Eco-anxiety is mental distress caused by climate change and environmental degradation.

Humans are not separate from our environment. The global situation and the human situation are intricately linked. Planetary health impacts human mental health and psychological well-being.

If you’re feeling overwhelm, grief, outrage, dread, alienation, or despair in response to the state of the world, it’s very important that you find opportunities to connect with others who share your concerns. Not talking about it can lead to feeling isolated. And, when those around you continue to live as if nothing is wrong, it can be easy to question and doubt your perceptions and feelings, which only exacerbates your confusion, paralysis, and despair.

Your pain signals that you are sensitive and awake to the daunting systemic predicaments faced by humanity and all of life at this time.

I can help you to stay present with your feelings and to listen for the deep human needs and values that give rise to them.

Through careful, compassionate attention, you will learn to calm and soothe yourself, so that your responses are not driven by fight-or-flight reactions, but emerge from a balanced integration of your multiple concerns and capacities.

I believe that the current global situation is calling for humans to cultivate the internal strength and courage to turn towards the situation with eyes wide open, to see what’s going on without being blinded or paralyzed by fear, guilt, blame, grief, or wishful thinking. When we see reality as it is, that clear seeing will point towards action that does not come from the worldview (separation and control) that created the problem in the first place.

The pain you feel in response to our planetary predicament carries the seeds of your most inspired and creative response-ability.

It points you towards what you love - and would hate to lose - the most. And that love carries tremendous energy and motivation to use the life you have to serve life in your own unique, and however small, way.

Suggested reading:

Pontoon Archipelago or: How I learned to stop worrying and love collapse by James Allen

“Think of a tree.

When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level, it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately it has no independent existence. When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe.

The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight – all form part of this tree.

As you begin to think about the tree more and more, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is, that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else, and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing.”
 

— Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying