The Work That Reconnects

Interview with Gloria Filax

Joanna Macy, Ph.D., is the primary source and root teacher of the Work That Reconnects. The theory and practice of this group work are described on this website and her book, Coming Back to Life.

Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with four decades of activism. She has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

Many thousands of people around the world have participated in Joanna's workshops and trainings. Her group methods, known as the Work That Reconnects, have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, churches, and grassroots organizing. Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.

Joanna travels widely giving lectures, workshops, and trainings in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. She lives in Berkeley, California, near her children and grandchildren.

I was first introduced to the work of Joanna Macy by dear friend Sister Maureen Wild. While Maureen works in the area of spiritual ecology and I work in the area of equality and social justice and we both have different institutional affiliations, we share a love of teaching about social justice and/or environmental concerns. Maureen’s introduction to Joanna Macy’s work pointed me to a workshop on The Work That Reconnects on Gabriola Island, BC on October 9 – 12, 2009.  I had the great good fortune of taking the workshop with 80 other participants led by Macy. I now realize that I am part of a large and interconnected movement, a realization that has made me feel that living today is an exciting time and not just a time of dread, violence, and confusion.

Aurora: I’d like to start by asking you about yourself.

Joanna Macy: I am a white, American woman who has always been interested in world religions.  While serving with my family in the American Peace Corp in India, I met and worked for a year or two with Tibetan refugees. I was exposed to their Buddhist beliefs and ways and this had a great impact on me.  I wanted to understand both Buddhist teachings and practices.

Later, in my 40s, I went back to graduate school in order to study world religions, particularly Buddhism and became very fascinated by the Buddhist teachings of the radical interdependence of all things and all life forms.  I did my doctoral work on the central teaching of the Buddha, which is about causality and is known as the teaching of “dependent co-arising.”  That was my scholarly work and it turned out to be extremely fertile for every aspect of my life.

Aurora: Your work is also informed by living systems theory.

Joanna Macy: Yes, while still in graduate school, I encountered the systems view of life, or living systems theory , which comes out of the life sciences.  I found that between the ancient teachings of Buddhism and this new body of thought from the empirical sciences, there were very startling, very significant convergences. The interaction between these two bodies of thought was vitalizing to my mind and to my life.

Aurora: You were able to bring Buddhism and living systems theory together in a book.

Joanna Macy: My writings that reflect this scholarship came out quite a bit later in 1990-1991 with the State University of New York Press.  My book is called Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory. This work on the interplay between Buddhist teachings and systems science, both of them distinctive in recognizing the interdependence of all life, fed directly into my activism and my teachings. Workshops and trainings began increasingly to occupy my life.

Aurora: Will you say more about how this happened?

Joanna Macy: I had planned originally to be a teacher or professor at the university level in Buddhism and world religions but I got involved in some social/political issues.  In particular for me, it was working around nuclear power and nuclear weapons making.  As I did work in these areas I was puzzled by people's difficulty in responding with appropriate interest and attention to something that was clearly destructive of life. By that I mean the potential and enduring threat of destruction from contamination produced at every stage of the fuel cycle from the mining and milling of the uranium ore, up to the generation of the nuclear power and manufacture of nuclear weapons.  As I encountered the difficulty people had with facing the devastation of nuclear power, I came to understand this phenomenon as psychic numbing.

Aurora: How does psychic numbing occur?

Joanna Macy: I was very appreciative of the work of psychiatrist, Robert J. Lifton, who had studied the psychological effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and the technological capacity we now have to destroy life on this planet.  His views on what this does to the human capacity to respond and to imagine the ‘ongoingness’ of life helped me to explore further what we were doing to ourselves when we fail to address dangers that are increasing in these times, whether they are deforestation, poisoning of the rivers, acidification of the lakes and oceans, or extinction of other species.

Aurora: How did Buddhism and systems theory help you understand psychic numbing?

Joanna Macy: In coming to grips with the teachings of Buddhism and systems theory I was able to find ways to help people confront and express their responses to these immense global crises.  I explored ways to help people tell the truth to themselves and to each other about what they feel, see, and know is happening to our work and to life on earth. 

Aurora: I read in your autobiography about how you saw the need to take responsibility for on-  going care or guardianship of nuclear wastes. What do you understand by this?

