Can we namaste our way out of the climate crisis?
A psychologist and yoga teacher's sceptical look at how inner and contemplative practices can be helpful and not helpful in the climate work.
Welcome back to Climate Psyched, the newsletter where we explore all things psychological, behavioral and emotional related to the climate and ecosystem crises.
A few weeks ago I led a yoga retreat for climate engaged people and activists. I’ve been a yoga teacher for many years, something that has been unexpectedly helpful in working with supporting the climate community and helping people nurture resilience, relaxation and communal empowerment. Getting to spend a weekend with a group of people all joint by their care and worry for the planet and humanity, all bursting with things to talk about, and facilitating for them to feel supported, grounded and relaxed in their own bodies and minds is a deeply meaningful experience.
I’ve worked with the combination of yoga, mindfulness and psychology for over a decade, and have been involved in various research studies that have explored the effects of that combination on common psychological challenges that people are dealing with. With good results! And yet I’m a bit of a sceptic.
In this month’s post I’ll try to entangle how and why inner practices such as yoga, meditation and mindfulness can be both helpful and potentially unhelpful in the climate work.
Situation
In recent years there’s been an increasing focus on how inner development and contemplative practices are related to pro-environmental action and dealing with climate related emotions.
The Inner Development Goals have developed a framework that, according to their web page, was motivated by a belief that there is a blind spot in our efforts to create a sustainable global society. The framework consists of five dimensions: being, thinking, relating, collaborating and acting. These five dimensions include 23 skills, e.g. inner compass, critical thinking, connectedness, communication skills and courage. In their own report “Going deeper” they write that
The Inner Development Goals (IDG) initiative is first and foremost a communications project. Its mission is to bring awareness of the importance of human inner development to more people and organisations. It also tries to make some of the rich existing knowledge about human cognitive and emotional development available in an accessible language that resonates widely with people and organizations in the 21st century.
Being more of a framework, the IDG doesn’t operationalize how their 23 skills work, whether an inner compass leads to more pro-environmental engagement or how someone can know whether they have good communication skills. It’s all quite fuzzy.
There are also initiatives aimed at people in power, e.g. The Mindfulness Initiative in the UK, that supports the cultivation of mindfulness and compassion among legislators to shift political culture and elicit wiser policymaking.
The connection between inner practices and climate work is, however, far from new. The work that reconnects, developed by scholar and long time activist Joanna Macy, offers more practical tools that use practices from buddhism to deal with climate and eco related emotions. Most well-known is the book "Active Hope”. Renowned zen master, the late Thich Nath Hahn, had a long engagement for the environment and has written about this for both the UN and in several of his own books.
But even with these many initiatives across countries, and an explicit need from many climate activists to find support and tools to help relax and cope with stress and worry, it’s not entirely clear whether contemplative practices increase pro-environmental engagement, and whether they strengthen resilience and help cope with climate related emotions.
Explanation
Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time in different yoga studios, retreats and groups, meeting people who are living unconventional lives and who are drawn to alternative medicine and natural remedies - but it wasn’t until I ran my own yoga studio for three years that I came in contact with the fact that there’s an overlap between yoga/meditation practitioners and climate deniers.
The shadowland of yoga and mindfulness
I will mostly be leaving the interesting topic of how parts of the yoga and wellness community are entangled with science denial and fascism out of this text, but there are others who’ve written initiated about it. In her latest book Doppelganger - a trip into the mirror world, Naomi Klein explores how some people struggling with important issues like security and health issues are drawn to, and comforted by what she calls the mirror world, inhabited by alt-right conspiracy groups. She explains how wellness and yoga influencers are drawn into this world of anti-establishment resistance and conspiracies. The connection between new-age and conspiracy theories has a long history, and seems to have gotten worse during the isolation of the covid pandemic, as for example The Guardian wrote about last year.
One lesson here is that any practice or tool can be misused when placed in the wrong hands, and that we can never isolate ourselves from the social context with which we identify. Yoga and mindfulness is clearly not a vaccine against science denial, nor is it in themselves a cure for unsustainable behavior.
The individualized commodification of mindfulness
In recent years there’s been some well-grounded criticism against how yoga and mindfulness practices have been appropriated into Western society and commodified in the market economy. This criticism is partly related to how the practices have been decontextualized and individualized in a way that encourages people to become calm and passive towards societal injustices. With the development of numerous apps, books and copyrighting particular yoga poses, there’s been a commodification of practices that in their nature are innate in each person practicing them.
One loud critic is Ronald Purser, author of the book “McMindfulness”, published in 2019. He doesn’t hold back when critiquing the mindfulness movement:
In response, mindfulness has arisen as a new religion of the self, unencumbered by the public sphere. The revolution it proclaims occurs not out in the streets or through collective struggle and political protests or nonviolent demonstrations, but in the heads of atomized individuals. A recurrent message is that our failure to pay attention to the present moment - our getting lost in mental ruminations and mind-wandering - is the underlying cause of our dissatisfaction and distress.
