Awakenings

From horror and hopelessness to commitment and care.

Earth Rise from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: NASA, NASA-GSFC, ASU

Last week in a Zoom call, someone asked us about our experiences of waking up to the climate crisis. It’s a fairly common question in climate circles, the underlying assumption often being that most people are asleep at the wheel, a metaphor I find a bit too simplistic. Nevertheless this question generally stimulates moving conversations grounded in personal experience, something sorely needed in climate circles where figures and graphs so often numb people out. In Australia, people frequently reference bushfires, floods or droughts or the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef  as their alarm call.  Others share how climate grief swept through them following the birth of their child or grandchild. Or how they cried their way through a documentary. There are so many ways that climate losses can awaken our hearts.

For me, there was no blinding flash of climate awareness. I was a nature loving kid in the 60s who became a teenager who raged on talkback radio about pollution in the 70s. By the 80s, I was marching for nuclear disarmament and by the 90s, I was sharing a house with a friend who was working on Government policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Climate anxieties quietly crept in alongside all my other ecological fears.

Until, I literally did have a waking up experience which changed my life. It was in 2008, not long after I’d organised a panel about depth psychology and climate change for the Sydney Jung Society. Not many people came, life was busy, I had other things to do now, I thought. But then came a dream which felt more like a vision. A terrifying one.

In the dream, I swung on a rope high above the Earth watching land masses shifting beneath me.  Continents were sinking beneath rising seas. Millions of people were in the oceans desperately clinging to heaving shores. Although it made no sense,  I knew I had to join them. I let go of the rope and dropped into this climate catastrophe, swept up in chaotic waves. In the midst of this horror, a poodle swam into my arms, full of trust and need. I cared for us as best I could, making it to shore, stealing biscuits from an abandoned house, fearing that our and everyone else’s struggle to survive would be futile.

I woke up, warm in bed on a cold winter’s night,  heart thumping and dazed by the “shock and awe” of dropping into an apocalyptic world. All I could think was “How do I respond to this? How can I respond to this?” Any possibility of distancing myself from climate change reports collapsed. I shook for the vulnerability of us all on Earth. No one could be safe in this global upheaval.  

Yet, for all its power, I did not believe my dream was precognitive or prophetic in a literal sense. How I made sense of it, was as a letting go of a ‘world view’ that placed me above Earth, separating me from life’s connectedness, complexity and catastrophes. When I let go of the rope,  I surrendered my privileged Western viewpoint with its false assumptions about individual autonomy and independence. Waking up I knew that I was subject to collective fate as much as anyone, and that the collective fate of these times is climate upheaval. I also knew that this would be my life focus from now on.

Within two years,  I closed my psychotherapy practice and began a PhD researching what happened for people psychologically when they engaged with climate issues, starting with my own experiences. Soon I was joined by others. We met up for a year to share how we felt, thought, imagined and dreamed in response to climate issues. What we found and created together was heartening, challenging, inspiring and life-changing, something I will write about more in posts to come.

Carl Jung wrote that dreams about the world and social concerns do not belong to the dreamer, but have a collective meaning and “a character which forces people instinctively to tell them”.  I have shared my dream many times now.  I tell it not to frighten, but to reflect on the ways that consciousness changes when we fully engage with climate and ecological crises. I share that although I had been reading and protesting about climate change before my dream, it took this vision to shake me out of my habitual ways of thinking and living.

Viewing apocalyptic anxieties through a symbolic lens, shifts the focus. Literal fears about the end of the world recede as a pressing need to drop habitual worldviews advances. Psychologists and mythologists recognise that apocalyptic imaginings and dreams often surface when we are approaching an expansion of consciousness. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokalypsis which means revelation, or the tearing away of a veil. This meaning suggests that our vision increases when old worlds, and the assumptions they rest upon, crumble away. My apocalyptic dream was both a revelation and a wake-up call, transforming my worldview and my life direction. To experience this as an awakening, it was crucial not to take my dream as a literal prophecy.

Apocalyptic scenarios are rife in popular culture today, serving up terrifying warnings, pessimistic dystopias along with thought-provoking stories. What we need to remember is that these are imaginings rather than about to happen scenarios. They are also culturally determined. For European people and those of the Global North, the threats of climate disruption feel unprecedented and apocalyptic, but for many Indigenous and BIPOC peoples, climate disruption is jut one more ecological destruction resulting from colonisation.  For First Nations people, the end of their known and loved world has been going on for the last few centuries. Their response is largely one of determination to survive, and to meet their cultural responsibilities to care for land and seas, drawing upon knowledge gained over millenia of navigating cultural, geologic and climate upheavals.  Despite the hardships that climate disruption is already causing, there is little sense of doom and gloom reports Gleb Raygorodetsky, a conservation biologist who works with Indigenous communities. Instead there a steadfast commitment to protect what is most precious. Look at most climate movements these days and you will find First Nations voices at the fore, guiding and inspiring Earth care through values of respect, relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility.

Once we acknowledge the panic-driven element of our apocalyptic fantasies,  we can wake up to what they reveal; feelings of vulnerability and grief in response to ecological destruction, the impossibility of holding on to familiar ways of living and thinking, the call to community and care. Following my apocalyptic dream, I was guided by a series of related dreams. All contained some reference to climate change and were set in, or around, water. In each, I was approached by an animal looking for connection with me.  Over time the settings became calmer, and the tentative connections deepened into communion. My feelings of horror, fear and guilt gave way to relationship and presence. Taken together, these dreams felt like a kind of initiation teaching me the right way to be in the world, loving, attentive, and grateful.

Each day holds an invitation to wake up, connect and live fully in response to the call of these times. I would love to hear from you about what wakings up to the world you have had. What gives you focus? what sustains you? One important finding from my climate psychology research is that sharing how we think, feel and act is nurturing and strengthening, including sharing our struggles and heartaches. So please leave a comment, a story, a reflection or more questions, so we can be together in this.