SSC: Key Concepts

Beyond facts and figures, creating a life-affirming and sustainable world involves vision and dealing with emotions such as hopelessness, anger, and powerlessness. The Work that Reconnects is an approach to learning that integrates information, vision, and feelings. It helps reveal our intrinsic role in the web of life, and explores how connection and pain can be two sides of the same coin. Through the work, people become enlivened and motivated to help heal themselves, their society, and the Earth. The Work that Reconnects draws upon the teachings of Joanna Macy, an author, Buddhist, and systems theorist, and Molly Brown, teacher and author.

The goals of this work are as follows:

to provide people the opportunity to experience and share with others their innermost responses to the present condition of our world.
to reframe their pain for the world as evidence of their interconnectedness in the web of life, and hence of their power to take part in its healing.
to provide people with concepts from systems science, deep ecology, or spiritual traditions which illuminate this power, along with exercises which reveal its play in their own lives.
to provide methods by which people can experience their interdependence with, their responsibility to, and the inspiration they can draw from past and future generations, and other life-forms.
to enable people to embrace the Great Turning as a challenge which they are fully capable of meeting in a broad variety of ways, and as a privilege in which they can take joy.
to enable people to support each other in clarifying their intention, and affirming their commitment to the healing of the world.

Theoretical Foundations

(From Coming Back to Life, by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, chapter 4, pp. 58-60)

The theory underlying this work...derives from the present challenge to choose life, from recognition of what stops us, and from understandings of the self-organizing powers of the universe, the basic miracle.

The following statements make more explicit the principles on which we base the Work that Reconnects.

1. This world, in which we are born and take our being, is alive. It is not our supply house and sewer; it is our larger body. The intelligence that evolved us from star dust, and interconnects us with all beings, is sufficient for the healing of our Earth community, if we but align with that purpose.

2. Our true nature is far more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit and society. We are as intrinsic to our living world as the rivers and trees, woven of the same intricate flows of matter/energy and mind. Having evolved us into self-reflexive consciousness, the world can now know itself through us, behold its own majesty, tell its own stories, and also respond to its own suffering.

3. Our experience of pain for the world springs from our interconnectedness with all beings from which also arise our powers to act on their behalf. When we deny or repress our pain for the world, or treat it as a private pathology, our power to take part in the healing of our world is diminished. This apathy need not become a terminal condition. Our capacity to respond to our own and others' suffering that is, the feedback loops that weave us into life can be unblocked.

4. Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only intellectually validated, but experienced. Cognitive information about the crises we face, or even about our psychological responses to them, is insufficient. We can only free ourselves from our fears of the pain, including the fear of getting permanently mired in despair or shattered by grief, when we allow ourselves to experience these feelings. Only then can we discover their fluid, dynamic character. Only then can they reveal on a visceral level our mutual belonging in the web of life.

5. When we reconnect with life, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity. Not only do we experience our interconnectedness in the community of Earth, but also mental eagerness arises to match this experience with new paradigm thinking. Concepts, which bring relatedness into focus, become vivid. Significant learnings occur, for the individual system is reorganizing and reorienting, grounding itself in wider reaches of identity and self-interest.

6. The experience of reconnection with the Earth community arouses desire to act on its behalf. As Earth's self-healing powers take hold within us, we feel called to participate in the Great Turning. For these self-healing powers to operate effectively, they must be trusted and acted on. The steps we take can be modest undertakings, but they should involve some risk to our mental comfort, lest we remain caught in old "safe" limits. Courage is a great teacher and bringer of joy.