The Turn is an invitation to deepen your engagement with the most urgent challenge of our times – and develop your personal course of action within the context of a supportive collective.
To find your way towards ongoing, meaningful action, including how to spread this work further and become a catalyst for change.
As a collective, we will investigate ways to:
- Feel and allow your emotions about the current state of the earth, without being overwhelmed or swallowed up
- Connect with others who feel the same, and learn to communicate honestly and supportively with others who “get it”
- Move your daily actions into greater alignment with your understanding, and continue creating small but meaningful changes that can alter our trajectory in radical ways
- Build your powerful connection to the earth and her natural cycles to nourish, sustain and replenish you as you change
- Figure out how to talk about your personal shifts and the global crisis in a way that inspires others to action
How will it work?
This journey lasts for six weeks and each week we’ll focus on a different theme.
Week One: Perspectives
We’ll gather and connect; set our intentions and create a container for change.
Orientation will begin with a brief exploration of different perspectives on the crisis – Deep Adaptation, Reconnection to the Earth, Activism, Emergent Strategy, and Permaculture.
You’ll do some honest reflecting on where you are, and think about what new ground you’d like to explore.
Week Two: Consciousness and conscience
Using our emotions as guides, we’ll begin to investigate what it means to be conscious at this time. We’ll use Joanna Macy’s work on despair as a framework for processing and composting our feelings.
Our focus will be on allowing ourselves to feel what we feel, surrendering to our awareness, and asking also what it might lead to. Pain as a door, and empathy as a basis for further connection.
Week Three: “A revolution disguised as gardening”
Bill Mollison’s famous quote on Permaculture offers us a way into this powerful principle for building sustainable systems. We’ll use the principle of observation to begin to examine our own lives, and identify which areas are ripest for change. Where are you harried, unconscious, stressed, inefficient? Where can you make tweaks to have the biggest impact?
Our aim is not only to reduce our individual footprints, but to ask how we can best spread change work to our communities. How can we sustain ourselves to create ripples far beyond our own lives?
Week four: Allow it to be easy
We’ll return to the habit principles we explored in the free challenge, looking for ways we can add delight, play and freedom to our lives.
How can we be part of a new paradigm that’s founded on human connection? How can we make our revolution one that’s built on wonder, and joy?
Week five: A different way of being
Our habits don’t just change our actions, they change our being too. In week five we’ll explore ways that we can connect to the earth, and use nature as a model for self-sustaining practice.
We’ll begin to consider our part in the system – both in relation to our earth, and to the communities we’re a part of.
Week six: Hope and trust
In our final week, we’ll look at how we can express the inner work we’ve done to create external change. Together we’ll explore language we can use to describe the change we’re a part of; use story to shift what’s possible, and ways to connect and support others on this path.
Live calls
At the heart of this process are four live online gatherings: frank, facilitated conversations where we’ll share our perspectives on these themes and hear how others are engaging with them.
Each week you’ll receive an email exploring the week’s theme and linking to the content, which will include:
- Prompts for reflection
- Action steps
- Links to further reading
- A forum for private discussion within the group
Modules will be shared via our private website, where we’ll gather and connect. We will not be using a Facebook group.
At the end of the 6 weeks, you will receive a PDF copy of the course, to keep and re-use as you’d like.
The group size will be limited to 24, to ensure that our connections are fruitful and I am able to ensure everyone is given the attention they need.
That said, this is intended to be an empowering, co-creative, collaborative process. You are expected to show up and participate as fully as you can, and I won’t be holding you accountable if you choose not to engage.
We’re in this together, in other words – and your contribution is as important as my own. What we’ll create within this container is sacred to our collective path.
To find out when registration will open, join our free mailing list here:
Why are you holding this?
Honestly? I couldn’t NOT. Learning about these times and creating this map to help us navigate them has been a greater and greater part of my waking hours in recent years. But there’s only so far I can go by myself.
I know it’s time to join with others who are curious about evolving a genuine response based on slowing down and connecting with the earth and each other. And I know that there are others who feel the same.
This isn’t an invitation to drop everyhting. The time committment could be as little as an hour or two a week. Like you, my life is full. I run a business as a freelance copywriter; I’m raising a toddler and building a farm.
But, like you, I read the news, and I watch the videos, and most heartbreaking of all I see the changes beginning to happen, all around me.
This winter, I sank deeply into grief at the state of the planet.
Come spring, that rage crystallized into anger. And the anger became a deep, and resonant, drumming that I can only describe as purpose.
It led me to open up The Turn Challenge, as a rally cry to those of us who know that now is the time to act.
The next step?
To open up this circle, and to trust that we’ll be one of many global communities linking arms and joining together to find our way to respond to the call.
I hope you’ll join me.
My story
In 2017 the house I was living in was destroyed by a wildfire that devastated the region of central Portugal where I live.
(My husband and I, along with our newborn son, happened to be away at the time, visiting family in the UK. We were left with what we’d packed for the two-week trip, and our digital memories.)
It felt like an initiation of sorts. I learned a huge amount about loss, and change, and letting go.
4 months previously I’d given birth to our son and the two strands – witnessing the devastation caused by unpredictable weather patterns, and suddenly experiencing what it is to be invested in the future of the planet my child would grow up on – intertwined.
In the subsequent years, I read everything I could lay my hands on about solutions to the climate crisis. I blended them with the work I’d already been absorbed in about reconnecting to natural cycles and returning to earth-based wisdom to build connection.
In 2019, I felt the call to stand up and begin to share this work with others, both in writing and in live online circles. As an educated, straight white woman lucky enough to be living this life I recognize the immense privilege that I hold. And with that privilege, I believe, comes a responsibility to have the courage to stand up for what this earth is asking of us.
Your reasons will be different from mine – but they’re just as important. I invite you to join me.