What is this Gathering all about?
In a time of deep world-ecological crisis many of us can find ourselves confronted with a sense of powerlessness and dismay. It can be difficult to know what can support us to transform our deep care into meaningful action. This two-day webinar explores how Buddhist practice and perspectives can offer us deeper resources to build personal and collective agency to meet the challenges of our times.
Faced with a sense of impotence, our genuine care for the world and for life, can become obscured and suppressed. Our impulses towards solidarity can become diverted by the scale and complexity of what we are facing into merely individualistic strategies. Within our movements for change, it is common to oscillate between despair and superficial forms of hope that are unsustainable.
Drawing on Buddhist practices and perspectives can help us to move from powerlessness toward a grounded sense of empowerment and transformative agency. These methods can offer us access to deeper resources, the energy, clarity, and courage needed for meaningful action in solidarity with life. Our online gathering will directly address this terrain.
We are living amidst a pluri-crisis
that encompasses the living systems we depend upon, the economy that rests on them, and the socio-political systems that mediate all of that between us. This is no small thing. It is an epochal crisis that marks a key moment in human history. It demands responses that seek to contest our future through deep changes in structures and power relations, as well as a transformation of the mindsets and views that underpin them.
To face the enormity of these conditions requires deep resources of insight and compassion, as well as forms of collective organization capable of generating real power. Building social movements of popular participation to challenge unaccountable power is difficult and often marked by fragmentation, exhaustion, and disillusionment. At the same time, there remains a sense of unrealized potential within and across our movements, a question of how we might cultivate the conditions in which that potential can become active and effective.
This includes asking not only what actions are available to us now, but what we can do in the present that might enable different forms of action in the future—how we might develop the capacities, relationships, and conditions that make new possibilities for transformation viable. In this sense, the question of practice becomes inseparable from the question of strategy.
Engagement that does not turn away from political and ecological realities
Some of us are finding that a radical engagement with Buddhist Dharma can contribute to this work. Such an engagement does not turn away from political and ecological realities, but instead offers ways of working directly with burnout, resilience, conflict, and the complexity of collective action. It can help to reconnect us with the underlying care that motivates our concern for the world, while also cultivating the energy and courage needed to remain engaged over time. Classical bodhisattva ideals can be reinterpreted here as living commitments that take form within the conditions of the present.
At the same time, radical political traditions remind us that inner transformation alone is insufficient. They emphasize the importance of building collective power, transforming institutions, and engaging directly with structures of domination and inequality. Bringing these traditions into a critical relationship with one another allows for a more integrated approach, one that attends both to inner transformation and to the material and political conditions that shape our shared future.
This webinar brings together people with many years of experience in both social movement activism and Dharma practice to explore these questions together. It offers a space to reflect on how we can sustain meaningful action, avoid the traps of both despair and complacency, and cultivate the conditions under which our efforts can become more effective and impactful over time.
We believe that both Buddhist Dharma and radical political traditions can make crucial contributions in this moment, and that their encounter can help support the solidarity and action needed today.
A profound shift within social movements
Over the past two decades, there has been a profound shift within social movements: a deepening of emotional literacy, the integration of trauma-informed approaches, and a wider embrace of spiritually grounded practices—mindfulness, Dharma, ritual, ecological wisdom, even forms of the imaginal/magic/alchemy. What was once largely absent is now widely recognized as essential. This marks a real maturation, and it matters.
At the same time, our sense is that the pendulum may have swung too far in this direction. As movements have turned toward the personal, the emotional, and the therapeutic, something of the sharpness of structural analysis has weakened—the ability to clearly name power, to strategize, to organize, and to build the kinds of collective force required for systemic change. This shift unfolds within decades of neoliberal restructuring that have eroded social bonds, weakened unions and movements, and dispersed collective life into increasingly individualized forms. In this sense, the emphasis on healing, grief, and inner work can begin to mirror the very processes of disaggregation that movements are trying to resist.
There is also a feedback loop at work
When movements lose confidence in their vision, their strategy, and their capacity to act effectively, a deeper sense of powerlessness takes hold. This is often expressed as “left melancholia,” despair, or quiet hopelessness. As this trend continues, the need for grief work, trauma healing, and emotional processing intensifies. These are real and necessary responses, but without a countervailing experience of agency, they can become part of a depressive cycle. The absence of effective collective action deepens the wound; the deepening wound, in turn, makes strong social movements feel more distant.
What begins to interrupt this cycle is a reorientation of inner work. Rather than reject it we believe there is a need to channel and connect it more powerfully towards the building of collective and strategic agency. People need spaces to metabolize grief and trauma, and they also need the lived experience of participating in movements that have traction—where strategy matters, where collective effort builds power, and where change, even in partial forms, becomes tangible. There is a kind of joy, even a vitality, that emerges from effective collective action, one that no amount of individual healing can substitute for.
The task, then, is to hold the gains of the past twenty years without dilution, while restoring the capacities that make movements powerful. To draw from the deepest resources of Dharma and psychological insight, and to place them in service of solidarity, organization, and systemic transformation. Not as a move away from the personal, but as a way of extending it into the shared conditions that shape our lives—and that must be transformed if the changes we long for are to take root.