clairewordley_author — Claire Wordley

Claire studied Zoology at the University of Sheffield, and completed a PhD on the impact of agriculture on tropical bats at the University of Leeds. She has since worked at the RSPB and University of Cambridge, and is now juggling freelance writing and activism. Follow her on Twitter @clairefrwordley

It’s hard to pick the worst moment of my ecological despair. Maybe when I left a three-day ecology conference after an hour, because I couldn’t bear that everyone knew about the climate and ecological crises but could function normally.

Maybe when laying my head on the beautifully swelling belly of my pregnant best friend, crying over what the world might become. Incredibly, she is still my friend. When my boyfriend also succumbed to grief as his country went up in flames, we clung to each other as if drowning, some days only just managing to keep each other afloat. Suffice to say the horror and guilt over what some of our species are doing to the beautiful, complicated, life-giving planet we call home has been at times almost unbearable. I know I’m not the only one who has felt this way.

My intense emotions were a useful catalyst to reduce my emissions and increase my activism, but they took a heavy toll. A therapist helped me to bring my emotions down to more manageable levels, and finding an activist community of like-minded people was also supportive. However, there were months where I felt I would never again experience joy that was not shot through with a stab of sadness.

I felt that there was a dark and knotted strand braided into my life, pulsing and twisting to remind me that everything I loved was threatened. I walked through the woods, smiling at the birds chasing and singing with all the zest of spring, and then wondered whether they would mistime their broods due to climate change. During Europe’s blistering heatwaves I relished the shade of those same woods, but saw seedlings wither and die, disease spread through the trees, and huge branches fall from the beeches. I normally love summer, but I longed for it to end so the trees could drink. I felt dislocated from a lot of people I knew, as if I was living a parallel reality of temperature graphs and droughts and fires that was separated from their happy normality by a shimmer in the air, almost invisible but utterly impenetrable.

Even when I was functioning well on the surface, my emotions drove me to work at an unhealthy intensity to fit in paid work and activism. I saw others around me do the same and of course many of us crashed and burned out, some for months on end. Part of me wanted to give up, to turn my face away from the problem. I wondered how people kept going not just month after month, but year after year, decade after decade. What is needed to walk on the tightrope of action, falling neither into the feather-bed comfort of denial nor the tar-pit paralysis of overwhelming fear?

Burning despair; fires in Bolivia, August 2019 / Photo by Ipa Ibañez

The climate and ecological catastrophes around us may be relatively new, but the emotions we struggle with are ancient. We are not the first people to be saddened by the destruction of nature, or of our own kind. We are not the first humans to look for ways to cope with the surges and storms of anger, sorrow, and fear. In the lingering burn out I experienced at the end of last year, I turned to an old philosophy; Buddhism, specifically Vipassana meditation.

I went on the course mostly because I had three friends, all environmental scientists, all fierce champions of Mother Earth, and all wonderful people to be around, telling me a Vipassana course could help. I read up a little and liked Vipassana’s emphasis on leading a moral life, helping others both human and not. I’ve seen some of the tangents that ‘mindfulness’ has gone down in western culture, and didn’t want to learn to be a calmer and more effective CEO of a destructive company.

Vipassana courses are free to attend so I signed up for a 10-day course, figuring that at worst I would lose a couple of weeks and a bus fare. What I found was an old philosophy that I could use to address my very modern problems. Sure, Vipassana does not explicitly teach us how to engage in collective action, or what to do in the face of ecological disaster. Indeed, I can see the temptation to use meditation as a way to escape the outer world and focus inwards. However, I also see (as others have before me) the practical and philosophical ways it can help environmental activists, and those who are harmed by their ecological despair.

You are stronger than your pain

I understand why climate deniers want to believe that everything is fine, or why people who know about big issues draw an intellectual line around them and don’t allow themselves to feel anything. Deep and honest emotional processing of the situation we are in is extremely painful.

Those of us who think about the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, the resurgence of fascism, and the ways they intersect, can get paralysed and overwhelmed by the scale of all that is wrong. We can decide that it is too raw to put our hearts on the line day after day, and retreat back into our ordinary lives.