Joanna Macy: This continues to preoccupy me because we have generated immense tonnage, beyond belief amounts of contaminated and contaminating radioactive materials.  They will need to be kept out of the biosphere for incredibly long periods of time.  The future generations will need to know what these materials are, how they got generated, what they do to life forms, how they stunt the mind and deform the body causing mutation in the biological systems.  We need to know those things in order to keep radioactive materials out of the biosphere.  People want to know and can work together in a sense of tremendous commitment to express their loyalty and love for the planet in finding ways that they can be guardians of nuclear waste to keep this poison fire out of the biosphere.

Aurora: How does this happen with nuclear power?

Joanna Macy: You can guard nuclear waste if you are willing to look at it, but our industries and government would rather spend billions of dollars hiding it, sticking nuclear waste deep in geological repositories where it can be out of sight and out of mind, rather than keeping waste at ground level retrievable storage sites where containers can be repaired and the stuff can still be kept out of the biosphere.  It is still relevant.

Aurora: When did you encounter the work of others thinking about deep ecology?

Joanna Macy: In the mid 80s I became aware of the term deep ecology and the writings of Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, as well as the concept of the ecological self. This is exactly what we were experiencing in the despair and empowerment work we were doing.  I was delighted to discover the term "deep ecology" because that was a secular way, an easier way, to express it than saying dependent co-arising, which sounded a little arcane and Buddhist.

Aurora: How did you incorporate the term deep ecology into your work?

Joanna Macy: It was a journey of discovery generating a lot of creativity in both the theoretical bases of deep ecology and the exuberance of forms and practices of it: these range from the Council of All Beings where people step outside their human identity to speak on behalf of another life form, to deep time work where we use our moral imagination and new teachings on cosmology to  experience  our living connections with our ancestors, and with future beings.

Aurora: Has part of your work been to bring Buddhist thinking and general systems theory together with deep ecology?

Joanna Macy: I actually did this before I encountered deep ecology as a concept or name.  The assumptions and the core beliefs of the worldview of Buddhism are deeply ecological.  The assumption is that all life is intimately and intricately interrelated and that mind or consciousness is present throughout in different forms.

Aurora: Some of the words that move across those three scholarly interests are interdependence, mutual causality, process, relational, nonlinear, non-hierarchical, dependent, co-arising.

Joanna Macy: Yes.  Then a very interesting thing happened.  As I developed group work (which I originally called despair and empowerment work), and people found ways to express their deeper inner responses to the plight of our world they could hear and see how universal is this response of profound concern.  What emerged was a very strong and even jubilant sense of the interconnectedness of all things - a kind of shift of identity.  People moved from experiencing themselves as separate individuals, isolated and competitive, and emerged with a sense of living and acting on behalf of their planet.  This was like a radical extension of self-interest.

Aurora: Your recent work doesn’t explicitly address deep ecology.

Joanna Macy: About 11 or 12 years ago, on writing the second book, Coming Back to Life, which describes this deep work, I tended to the term ‘deep ecology’.  People were trying to distinguish between transpersonal ecology, social ecology, spiritual ecology, radical ecology, etc.  The debates were getting doctrinaire and hairsplitting so I dropped ‘deep ecology’ and went for a simpler term.  We call it "the work that reconnects." It truly does that.  It reconnects mind and heart, inside and outside.  It reconnects us with our brother and sister humans.  It reconnects us with the natural world.  It reconnects spiritual practices with scientific empirical knowledge.

Aurora: Your study of Buddhism and General Systems Theory continues to inform your writing and activism, including the “work that reconnects.”

Joanna Macy: I'm very grateful for the journey I have had with this work.  It keeps on unfolding, new perspectives and new thoughts.  It rests very solidly on a relational view of the phenomenal world.  I find that these two schools of thought, Buddhism and systems theory gives us the most sophisticated concepts and tools for seeing and understanding interconnectedness. The dance between these two worldviews has been extremely productive in my experience because they offer a binocular view:  letting us see our lives and our experience in greater depth and greater subtlety.

Aurora: The evidence is everywhere of the contradictions between the military industrial growth complex and the finite resources of the earth but many people are not showing any signs that they are aware of these contradictions.

Joanna Macy: It was a very important point in my own journey when I discovered that people were not as apathetic as they seemed.  Environmental and social change organizations and campaigns working for peace and justice decry the lack of people's responsiveness.  They attribute the apparent apathy of the public to indifference or ignorance.  It was a very significant turning point for me to come clear in recognizing that that is not the case.  People are not so ignorant--they do know a lot about what is threatening life-- and they are not indifferent.  They care deeply.  To approach the public by simply shoveling terrifying information at them or scolding them, moralizing or sermonizing them, is often counterproductive.  People know and they care, but they are afraid.  We all are afraid of the pain itself.  There is a widespread fear, even today, that if we really acknowledge how we feel and what we know, we'll become mired in despair; that we will become stuck in hopelessness and be immobilized.

