The Antidote For Climate Anxiety Isn't What You Think

Interfaith Lessons For Transforming Eco-Grief

Jun 08, 2024

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You’re reading Climate Anxiety and Spiritual Resilience, a sometimes-weekly publication from a professor of Religious Studies and Indigenous Studies, where we explore resources for practicing hope, staying present, and building a more just and sustainable world.

Well, This is Embarrassing

Trudi Inslee, wife of Washington state governor Jay Inslee, is asking me a question. And I don’t have an answer.

My spouse and I are at a recent Climate Solutions fundraising event in downtown Seattle, surrounded by policy makers, activists, technical innovators, green energy entrepreneurs, and more MBAs and MPAs then you can shake a stick at.

For a Humanities professor who peddles in ideas, I always find these settings both intimidating and strangely exotic. Business? Policy? Start-ups and action committees? This is a foreign land compared to my university world of mentoring undergraduate students, reviewing book manuscripts, or moderating panels at academic conferences.

The sustainability version of a red carpet. (I guess it would be a green carpet?)

My spouse has pulled me over to chat with Governor and Mrs. Inslee, and while I’m a little star-struck by the governor, I have to admit it’s Trudi I’m most eager to meet. For several years now she has been one of my husband’s favorite people. I tell her I’ve been reading and writing about the paralysis of climate anxiety—that I see our collective grief and fear as a prime cause of our failure to act on climate change. And that’s when Trudi poses the question:

“So what’s your answer? What’s the antidote to climate anxiety?”

And here it is: My moment to shine! I am suddenly aware that I have about 60 seconds to provide a brilliantly insightful, succinct summary of all the thinking and writing and contemplating I’ve been doing for the last twelve months. Yes! I am thinking. Go, Suzanne! Seize the moment!

Instead, seconds tick by, and I realize I am merely standing there, my mouth gaping.

I am drawing a stupefying blank.

Well, not a blank, exactly. More like an overload.

I’m an academic. Ask me a question, and my problem is not that I have nothing to say, it’s that I have way too much to say. Perhaps it goes without saying, but the moment was not seized.

Here’s What I Wish I Had Said

So, with nearly two weeks to stew over the matter, here’s what my smarter, brighter, and more articulate self (wishes she would have) said to Governor and Mrs. Inslee:

The antidote to debilitating climate anxiety is a symphony in three movements.

We need to feel. We need to reflect. And we need to act.

Or to put it another way, we need to nurture our inner artist, our inner meditator, and our inner warrior.

Like all good answers to complicated questions, it’s deceptively simple. And so, please indulge my professor self, and let me elaborate.

I am borrowing this triad from Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. As he writes:

“There are three aspects of your person. And you should allow all three aspects to be active at the same time in order to have balance. We have to mobilize them all and never let one of them die or become too weak. If you are an activist, a political leader, or a leader in your community, you have to know how to cultivate these three aspects within yourself so you can offer balance, steadiness, strength, and freshness for those around you.”1

But I’m also borrowing from Dr. Marta Moreno Vega’s beautiful memoir, When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio. Vega, an artist, professor, activist, and founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, recounts coming of age under the care of her abuela, a Santería priestess who taught her to honor their ancestral orishas. Early in her life, Vega’s grandmother discerned that she had three ancestors walking beside her: a creative spirit, who brings emotional and spiritual cleansing; a thoughtful spirit who held intellect and truth; and a fearless warrior who would keep her safe.2

As I thought about how I wished I had answered Mrs. Inslee’s question, I returned to these two very different authors, describing two very different traditions, both of which are built on two very different views of the cosmos and our place within it, but who nonetheless arrived at similar conclusions.

Trilliums. Because three is a good number.

1. Nurture Your Inner Artist: Feel and Create

Almost exactly a year ago, I woke up to a rather harsh realization. It was the first morning of my sabbatical, and it was perfection—think robin’s egg blue skies, with actual robins just outside my window doing their vocal warm ups. I should have floated up from my bed with a beatific smile, buoyed by a wave of serenity, and joyful anticipation.

