Despair and Empowerment Workshop: Cultivating Resilience in Dark Times

The pervasive pressure in the climate space to always remain hopeful or optimistic can create a cognitive dissonance inside ourselves and our movements as the climate emergency and all of the intersecting injustices escalate exponentially with no resolution in sight.

If we do express our feelings of despair or hopelessness, we may fear being exiled into the realm of apathetic doomers (aka the fossil fuel lobby’s newest diversion tactic). This dissonance, and subsequent silence, can leave us feeling isolated, burnt out and disembodied from our very perception of the reality all around us.

But what if masking our feelings of despair, rage, fear and hopelessness is more harmful than feeling them? How might collectively witnessing and expressing these emotions unearth an untapped sense of clarity, energy and resilience inside of ourselves, our movements and our communities?

These are the questions we’ll be exploring together in this dynamic Despair and Empowerment workshop. Based on The Work That Reconnects, a set of collective practices designed to help us process our distress, we’ll create a container for feelings that might be taboo in other climate spaces and explore how to cultivate resilience, community and collective action even in the absence of hope or any guarantees of positive outcomes.

You can expect a mixture of individual, small group and large group exercises with options to take your own space as needed. Please bring a pen and journal!