Sept 11-13| DEEP ECOLOGY | Coffs | with John Seed and friends

The Rainforest Information Centre presents DEEP ECOLOGY 

with John Seed, Niamh Murray, Feya Durkin & Brother Tenzin

Deta

• At North Coast Regional Botanic Garden - Coffs Harbour

• Tickets are sliding scale from $100-$500  ($100 for students or unemployed, $500 if you've got a great job or wealthy, or something in between) 7 to 9pm Friday, 9am to 9pm Saturday (lunch and dinner provided) 9 am to 4pm Sunday lunch provided.

• Stay in your own home if you live nearby or stay in a campground or  a nearby b&b.

• Vegetarian meals will be provided, gluten-free and vegan options by request after booking. 

• 25% of the proceeds will be donated to the Rainforest Information Centre.

What the workshop will cover

What we call experiential Deep Ecology in Australia is the same as what is called The Work That Reconnects in the United States. In this workshop, we follow the spiral that follows The Work that Reconnects, starting and ending with Gratitude, with these three stations in between:

• Honour Our Pain for the World

• Seeing with New Eyes

• Going Forth

FROM JOHN SEED

I have worked for worldwide rainforests since 1979. Although many of our efforts succeeded, for every forest saved 100 have disappeared. Clearly, you can’t save the planet one forest at a time. It's one green Earth or a bowl of dust. Without a profound change of consciousness, we can kiss the forests goodbye, the ones we’ve "saved" alongside the rest.

Deep ecology is key to the change we need. To deep ecology, underlying all the symptoms of the environmental crisis lies a psychological or spiritual root – the illusion of separation from the rest of the natural world which stems from anthropocentrism or human-centeredness.

Conditioned since the Old Testament to “subdue and dominate” nature, the modern psyche is radically alienated from the air, water and soil which underpin life and this is reflected in the rapid shredding of all-natural systems in the name of economic development. Deep ecology reminds us that the world is not a pyramid with humans on top, but a web. We, humans, are but one strand in that web and as we destroy this web, we destroy the foundations for all complex life including our own.

While we maintain a self-image created in the matrix of anthropocentric culture, a shrunken and illusory sense of self that doesn't include the air and water and soil, we will experience nature as "outside" our self and fail to recognise that nature "out there" and nature "in here" are one and the same.

Many people INTELLECTUALLY realise that we are inseparable from Nature and that the sense of separation that we feel is socially conditioned and illusory.

But as the late Arne Naess, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Oslo University, the man who coined the term "Deep Ecology" wrote: "it is not enough to have ecological ideas, we have to have an ecological identity, ecological self".

But how can we nourish our ecological identity? In answer to such questions,  Joanna Macy and I developed a series of experiential deep ecology rituals called the “Council of All Beings” and in 1986, with Arne Naess and Pat Flemming,  wrote a  book called Thinking Like A Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings (which has been translated into 12 languages). Along with others, we have been facilitating these workshops around the world since then.

In this workshop we remember our rootedness in nature, recapitulate our evolutionary journey and experience the fact that every cell in our body is descended in an unbroken chain 4 billion years old, through fish that learned to walk the land, reptiles whose scales turned to fur and became mammals, evolving through to the present.

We further extend our sense of identity in the Council of All Beings itself where we find an ally in the natural world, make a mask to represent that ally, and allow the animals and plants and landscapes to speak through us. We are shocked at the very different view of the world that emerges from their dialogue. Creative suggestions for human actions emerge and we invoke the powers and knowledge of these other life-forms to empower us in our lives.

One of the rituals we will share is honouring our pain for the world: we grieve for all that is being torn from our world, the species lost, the landscapes destroyed. Only if we can allow ourselves to feel the pain of the Earth, can we be effective in Her healing. This is why the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, has said that in order to heal the Earth,  "the most important thing that we can do is to hear, inside ourselves,  the sounds of the Earth crying". 

This workshop enables us to find an end to the illusion of separation and experience our rootedness in the living Earth.

Niamh Murray is an environmentalist, activist, facilitator and founder of Enviro Mentality, an initiative dedicated to restoring our connection to Soil, Self and Society. Through her in-person workshops and emotive poetry, she seeks to remind people of their true nature, before the oppressive systems took hold. Niamh currently lives in an intentional community that is focused on food sovereignty, community resilience and building parallel systems, and facilitates Deep Ecology across NSW.

Feya Durkin hails from Aotearoa but has called Australia home for the past couple years. Her deep appreciation for the earth started young, growing up camping with her family and spending time on the untamed West Coast of Te Waipounamu. 

Feya is currently interning for John Seed, living at Narara Ecovillage. She’s been spending her days helping in the garden, swimming in the dam, walking in Strickland, learning guitar, making pickles and whatever else catches her attention, as well as helping John out with whatever schemes he’s scheming. John’s son River says she’s ‘fun to have around, a hard worker, a good person and a bit annoying.’

Ven. Ngawang Tenzin (Dr. Alex Anderson) Began with an ecologist’s understanding of interdependence, but the rainforest soon led him to Buddhist meditation.  Now ordained as a monk in the Sakya Tibetan tradition, he has also studied and practiced meditation under Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village in France, at Mountain Spring near Sydney, and in Myanmar at Pa Auk Tawya.  Also ordained in the Plum Village Order of Interbeing, an engaged Buddhist approach to the bodhisattva path, his practice is informed by Theravadin, Zen, and Vajrayana methods of meditation and mindfulness, as well as Hatha Yoga, Deep Ecology, and his deep love of wild places.  He currently lives In Australia, on Gumbaynggirr country on the Dorrigo Plateau, where he has a project to co-create community space for meditation, forest restoration and nature connection: http://www.gaiaforest.org

For more information, contact deepeningsvic@gmail.com