The path to intentional action and justice is through our emotions by accessing body and soul - ours and Earths.
What is Climate Resilience?
In a climate changed world, climate resilience is our ability to adjust, adapt, and transform ourselves in response to our environment and to transform our environment in relationship with community and nature.
Resilience isn’t about bouncing back. There is no bounce back. Not for us as humans. Not for Earth either.
Our ability to be climate resilient can be developed and is not inherent nor reactive. Resilience is a built competency that involves knowledge, mindsets, skill sets, and behaviors in order to dream a new future together with Earth.
Embodied Climate Action
Collectively, we are experiencing a climate justice crisis. Individually, the crisis impacts us variously.
This can show up as eco-anxiety, climate grief and anger, trauma, shame, and paralysis.
Embodied Climate Action is the ability and capacity to develop strategies to engage, communicate, and lead climate actions individually and collectively that avoids physical and psychological bypassing. To take Embodied Climate Action you need to learn how to befriend and use your eco-anxiety, grief, rage, and despair for action.
To reconnect your humanness back to nature and promote well being. To be involved in advocacy and action work without burnout. To engage your creativity for a better future than where we are headed.
The old paradigms of deficit models, shame, and info overload aren’t effective in imagining climate forward action. We need more embodied and connection within and to community.
If you’re not sure what to do or how to do more. If you feel overwhelmed or even filled with eco-anxiety. You’re not alone. 2/3rd of people in the US think we should do more to address climate. 51% of Americans feel helpless when it comes to climate change. 64% of people globally suffer from eco-anxiety, defined as the inevitable or even healthy response to our collective climate emergency.
The Bad/Good news? We are both the problem and the solution.
But most of us though don’t know what to do beyond recycling and reusable grocery bags. And we are at crisis point now and need to know what to do more of to make a difference for the next generation’s wellbeing and livelihood.
Climate change is a topic and issue for all of us within our local communities and families. You don’t need to be a scientist to figure it out, you just need the tailored information and a connection to nature and your own values to create a personal plan of action. By understanding of the causes and impacts from climate change, we develop the ability to build resiliency and hopefulness over the inaction of stress, anxiety, and overwhelm.
By feeling into our bodies and emotions, we can process into and through our rage, anxiety, and grief so that we feel more in touch with ourselves and the pain within and around us in Nature. Deeply connecting allows us to build up tolerance and resiliency so that we may feel empowered to create our own action plan that supports our passions.
What is Climate Coaching VS Sustainability?
Climate coaching or climate-aware therapy is a new subarea growing in the US and currently more established in the UK and Australia. Climate-aware coaching supports the integration of mind-body-soul on individual and collective levels. As a climate coach, I am interested in how we as humxns, individually and collectively, experience climate crisis in our bodies, emotions, and mind with each informing the other and interconnected with Nature. I believe the healing of ‘soul & soil’ comes from learning how to grow our tolerance and resiliency for feeling all the hard and good feels so that we can stay engaged in climate action work longer. Skipping right to action feels to me like emotional or spiritual bypassing, the desire to skip the pain and mess of growth so that you have solutions or the right performance.
This is in comparison to sustainability work where the focus is often on practices to reduce the carbon footprint. While reduction is critical work, especially in western developed nations who are producing far beyond their share, it is a narrow perspective of bandaid like fixes rather than a mindset shift that gets us as humans back in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the Planet’s ecosystems.
While carbon reduction can be an outcome of climate-aware therapy or coaching, the emphasis, for me, is on the process over the product so that all decisions are consciously decided through a climate perspective. It’s less about ‘never fly again’, although that may be your switch, it’s more about if I make this decision, what is the impact on climate and my local community and how do I feel when I make this decision. It’s about accountability and responsibility for being an interconnected being in Earth’s ecosystem. A focus on process is likely to shift outcomes already. It’s building a regenerative mindset into all of our choices and demanding action from systems and companies to end exploitative capitalism.
Not so easy and simple, right? That’s why we need support and community.
A trauma-informed understanding of climate crisis normalizes a range mental, emotional, and bodied responses such as:
Climate-related grief (often understood as past and present focused)
Eco-anxiety (often understood as future focused)
Climate trauma (inclusive of primary, secondary, epigenetic and ever present)
Disconnection from nature (historical, geographical, and cultural)
Climate stress responses and windows of tolerance
Healing is individual, community/contextual, and environmental.
