This guide to personal empowerment provides 47 exercises for dealing with feelings of despair, isolation, and powerlessness associated with the growing threat of nuclear war, progressive destruction of the environment, and unprecedented human misery. The first of eight chapters describes psychological responses. to planetary perils and discusses world concerns, pain, reactions to peril, causes and effects of repression, and the genesis of "despairwork." Chapter 2 concentrates on the theoretical foundations of despair and empowerment work, explaining basic principles, the interconnectedness of life, methods for shedding outmoded ways of being, power, and ways of shifting toward new levels of consciousness. Chapter 3, despair and empowerment work with individuals, recommends breaking social taboos and talking about planetary perils in ways that are mutually strengthening. Six exercises for children and young people are provided and suggestions are given for professionals in a counseling setting. Chapter 4 provides sections on facilitating despair and empowerment work in groups or workshops. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 describe three major stages of work and provide 37 exercises to help in the facilitation of movement through these stages. Four final meditation exercises are provided in chapter 8. Appendices include sample workshop agendas and announcements, a resource list of organizations and materials, and advice for dealing with terrifying films. (LH)

This book brings together for the first time many if the leading writers and thinkers from the psychological and mental health fields. Contributes include Robert Jay Lifton, Joanna Macy, Roger Walsh and others.

Personal empowerment in the face of planetary despair

How can dystopian futures help provide the motivation to change the ways we operate day to day? This book raises and tackles a number of important questions about the future and the lessons we can learn for the present.

Every day, people who push against violence and injustice or pull for peace and freedom must face their own fears. Many activists also must struggle with "aftershock," the physical and emotional reverberations of frightening, horrifying, or otherwise traumatizing experiences endured in the course of their activism. Jones explores the culture of trauma that people have created through our violent exploitation of the Earth, other animals, and one another. As long as we continue to perpetrate such violations, we will never fully heal our own traumatic injuries. This book, therefore, is for survivors of all kinds of trauma, for therapists who treat trauma, and for anyone who hopes to reduce the amount of terror in the world. --From publisher description.

Some kinds of death are caused by people, deliberately or accidentally. This work argues that horrendous death - by war, homicide, poverty and other man-made means - is the greatest public health problem of our time and can only be defeated by strong co-operative action.

Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology whose decades of writing, teaching, and activism have inspired people around the world. In this collection of writings, leading spiritual teachers, deep ecologists, and diverse writers and activists explore the major facets of Macy’s lifework. Combined with eleven pieces from Macy herself, the result is a rich chorus of wisdom and compassion to support the work of our time. “Being fully present to fear, to gratitude, to all that is—this is the practice of mutual belonging. As living members of the living body of Earth, we are grounded in that kind of belonging. Even when faced with cataclysmic changes, nothing can ever separate us from Earth. We are already home.”— Joanna Macy

Winner of the 1988 Crossroad Women's Studies Award