We Are The Great Turning

What’s really going on in the world right now? “Business as Usual”—a comforting narrative in which industrial growth and progress overcomes all? “The Great Unraveling” —a planet careening toward inevitable destruction? Joanna‘s work introduces a third story, “The Great Turning”—a paradigm shift on an epic scale, the creation of a just and life-sustaining society. The stakes are high, the outcome uncertain. This conversation invites you to devote yourself to the Great Turning even as you grasp the truth in all three stories.

In this episode:

• Three outlooks on these times: Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning
• What’s behind all three—how they affect us in conscious and unconscious ways
• What the Great Turning means, and how to devote yourself to it
• Bonus Exercise: Envisioning the Great Turning

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

As Joanna Macy approaches the end of a long life dedicated to healing our imperiled planet, she begins the conversation with Jessica Serrante, her student and dear friend, “standing afresh with what it’s like to live on Earth at this moment.” As we look into the face of the climate crisis, injustice, and war, difficult feelings arise; all are welcomed.

You are invited to join them at Joanna’s kitchen table, and invited into a deeper sense of your belonging and love for our world.

In this episode:

• How to connect with the great possibilities that still exist for us even in these precarious times Joanna reflects on her awakening of environmental consciousness
• Jess reflects on how meeting Joanna changed her life
• Love, laughter, heartbreak, and the Work That Reconnects
• Bonus Exercise: “Open Sentences”—a practice for partners

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

This bonus episode will support you to take the main insights from Episode 2, “The Three Stories of Our Time,” deeper into your life.

In Episode 2, we talked about the three stories of our time: Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning. All three stories are true, and we can choose to give ourselves to the Great Turning—to building a more just and life-sustaining society.

We need inspiring visions for the kind of world we want to live in that can motivate us, move us to action, and so that we know what it looks like to succeed. So, in this bonus episode, we’re going to envision, in detail, what the world might be like if the Great Turning really were the predominant story of our time.

All you need is a quiet place where you can sit and close your eyes. We hope you’ll do this exercise with someone else, so that you can talk together about your experience after you finish. It might also help to have something to write with and on.

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

Now we get to what may be the toughest part of reckoning with our planet’s situation: dealing with numbness, grief, and despair. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the many crises around us, and natural to want to numb ourselves to the pain.

Joanna and Jess speak with great vulnerability and candor about what it takes to navigate our darkest feelings—and the strength and beauty that can be found when we honor our pain.

Trigger Warning: In this episode, we discuss suicide.

In this episode:

• When it feels like our pain could swallow us whole, it helps to remember that all feelings come and go
• Desperation can take us to dark places, but we are more than our despair
• Numbness—Jess opens up about her familiar tactic for escaping pain
• Our pain becomes sacred when we allow it to deepen our connection with the world
• Bonus Exercise: Breathing Through

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

This bonus episode will support you to take the main insights from Episode 4: There is No Future if We Go Numb deeper into your life.

This bonus is a recording of Joanna leading a meditation called Breathing Through, recorded at a retreat in 2006. In it, she’ll guide you to create space to acknowledge and honor the pain for the world that you carry without numbing or getting overwhelmed. All you’ll need for this bonus exercise is a place where you can close your eyes and relax.

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.