Instead, I was jolted awake by one of the worst panic attacks I’ve ever had.

Within minutes I was up and Googling. Will the wildfire smoke be bad this summer? Do N95 masks work against smoke? How do I turn a box fan into an air purifier?

I’d already known that I self-medicated my climate anxiety by staying busy. (If I just keep moving fast enough, it can’t catch me!) But even I was surprised by how quickly it arrived. Not even one day away from work, and it was back. With a vengeance.

I’ve had some very smart people tell me that the antidote to climate anxiety is action. But after taking a careful look at what Indigenous teachers, different religious traditions, and psychologists of climate anxiety have to say on the subject—not to mention my own experience—I’m convinced that while action is essential, it’s not the first part of the answer. And it’s not the second either.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, before we get busy, we need to begin by doing the work of attending to and transforming our emotions. We need to pause, draw a boundary around a sacred space in time, and give ourselves permission to simply feel. To put it another way, we have to let our inner artist flex her metaphorical wings, and show us how to grieve, to create, and even to play.

This is essential, because action that is not prefaced by the necessary internal activism of attending to our feelings can easily become a form of frenetic distraction from those feelings. And that kind of action, when it’s used to self-medicate, to dull the pain we may otherwise feel, will quickly lead to burnout.

Please remember that it is not pathological to feel sorrow or fear when faced with potential catastrophe. Quite the opposite—it’s a good thing! It’s a sign of our humanity, of our capacity for care.

As Anishinaabe author Patty Krawec writes in her beautiful book Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, “Grief is the persistence of love.”3

And, as climate anxiety psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren reminds us, creating intentional time and space to pay attention to and express the depths of our feelings is essential work, lest those feelings manifest in disruptive and even destructive ways. It is also important because our feelings are incredibly valuable data.4 When we truly attend to them, we learn what we value, and what we’re willing to fight for. And as Britt Wray tells us, those feelings aren’t just nice—they’re “super fuel” for doing the transformative work we need to do.5

Of course, as I’ve written here and here, this kind of emotional alchemy isn’t always easy. Grieving requires careful boundaries, community, and wise guidance to ensure we don’t become lost.

But it’s essential work. Because grief—generative grief—is the birthplace of creative expression: from music, to poetry, to gardening, to dance, to the many ways we memorialize and remember. And that work, born of love, is a pathway to joy: because our inner artist is also the domain of creativity and play.

As Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “In each one of us there is an artist … The path should be joyful, nourishing, and healing. So, we have to find a way to create that joy every day.”

The kiddo and I. Play time is sacred time.

And fierce joy—that laughter that makes your belly ache—is powerful. Because it does not run away from difficult truths. As standup comedian Tig Notaro famously said in her set Hello, I Have Cancer: “It's weird because with humor, the equation is tragedy plus time equals comedy … I am just at tragedy right now.”

A dear friend of ours, Aaron Barnett, works to protect local coastal ecology. He told me recently that to keep going in work like his, “you either have to be a contemplative or have a great sense of humor.. or more likely, both.”

Bonus! Because laughter is essential for our inner artist, check out a sketch by the genius Irish comedy trio Foil, Arms, and Hog.

That element of joy is vitally important here, because our inner artist hungers for playfulness, creativity, spontaneity. It is from that space that our best thinking, our best dreaming, and our best energy are born. And right now, we need the best of us.

So here is my first invitation: Carve out daily space for feeling the tough emotions, and then also also carve out time for creativity and play. Need some inspiration? Consider the work of Indigenous artists, who know this well, modeling how they center the recovery of traditional arts in healing from the soul wounds of colonialism.

