If you are interested in attending any of these workshops please email me at
The Work that Reconnects
This is beautiful group process designed by the late Joanna Macy. She leads us through four ‘stops’ on a Spiral. These are Gratitude, Grief, Seeing with New Eyes and ending with Going Forth. It creates an island in time where, removed from distractions and demands, we can focus together long enough to reach and explore our deep responses to the dangers and fear we may feel in the world today.
These four reflective pauses are held within her wider philosophy of the three states that we co occupy as humans, shuffling one to the other depending on the phenomena present: Joanna names these states are The Great Unravelling, The Great Turning and Business as Usual.
This work can take place as a 2 to 3 hour session, a day, a weekend or even weeklong workshops.
You can read more about The Work that Reconnects here.
Copyright Dori Midnight
Climate Cafe Listening Circles
I hold these spaces for small groups of 6-8 people face to face.
As it becomes more evident that the climate and ecological breakdown are a clear and present danger to our safety and wellbeing, we increasingly need to talk about what our changing world means for us in terms of impacts at personal, family and societal level. To have these practical conversations many of us need first to be supported in exploring some complex feelings and thoughts which may often be taboo and hard to talk about.
With sturdy enough support structures in place, most people can sustain challenging feelings without either dissociating and numbing or going into blind panic. They can engage with difficult truths whilst staying connected and grounded.
A climate café listening circle aims to be such a structure - a container that is strong enough to allow the exploration of fear, anxiety, and other emotions such as anger, helplessness, sadness, grief or depression.
We use the word ‘cafe’ to evoke the simple friendliness and warmth that happens when humans share food and drink together.
In this friendly setting, the circle focuses on feelings rather than action
It is not a space for discussing or debating climate policy, climate science or climate action.
Words taken from Climate Psychology Alliance.
Francis Weller’s Grief Ritual Spaces:
"There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried" - Oscar Romero
This work of honouring the sacred ground of grief that affects us all at various stages of life as loss and transitions and is drawn for the Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow. He describes it as:
“Where there is sorrow,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “there is holy ground.” These gatherings are an invitation to enter the sacred ground of grief and encounter the ways it enables us to walk in this world with its attendant harsh realities of loss and death. We discover how sorrow shakes us and breaks us open to depths of soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by the experience of sorrow, adding substance and weight to our world. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. In a very real way grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the heart that knows sorrow that is also capable of genuine love.
These rituals are held in community, and require a full day and evening to be held in care and be given time to ‘coax our stories into the visible world where they can be held within the healing embrace of community’.
Please explore more of Francis Wellers wonderful work here. And his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francs Weller.
