Being Medicine in this Planet Time
Grace Lee Boggs famously asked, “what time is it on the world clock?” – What’s your internal response and answer to that question? What do you see happening – to yourself, to your fellow humans, to the more than human world?
The hour is late for tipping points for catastrophic climate change, the sixth mass extinction being caused by human activity, the expansion of authoritarianism, and many other interrelated facets of today’s polycrisis. Many things are in a state of collapse.
Given this late hour, knowing there is much it is too late for and can’t be saved, how can we be part of the medicine needed in these times? What is it not too late for? What healing can become possible if we give ourselves to it?
Medicine and healing are needed on many levels:
- Internally within ourselves
- In our interpersonal relationships with family members, colleagues, neighbors, and community members
- Within our species between different social groups that have a long history of inflicting harm on people outside of their self-defined group (e.g. patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism)
- Between the human species and other species (e.g. ongoing species extinctions)
- Within the larger ecosystems and biosphere (anthropogenic climate change)
Much of the healing needed is relational, which means there is a role that we can play.
One of the reasons Joanna Macy created the Work That Reconnects was so that when things fall apart, people would turn towards each other rather than on each other. As things increasingly fall apart, let us cultivate the conditions for turning towards one another, and see what possibilities for breakthrough emerge amidst the breakdown and collapse ensuing around us.
To support these inquiries, Interhelp is offering a Being Medicine in this Planet Time online workshop series. Workshops will include a dialogue/interview between the host of this series–Aravinda Ananda–and a guest speaker as well as Work That Reconnects practices or other integrative modalities.
The first Being Medicine in This Planet Time workshop will happen on June 22, 2025 3-5pm ET, with special guest Carol Berzonsky.
Registration will soon open for the June 22nd program.
About the workshop series host:
Aravinda Ananda (she or they) is a social ecologist living and working on Massachusett land. Aravinda calls her life’s work LivingrEvolution, which is about supporting a shift in human relationships with the entire web of life to be more life-affirming and sustaining. A current focus of hers is this inquiry of how we can be the medicine needed in this planet time. Last year she collaborated with Louise Dunlap to offer a Healing the Colonizer Mind workshop series through Interhelp that combined dialogue between Aravinda and Louise with Work That Reconnects practices. Following that well-attended workshop series, Aravinda is creating another series to explore the topic of Being Medicine in this Planet Time.