Vipassana teaches us to sit with sensations, including pain, and to remain equanimous. We are used to running from our pain, distracting ourselves from it, numbing it, and sometimes even feeling bad for being in pain in the first place. As an expert in all these strategies, it was strange and radical for me to sit with it, to say, OK, I have this pain, that’s alright. This pain is not me. It just is, and I can sit with it, at least for a little longer. Little by little, I can expand my capacity to look into the abyss without falling in.

Vipassana helps me to feel less defined by my dark and knotted emotions. I don’t worry about them, or try to suppress them, or block them out. I accept that they sometimes come up when I think I should be happy, I accept that they are painful, and somehow that makes them less powerful. The storms no longer shut everything else from my brain. The dark strand in my life is slimmer; it does not warp the rest of the weave.

Climate change and LGBTQ+ activist Jay Michaelson writes that Vipassana helped him find more ‘inner spaciousness’ to deal with serious issues and activist challenges, and that feels very true to me. I feel I am growing big enough to hold my pain more easily. Furthermore, things which stress me about organising – the overflowing chat channels, the huge, claustrophobia-inducing protest crowds – overwhelm me a little less. I have more capacity to be uncomfortable.

Your suffering doesn’t help anyone else

Last summer, after a desperate fortnight of writing, crying, emailing, calling, going on radio and TV, and donating for the fires in the Amazon and Chiquitano forests, my boyfriend decided enough was enough and we were going to the lake. It was the middle of an oppressive heatwave, we were exhausted, and we had done all we could from the other side of an ocean. It felt incredible to wade into the cool green water, as if it could wash away the images of burned anteaters seared into my eyelids, the sleepless nights, the tension in my muscles. Yet I resisted the restorative properties of the water.

‘I feel bad about enjoying today.’ I said ‘People we know are firefighting without proper equipment. We are in this lovely water, when they can’t get water to put out the fires.’

‘That’s bullshit.’ He replied. ‘Whether you suffer or enjoy this day, it doesn’t make any difference to the fires. It only makes a difference to you, and to me, because you’ll make me suffer too.’

Firefighter in Bolivia, August 2019 / Photo by Ipa Ibañez

I have met other people who fall into this trap. We feel that because others are suffering, our personal happiness breaks our solidarity with them. If you have ever gone down that line of thinking, then please stop right fucking there. Being tired, despairing, and anxious for a long time is likely to cause us to burn out, switch off, and stop engaging with important causes. The Vipassana course helped make that obvious to me, but, really, careful observation would do just as well.

Vipassana teaches that looking after your own wellbeing matters because you can’t help others if you’re a mess. Have you ever been in a meeting where the snappiness or sadness of one person affected everyone else? I have. One of my favourite activists is known to everyone as ‘Happy’. Every time you see him, you feel like you made his day just by showing up. However tired or damp or cold you are, you forget it when you talk to him. His infectious joy doesn’t undermine the campaign for climate justice – it supports it, by making us all want to be there with him, and by giving us energy when we need it most.

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about Vipassana is that when I meditate I am happier, and that this makes me nicer to those closest to me. I’m pretty sure this is good for all of us. We can’t all be Happy, but we can recognise that being happy, and sharing that happiness, is not a sin but a requisite step to making the world a little better.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional

Vipassana teaches that 100% of your misery comes from inside. Yeah, I struggle with that one too. I would always have told you that I was suffering because people were hacking down the forests, filling the rivers with poison, and beating up those who resist – not because of anything inside me. But the Vipassana course explained that while bad things would always happen in the external world, we could learn to not multiply and compound our suffering internally.

As I went through the course, I started to think that those bastards in the fossil fuel industry (no, I am not always full of compassion, I’m working on it) are working to steal my future. I am going to fight them every step of the way, but I’m not going to lose my present, my now. I am going to choose to love my life and enjoy every moment as much as I can, because they can’t take that from me. I will fight them with a smile on my face. Even if I can’t always accept that 100% of my misery comes from within, maybe I can accept that 50% is internal – good. I can work on that 50% and be 50% happier.