Influenced by the society in which they’re practiced, yoga and mindfulness have in many instances shifted from practices that help us live collectively and contribute to the world, into something aimed at individual, personal growth and self-care, oftentimes bordering on self-absorbing. This has very much been my own experience of many yoga practitioners in the individualized country of Sweden, as well as the United States where I’ve done parts of my yoga training. The explicit goal of personal growth has far too often justified yogis’ carbon intense travels to warm countries in order to “find themselves”.
What a certain practice leads to cannot be fully separated from the context in which it is practiced, and the world the practitioner encounters once they step off the mat and back out into society.
There is however nothing in these practices themselves that opposes collective and political action. I believe that one mistake that’s often made when using mindfulness and yoga in a westernized way, is to view them as the end point rather than the starting point. If yoga and mindfulness lead to passivity then they are not helpful tools in the climate crisis - but if we use them as tools to help us become more resilient, better prioritize what needs to be done, feel grounded and more courageous in our actions, then they can definitely be helpful. As both yoga and meditation can be practiced in so many different ways, it’s oftentimes too vague to talk about these practices without specifying how they’re practiced.
There is luckily at least some initial interest in the research community to integrate the moral and philosophical aspects of yoga with collective action for environmental justice.
Yoga offers a robust set of moral principles which are meant to regulate our relationship to ourselves and our world. These principles are both the most overlooked and arguably most important qualities of what Yoga is. There is a gaping need to discuss them since most Yoga practitioners do not seem to know or care about them and our world is in a worse state of distress than ever before, in dire need of greater compassion. The non-practice and misapprehension of yogic ethics comes primarily from a sense of hierarchy and disconnection.
Can we really know what leads to what?
One problem with putting too much hope on inner practices to help us in the climate work is the lack of robust, experimental studies that investigate the effects of various contemplative interventions. Experimental studies are important not the least to answer the question of whether we primarily should use inner and embodied practices to get people engaged in the climate work, or to help people already engaged become more resilient? What really leads to what?
Some initial and interesting results come from a pilot study that tested the effects of a mindfulness based program called the EU Climate Leadership Program with high-level decision-makers as participants. The program consisted of several modules that included mindfulness training and spending time in nature, as well as journaling, habit change exercises and discussions and reflections with other participants on various topics. The study showed significant effects on pro-environmental behaviors and engagement across the individual and organizational level, as well as increased levels of mindfulness, nature connectedness and overall well-being.
Another study that compared (individual) pro-environmental behaviors between yoga practitioners and a control group found that the non-yoga practitioners actually engaged in more pro-environmental behaviors. Similarly, this meditation study found no effect of a sustainability-adapted mindfulness-based intervention on sustainable consumption or reduction of the attitude-behavior gap.
One hypothesis to explore further could be that contemplative practices needs to be put into a climate context and be integrated with other skills, as in the EU Climate Leadership Program, in order to actually affect practitioners pro-environmental engagement.
Inner practices for nurturing resilience
Climate anxiety seems to be correlated to lower levels of mindfulness, which isn’t surprising since worry and anxiety entails symtoms of ruminating and “being in one’s head”, preoccupied by future events.
In a meta-analysis that looked at numerous studies, researchers found that there’s an association between trait mindfulness and nature connectedness, meaning that people who are more mindful also have a stronger connection to nature, although not drawing any causal conclusions. However, other experimental studies show preliminary evidence that spending time in nature (not including parks or urban green spaces) increase mindfulness, and that nature connectedness is associated with happiness and well-being. Interestingly enough, this connection was stronger in studies with older participants and community participants rather than nature, which might be an indicator that it’s perhaps not mindfulness in itself that nurtures nature connection, but rather that older and community participants have had more opportunities to experience the mindfulness-heightening qualities of nature. Perhaps there’s a difference between practicing mindfulness in a corporate, sterile building, and doing so in a lush forest.
This raises the question of whether it’s more effective to encourage people to simply get out in nature, than to put them through mindfulness based programs? A study that explored how mindfulness relates to pro-environmental behavior found that mindfulness correlated with pro-environmental behavior through cognitive reappraisal and climate change awareness. However, when people had higher nature connectedness, the influence of mindfulness on pro-environmental behavior was diminished. When people feel connected to nature, they don’t seem to need mindfulness to act for the environment.
So nature seems to make us more mindful, but at the same time there are several studies showing that nature connectedness is associated with higher levels of climate anxiety, and even being more impaired in coping with these emotions. When we’re connected to something we tend to care about it and when we care about something we also notice when that something is under threat. Nature, with all its healing properties, apart from making us mindful, also becomes a reminder of the climate crisis.
Action
In our work we often use the ice cream model, which we’ve developed over the years of working with supporting the climate community. The model emphasizes the importance for a long-term sustainable climate engagement of learning strategies to regulate one’s emotions, but also to find ways of relaxing and pausing from the crisis. Learning to stay present with one’s emotions, without judgement or reactions to them can be a very helpful skill to have when navigating the climate crisis.
