"If we can practice opening to the crises in our personal lives as teaching moments, as evolutionary stepping stones, we will be far better prepared emotionally and spiritually for the trauma that collapse will foist on us and everyone around us."
? Carolyn Baker, Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times
Carolyn Baker sees uncertainty everywhere she looks: economies collapsing, run-away climate change and oil depletion. Yet she's been described as an insistent optimist. With a background as a psychotherapist, she has researched and written six books with the aim of helping people build inner resilience to deal with the possibility of the world they know collapsing.
Her work in speaks strongly to the global Transition Movement, of which Bowen in Transition is a part. We're about strengthening communities and building local capacity to face the economic, ecological, and energy crises that our planet is facing.
It has been recognized that this work needs to be complimented by spiritual and emotional assistance--facing up to the enormity of the environmental challenges we face today can lead to grief and anger.
The Transition Network website offers the following on inner transition:
"Does change start on the outside and work in, or start on the inside and work out? From the very beginning of the Transition movement, people from both perspectives have, literally, sat round the same table and worked together. Both perspectives are true: the outer creates the inner, and the inner creates the outer. What's more, some would argue, in coming together we will be working to heal divisions and 'splits' that may well be at the root of the mess we are in."
Transition is not gloomy and dire finger-pointing, nor stoic resignation, but an unabashed celebration of the kind of world it's still in our power to imagine. Carolyn Baker's work harnesses the power of myth, story, drumming and ritual to move us beyond the head and hand aspects of Transition to the deeper story it calls us to enter. There will be a free talk on the evening of Friday, November 8th and a workshop on the following day. If you want to to register for the Saturday workshopjoin in this exploration, please contact Brian Hoover (604-947-2283). Friday night's talk is free.