2. Feed Your Inner Meditator: Reflect

“In every one of us there is a meditator….Our inner meditator brings us lucidity, calm, and deep insight.”6

In her book As We Have Always Done, Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson talks about what she calls “regenerative refusal,” a reminder that sometimes resistance takes the form of inaction, of opting out.

This pivot toward quiet, toward stillness and listening, is a profoundly important companion to action. Because action without wisdom can make things a lot worse.

If you need convincing, look no further than the history of the Indigenous people of North America—it is riddled with white-folks-with-good-intentions whose compulsion to act wrecked absolute havoc on Native communities and their homelands. Consigning Native children to boarding schools. Building massive infrastructure projects like hydroelectric dams that eviscerated salmon runs in the millions. Outlawing and violently suppressing Indigenous cultures and religions. Good intentions that are not grounded in respect, reciprocity, and right relations can become weapons of mass destruction.

Simpson’s claims also find affinity with Tricia Hersey, who argues in her best-seller Rest is Resistance: Free Yourself From Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life that demanding the right to rest can be a revolutionary act—particularly for women of color who have been disproportionately tasked with carrying the burdens for everyone else. As Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”7

Seeking guidance and pausing for deep listening—to other people, to the land, and to the Spirit—is essential if we’re to ensure that when we act, we act wisely.

There is plenty of guidance here. Contemplative traditions abound throughout the world’s religious and cultures. And while they vary in many important ways, they share a common sensibility of the importance of The Pause. Of quieting the mind, and developing skills of deep listening and discernment. (Curious to know more? I’ll be writing about some of these contemplative traditions in the months to come.)

A hidden gift from an anonymous artist, found tucked away on the trail last week.

While including space for stillness and rest, meditative reflection is not a vacation, but a mindful centering of the values that undergird our life, inspire our work, and shape our protocols for respectful behavior. It’s here we remember values like kinship, interbeing, and interdependence. Compassion, equity, and justice. Care, community, and creativity.

So here is my second invitation: Explore ways to integrate rest, reflection and discernment into your life. If we want the actions we take to be grounded in justice, consensus and care, respect, reciprocity, and right relations, then learning to quiet the chatter and listen is essential. Nourishing our inner meditator by creating space to be still, to listen deeply, and to center our values enlivens our spirits, protects us from burn out, and ensures against the violence of good intentions gone awry.

As Thich Nhat Hanh and Buddhist author Sylvia Boorstein have both famously said:

Don’t just do something! Sit there!

3. Empower Your Inner Warrior: Take Action

“In every one of us there is also a warrior. The warrior brings determination to go ahead. You refuse to give up … As a practitioner, you have to allow this fighter in you to be active.”8

Our grief, our creativity, and our discernment don’t just make it possible for us to take action, they actually propel us forward. Because these are practices of radical compassion. And compassion is care in action.

Tree with a warrior spirit, sustained by a nurse log. (For some reason this makes me think of a centaur!?)

That same warrior spirit—guided by discernment and inspired by grief and joy—mobilized the Lummi Nation to defeat the proposed coal export terminal at Cherry Point. It inspired Lakota youth to begin a movement to protect their sacred water at Standing Rock. And it continues to animate San Carlos Apache activists battling to protect their ceremonial grounds at Oak Flat from a massive open-pit copper mine.

Action can take myriad forms. For some it may be activism. For others it means doing the work of technical and skillful adaptation and mitigation. For others it is about caring for those species (including humans) who are already being harmed by a warming planet and a culture of disconnect.9

It may mean seeking out new communities of like-minded folks with whom to collaborate, or it might mean engaging in what Gifford Pinchot III has called intrapreneurship—creating change for good by innovating within whatever organization you already call home.10

But whatever form your action takes, every single one of us, in every single arena of life, in every profession, have an opportunity to help us move away from fossil fuels and toward a healthier, mutually sustaining world.

Do you have suggestions for ways that we can take action, both locally and globally? Please share in the comments!

Climate Anxiety and Spiritual Resilience