Have compassion for those who destroy

During the course, I was walking in a small grove of trees when I was struck by a surprising feeling; compassion for the people destroying our beautiful world. I stopped still, and explored the feeling. Vipassana teaches that our suffering comes from our cravings and aversions. People who crave endlessly, even when they have unimaginable wealth, can’t be happy people. How hollow they must feel that they must keep filling their lives with stuff, even as the world turns against them! I thought about the CEO of Shell, in my mind a hazy figure made up of grey hair and a suit. I felt compassion. I thought of Donald Trump, tweeting on his gold toilet. I felt compassion. I thought of Jair Bolsonaro, and I had to work for that one, but I managed a drop or two.

I started to worry that this meditation stuff was going to make me give up activism, but realised I still wanted to act against the planet-eaters – I just didn’t want to live a life full of anger. Buddhist texts compare anger to a burning branch – it hurts not just those it is thrown at, but those who hold it. I didn’t need to burn up with fury to care. I could act strongly without hate, fuelling my actions with love for this blue-green marble and the miraculous, teeming web of life wrapped around her.

There are just too many people to be angry at, and we can burn ourselves out with white-hot rage. Anger may be a useful propellent to get us started, but I suspect that it is better for sprints than for marathons. Buddhist monk and social activist Thich Nhat Hanh says that a grassroots movement will only be effective if activists deal with their own anger, rather than projecting it onto others. Reflecting on people I knew who railed furiously against car drivers and shoppers while ignoring their own damaging behaviours, this resonated with me. I resolved to stop hurling my anger around so freely.

Jay Michaelson writes that Vipassana helped him remain engaged, by helping him to stay calm and not get angry even when people abused him in the streets. He refers to the need for ‘contemplative fitness’ in having tough, engaging, compassionate conversations with people who disagree with you, and how these conversations are some of the most important things we can do right now. Whether we work on compassion to save our own sanity or to be more effective in dealing with others, it seems like a quality worth cultivating.

This too will pass

The word ‘anicca’ is repeated in every Vipassana meditation. It reminds us that everything, ourselves included, is impermanent and constantly changing. Thich Nhat Hahn, a Buddhist in a slightly different school of meditation, says that if we take a long enough view the ecological crisis itself is impermanent. ‘For us it is very alarming and urgent, but for Mother Earth, if she suffers she knows she has the power to heal herself even if it takes 100 million years.’

This seems bleak, but in some ways I found it helpful. If everything is impermanent then fossil fuel capitalism, too, shall pass. I will work like hell alongside many others to ensure that it ends in a way that leads to more life and more equality, but it is going to end one way or another, and I take some comfort in that. This is not a reason not to act within the small lifetimes we are given, but it may give some solace to those who are suffering right now. I also find it liberating to see each moment as something fresh and new – if everything is always changing, then maybe we can make it change for the better.

Nature finding a way / Image by skeeze from Pixabay

Moving forwards

To learn more about Vipassana, listen to its foremost teacher, Mr S.N. Goenka. To understand how meditation can intersect with environmentalism, read Thich Nhat Hanh on how we plunder the Earth’s resources to use as sticking plasters for our unmet emotional needs.

But ultimately, Vipassana teaches us that we only learn through the experience of meditating. A lot of what I learned from the course I could have told you beforehand; what I really gained was moving beyond the academic to change my responses on an emotional level. I think this emphasis on experience also teaches us something about the crises we are in; if we understand them with our brains, but fail to link that to physical and emotional experiences, then we won’t act appropriately.

I am not a meditation expert. I am at best a kindergarten level Vipassana meditator, but I can tell you that even being a kindergartener has made me significantly calmer, happier, more resilient, and, most importantly, more patient and kind with those around me. It has helped me to put the broken pieces of my heart back together without losing what I learned from the breaking. I’m not sure it would have been right to start a meditation practice when my emotions were at their most intense – I am glad I was able to access a therapist then. Meditation wasn’t the only thing that helped; people around me, physical activity, and nature itself all continue to support me, and I know I still have a long way to go in terms of being as strategic, organised, and tranquil as I’d like to be. But Vipassana taught me that I have a surprisingly deep well of calm and joy to draw on inside me; and that, I think, is pretty good for the price of a bus fare.

Vipassana courses are run all over the world; I went to one in Triebel, in Germany.

Coping with ecological grief