Aurora: How does Buddhism help with despair?

Joanna Macy: Buddhist teachings about the nature of mind show that we are only stuck in what we will not allow ourselves to experience.  It is only when we repress and deny what we will not allow ourselves to experience that we are stuck.  When you can express and speak, then you find that you are more than what you repress.  Those are just feelings.  You can gain in clarity and authority and resilience by looking at what is.  You stop being afraid of the suffering of our world.

Aurora: It was transformative for me in the workshop,  to realize I'm not the only one who might be frightened by what is happening to the earth.

Joanna Macy: Not only are we not alone, but the capacity to suffer with our world is the literal meaning of compassion.  This has something very significant to say about who and what we are.  We are not the little self-enclosed, encapsulated, shrunken self that our consumer society seems to assume.  We are an interconnected part of the web of life. There is so much more to our true nature than what we have imagined.  This, too, has been validated by Buddhist experience, as well as systems understanding.  One of the systems thinkers who has articulated this the most clearly has been Gregory Bateson and his Steps to An Ecology of Mind where he talks about the grievous epistemological error of thinking we can live and survive separate from our environment and that we can make sound and valid choices based on promoting a self-interest that does not include the planet as a whole.  So much of this is common sense.

(Note: see also http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm)

Aurora: But it does run directly counter to the assumptions that drive the industrial growth society, like individualism.

Joanna Macy: And competition and the need to keep consuming because you are separate and fragile.  You have to keep struggling for your place in the sun, to have enough, to have more and more. This delusion feeds the need for strong defenses and readiness to push others out of the way.  These basic assumptions centered on the separate, competitive self are further influenced by the military industrial complex and consumer society.  We are seeing now that they are indeed suicidal.

Aurora: Is there anything you want to say in closing?

Joana Macy: Yes.  I would like to mention that in the process of the work, when we are ready to gaze with open eyes and fresh eyes at what is happening in our world, we see that, yes, there are dangers.  Yes, there are destructive forces.  Yes, there are great losses, but also there is an immense transition that is taking place, actually a revolution taking place, on a scale comparable to the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.  This transition to a life-sustaining society is happening all around us. It is not being covered in the corporate-controlled media, but it is there.  We call it The Great Turning.  A lot of people engaged in The Great Turning don't even use that phrase, but you can call it anything you want as long as you realize that there is a very important evolutionary development taking place in human creativity and co-creativity in slowing down the destruction of the industrial growth society and in generating new forms and ways of doing things, including some of the ancient, indigenous ways as well as a great shift of consciousness.  This is a very thrilling time to be alive, even though we are not sure we will survive or what will survive. Even with all the unavoidable uncertainty, it is a marvelous time to be alive.

Aurora: I am so pleased you ended with this.

Resources and Publications

Joanna Macy website: www.joannamacy.net

Work that Reconnects
DVD set - a visual tool for educators, clergy, helping professionals, and activists. It is also a training guide for those currently facilitating the work and for those who may be inspired to do so. You will see Joanna teaching the conceptual foundations of the work, including the Great Turning, systems theory, deep ecology, and despair work, as well as many of her favorite exercises. To these she adds for the viewer guidelines on critical aspects and choice points of the experiential work.

To order a set, click here.

Joanna Macy. Pass It On: Five Stories that Can Change the World. Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA. 2010

Joanna Macy. World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA. 2007.

Joanna Macy. Widening Circles: A Memoir. New Catalyst Books, Gabriola Island, B.C. 2000.

Joanna Macy. Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, with John Seed, Arne Ness, and Pat Fleming. New Catalyst Books, Gabriola Island, B.C. 1998.

Joanna Macy. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C. 1997.

Joanna Macy. Dharma and Development: Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement. Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT, 1993, 1995.

Joanna Macy. Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Living Systems. SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1991.

Interview conducted January 19, 2010

Updated March 2018

Dr. Filax works in the Centre for Integrated Studies, Athabasca University

Aurora Online

Citation Format
Gloria Filax (2011) The Work That Reconnects: An interview withJoanna Macy, Aurora Online