
Something I have also been exploring actively, as a source of support, is my contact with the environment, the elements, and the plants and trees around. This is a deliberate exploration that has been crucial for my mental wellbeing over the last 6 months. Although I expected myself to feel worse at times, due to the shifting environments, unclear prospects and being far away from most friends, actively attending to the natural elements has been a huge source of inner nourishment and stability.
This practice—or, better yet, this body of practices—is intimately connected to what is now more and more often referred to as EcoDharma. When asked what this word refers to, I’d say it’s a system of knowledge and practice that arises at the intersection of three questions:
How can our contemplative practice support us in protecting the Earth, its natural world and its inhabitants?
How can our environmental activism be a spiritual practice in itself?
and
How can our contact with nature support and nourish both our mental health and the more profound insights brought about by contemplative inquiry?
I like to further simplify these questions into two points: how can we breathe out, offering something meaningful to the planet and the natural world, and how can we breathe in, enjoying our role as a part of natural systems. Both would be crucial for a meaningful engagement with EcoDharma: its in their balance that we are protected from both complacent nature-gazing that ignores the urgency of climate action and from the burning out that would inevitably happen if we failed to nourish our body and mind properly.
My own interest in this field of knowledge — a discipline that integrates multiple forms of practice and understanding, including that of systems thinking and deep ecology — arose in approximately 2017, when I spent my first few months slowly approaching the element-related practices preserved by the Tibetan spiritual tradition; some of those came from the lineage of Indian Buddhism and some were indigenous to the Tibetan plateau and preserved by the Bön tradition. This exploration kept slowly unfolding as I spent years teaching introductory classes on secular ethics, inevitably creeping into EcoDharma territory: indeed, one can’t imagine one’s ethical system to be comprehensive unless it includes at least some principles related to how we deal with the environment. As public awareness of the urgency of action kept increasing (even though its still infinitely far from an optimal level), so did the amount of EcoDharma elements I would try to incorporate into the humble classes I’d facilitate.
This Fall (starting in less than 2 weeks), for the first time, I am honored to present a course specifically on EcoDharma with the Tibet House US. This will be a joint communal exploration, rather than a transmission of some knowledge that is fixed in format and content.
Indeed, almost any element of any authentic Dharma – whether Buddhist, Hindu, Christian or that of any other tradition including secular humanism – can be used in service of our environmental work, and the process of contemplating that is something I want to initiate for all the participants.
However, beyond that, there are some key teachings of the Buddhist tradition — accessible to anyone, really — that can serve as a powerful source of sustenance in our work to rebalance our mind and become a more harmonious element in planetary interdependence. I very much looking forward to fine-tuning and exploring our practice of those.
EcoDharma work, like all socially transformative endeavours, is necessarily communal (while also personal), and in meeting for 6 sessions to explore some key topics and play around with some key practices, we are forming an intentional (albeit online / invisible) community that would continue to exist indefinitely—a community of people who care and are looking at the arising challenges with both spaciousness and a level of creative zest.
If that seems appealing to you, I am hoping that this course—and any future offerings around this topic—would bring you a sense of meaning and an experience of joy.
(On a side note, a humble invitation: if you know anyone who might be interested in this course/topic, please invite them — the more the merrier