Use yoga, mindfulness and meditation as tools that help you build skills to be present with whatever emotions you are experiencing, and find ways to calm yourself. But also use them as tools that facilitates looking at your surrounding world with an open perspective to help you prioritize what work really needs to be done. They can be practices in their own right, but more than anything they can be practices that help you change how you act in this world, rather than offering a resignation from the work that needs to be done in the world.
Keep some sound scepticism against any promises or marketing schemes that try to sell inner practices as a quick fix for a more sustainable world.
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Over the past year I’ve had numerous pledges to support Climate Psyched financially, which has been a little overwhelming - but also a receipt that my writing on these topics is appreciated and that there’s a will in the broad community of readers to facilitate the long-term survival of this publication.
Working in the field of climate psychology, me and my colleagues have been lucky enough to often get paid for the work we do. But there are nonetheless uncountable hours that we put in for free; to help progress the field, support the climate community and spread knowledge about climate psychology. Climate Psyched has been one of the things I put many unpaid hours into each month, in order to make these posts as well-researched and thoughtful as possible. It’s a labor of love and one that truly feels important. But it is a labor that takes a substantial amount of time and effort.
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Podcast alert! Två Klimatpsykoger Möter
For any Swedish speaking readers out there I wanted to share that my colleague Sara and I launched a new podcast last week, called Två Klimatpsykologer Möter, where we interview interesting climate people, researchers, activists, and reflect on how individuals can be part of the big structural change that needs to be done in the climate transitions. We’ve made six fantastic episode for Season 1, and are hoping to be back with Season 2 before the end of the year. We’ve gotten so much great feedback and are overjoyed that people are listening! If you want to give it a listen you can find it where you usually listen to podcasts.
A sound and sceptical look that supports our choices of approaches and tools for dealing with the climate and environmental crisis. Especially like one of the sentences under actions: "They can be practices in their own right, but more than anything they can be practices that help you change how you act in this world, rather than offering a resignation from the work that needs to be done in the world." I belive the practices need to be in a context/setting that makes it easy to transform experiences from the practices to relevant changes in behaviour for the climate and environment.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. Enjoyed your observations about the commodification of mindfulness. The underlying issue is, as far as I can see, the disjunct between the underlying constructs around self/identity upon which all the institutions of the dominant culture/paradgim depend, and how life and evolution appear to actually work. The number of disciplines that have arrived at a recognition of the interdependence/interbeing/co-arising/ etc etc of all things continues to grow. The siloed nature of the paradigm is such that as long as this recognition remains separated into apparently competing or, at least, unrelated ways of knowing, the information can ignored, or commodified - or, ideally, both. As a psychotherapist, it is a source of sadness to me that "my" field continues to come up with ways to deal with eco-anxiety, climate grief, intergenerational trauma and all sorts of other things that - in effect - are seen as happening to us and affecting our as individual psychological well-being, and yet there is neither effort nor language to acknowledge how our psychology is causal. Being ecopsychologically attentive, I regret that planetary equilibrium - homeostasis - is understood to be maintained through the interaction of bio-, litho-, cryo-, atmo- and hydro- spheres alone, whilst the most potent influence of all - psychosphere - is unrecognised, unnamed and always absent from both the media and from public forums such as CoP and IPCC reporting. Psychosphere, resulting from the inner processes of all living things (see also autopoesis), is dominated by human psyche. If one argues that these processes shape each other through what we might call intuitive or visceral means, then there is no reason that humans would be exempted from this evolutionary process.
Therefore, if we were to consider that humans are intuitively informed of systemic imbalances, we might say that we of the dominant paradigm (at least) live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance, with our embodied experience denied and disavowed - and yet, to continue to participate and survive/thrive in the dominant context we have to ignore the feedback we are receiving that, form a homeostatic standpoint, is designed to assist in the restoration of homeostatic equilibrium.
As we know, the trauma is less in the actual event that happens to us, and more in the inability for natural processes of restoration and renewal to occur. Thus, we are suspended in trauma, and inevitably seek to escape the discomfort.
Fortunately, the dominant paradigm is endlessly creative in commodifying ways for us to do this ... briefly assuaging the itch but never addressing its cause. Psychology, founded on the same modernist perspectives that drive the crisis, has some very useful tools and insights to share. But, as an institution wedded to professional standards with the system of the day, it is unable to deliver, unconsciously unwilling to rock the boat and risk the inevitable rejection of such outlandish ideas. Until such time as there is a concerted interdisciplinary effort made to challenge the dominant yet underlying sense of human identity, place and purpose, we are in a situation where - to quote interpersonal neurobiologist Dan Siegel I (2011) - "as long as we define Self as a separate noun, the planet is cooked". Or, to quote Neil Young (1974), "we're all just pissing in the wind, we don't know it but we are, and there ain't nothing like a friend, who can tell us we're just pissing in the wind". These are the friends we need to be. Namaste.