And an embodied approaches to this work allows us to create greater awareness within so that we become more connected out. It creates a more lasting shift than solution-focused only. Solutions are great and we already know all we need to in order to prevent the planet from warming beyond the point of no return. And we need to shift now.
My approach comes together from training and practices in mindfulness and meditation, pranayama and breathe work, eco-psychology, somatic trauma approaches, nature-based interventions, gender studies, organizational sociology, gardening and beekeeping, and more because I am a life long learner and lover of resources.
Embodied Climate Action Events
Adult class series Cultivate Critical Hope through Connection to Self, Nature and Community at The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, CO (bimonthly in 2024)
Being in nature and with community are two age-old forms of mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Each workshop in this year-long series is focused around a seasonal theme. We'll explore our inner responses to our collective climate emergency so that we may regenerate resilience for ourselves, our community and Earth. Tamara Yakaboski, PhD, guides participants through reflection, discussion, and mind-body activities to cultivate critical hope from our eco-grief and anxiety.
Climate Resilience: From Eco-Stress to Embodied Climate Action, Osher LifeLong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Colorado State University (fall 2024)
This course delves into the foundation of building individual climate resilience and how various climate-related stressors manifest as thoughts, emotions, and experiences within our nervous system. Recognizing the impact of climate stressors on mental, emotional, and physical well-being, we explore strategies to enhance personal and community resilience. Each session guides participants through practical exercises aimed at building a climate resilience toolbox. These include techniques such as writing and journaling, fostering a connection with nature, mindfulness practices, and embodiment exercises.
Throughout the course, we will explore the evolving landscape of climate stress responses and their implications for well-being. By delving into common responses and understanding the underlying emotions and mindsets, participants will develop the skills needed to support themselves and others. This series offers a transformative journey, with each week moving from a different state: from dissociation, denial, and cynicism through the freeze of hopelessness, guilt, and shame to activating anger, rage, and fear so that we land firmly in embodied climate action upon completion.
Sample of past workshops and events:
Climate Justice for counselors and therapists @ Palo Alto University, department of counseling
The amount of the US population who are “alarmed” and “concerned” has doubled between 2014 and 2020 (Center for Climate Change Communication). Now with the release of the dire news from the IPCC this year, the rates of eco-anxiety and climate related grief continue to rise substantially. Individuals' mental health is impacted in ways not seen before and sometimes not understood or connected. Our collective climate crisis is complex for counselors who need to work through their own emotions and actions as well as support the eco-anxiety and climate grief of clients and communities. The climate crises also exacerbates and ongoing racial and gender injustices as it is a 'threat multiplier' and connects with the broader umbrella of social justice.
Climate Crisis for Higher Education and Student Affairs Faculty Roundtable Discussions
Open discussions for folks affiliated with higher ed and/or student affairs graduate programs. 83% of US Gen-Z are concerned about climate and the vast majority recognize the impact to their physical and mental health. A global youth study found that 75% of respondents aged 16-25 felt “the future is frightening” and contributed their anxiety to climate change. The urgency is now. What has been missing broadly, and especially in higher ed outside of specific pockets, is how to be prepared personally and professionally with psychological resilience and nature-spiritual-community skills/connection from a trauma-informed foundation. And how to connect climate work to all future professional competencies/skills/knowledge knowing that those are the ‘easy’ part and emotional/mental/psychological resilience is the ‘harder’ part as is any self-work.
I’d love to listen to your thoughts and what else you might add to this list. What do you need to re-tool to engage in this critical work for our future? Workshops and keynote talks available, submit form on Speaking page.
In this webinar, Katie Asmus, founder of the Somatic Wilderness Therapy Institute and somatic- nature-based therapist and educator, interviews Tamara Yakaboski, PhD, an educator, coach, and creator of climate support groups.
Podcasts past episodes available on the Speaking page.
We have a choice: do we want to give up and surrender to the great unraveling, or do we want to join those who are working for a liveable future?
— Joanna Macy
How do you talk to someone who doesn't believe in climate change? Not by rehashing the same data and facts we've been discussing for years, says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Hayhoe shares that the key to having a real discussion is to connect over shared values like family, community and religion -- and to prompt people to realize that they already care about a changing climate. "We can't give in to despair," she says. "We have to go out and look for the hope we need to inspire us to act -- and that hope begins with a conversation, today."