Resources for GGN’s “10-Steps to Personal Resilience & Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate”

Resources To Dig Deeper Into Each Step

We’ve curated a wide variety of writings, audio, and other media we specifically recommend for those at each step in the 10-step program.

Overall Recommendations

Quotes

  • “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.” ―Adrienne Rich
  • Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ― Howard Thurman
  • “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • “If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.” — Marian Wright Edelman
  • “Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realize how precious your time here is. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.” — John O’Donohue
  • “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
  • “(The) unwillingness to face the truth about our time is another form of silencing. Before we can fix our troubled relationship with nature, we must be willing to look at it.”― Derrick Jensen
  • “Should you fear that with this pain your heart might break, remember that the heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe. Your heart is that large. Trust it. Keep breathing.” ― Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
  • “It seems clear the mission of our time is to reinvent what it means to be human.” ― Thomas Berry
  • “We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.” ― S. Kelley Harrell
  • “Grief dares us to love once more.” ― Terry Tempest Williams

Articles

 

Books

Video

 

Poems

 

Organizations

Courses

Music

Spotify Playlists:

Step 1: Accept the Severity of the Predicament

Quotes

  • “We have to do something braver than just try to save the world we have known, we must accept the fact that the world we have known is going to change in hideous and damaging ways.” ―Bill McKibben
  •  “Acceptance does not mean surrender. It does not mean resignation. Acceptance means I am finally available to the entire spectrum of creative responses.” ―Trebbe Johnson in Radical Joy For Hard Times
  • “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ―Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • “Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” —Andrew Boyd
  • “(The) unwillingness to face the truth about our time is another form of silencing. Before we can fix our troubled relationship with nature, we must be willing to look at it.” ―Derrick Jensen

 

Articles

 

Perspectives on Recent IPCC Findings:

 

Books

 

Video

Step 2: Acknowledge I Am Part Of The Problem & Solutions

 

Quotes

  • “Action feeds hope feeds action feeds hope. Because without hope, you’re not going to have action, without action, you’re not going to have hope. They feed each other.” ―Heather Price
  •  “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” ―Clarissa Pinkola Estes
  • “If we see that something is wrong we have no choice but to oppose it—for the sake, if for nothing else, of our own souls. And yet, in so destructive an age as ours, it is possible for our sense of wrong to become an affliction.” —Wendell Berry
  • “The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.” ―Thomas Berry
  • “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” —Alice Walker

Articles

 

Books

 

Video

 

Audio

 

 

 

Poems

 

 

 

 

Organizations

 

 

Step 3: Practice Being With Uncertainty

 

Quotes

  • “No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”―James Baldwin
  • “Be open to the outcome, not attached to the outcome.” —Angeles Arrien
  • “One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’” —Rachel Carson
  • “It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” —Alan Cohen
  • “One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.” —Krishnamurti
  • Life is a balancing act of holding on and letting go. —Rumi

 

Articles

 

Books

 

Audio

 

Video

 

Organizations

Step 4: Honor My Mortality And The Mortality Of All

Quotes

  • To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. —Pema Chödrön
  • i don’t pay attention to the world ending.
    it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.
    —Nayyirah Waheed
  • My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change. —Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

 

 

Articles

 

Books

Video

 

Audio

 

Meditations

Step 5: Do Inner Work

Quotes

  • “You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.” —Edward Abbey
  • “Only if we can stop the terrorism in our own hearts will we be able to stop the terrorism in the world.” —Alice Walker
  • “It is not half so important to know as to feel.” —Rachel Carson
  • “Caring for myself is not a self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
  • “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” – Khalil Gibran
  • “The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés
  • “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” – Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
  • “Should you fear that with this pain your heart might break, remember that the heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe. Your heart is that large. Trust it. Keep breathing.” ―Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
  • “Grief dares us to love once more.” ―Terry Tempest Williams
  • “To be numb to the world is another form of suicide.” ―Terry Tempest Williams

 

Articles

 

Books

 

Video

 

Audio

 

Meditations

 

Poems

 

Organizations

Step 6: Develop Awareness of Brain Patterns & Perception

Quotes

  • “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” —Anais Nin
  • “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.”—Isaac Asimov
  • “What counts is the ability to slow down and act from clarity and compassion rather than projection and selfishness.” —George Draffan
  • “In order to be a ‘radical’ one must be open to the possibility that one’s own core assumptions are misconceived.” —Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

 

Articles

 

Books

 

Organizations

MindValley.com

Videos

Step 7: Practice Gratitude, Witness Beauty & Create Connections

Quotes

  • “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.​”​​ ​―Terry Tempest Williams
  • “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.”―Francis Weller

  • “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” —Rachel Carson

  • “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” —Rachel Carson
  • “Look for magic in the daily routine.” —Lou Barlow
  • “Perhaps this is all a person can try to put into each of her days: attention to the radiance, a rise to the full chase of beauty.” —Ellen Maloy
  • If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change. ―Buddha

     

    Articles

     

    Books

     

     

    Video

    Organization 

    Meditation

    Step 8: Take Breaks & Rest

    Quotes

    • “Caring for myself is not a self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” ―Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
    •  “Every person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no​ ​solutions searched for. On that day we need to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw​ ​from us.” ―Maya Angelou
    • “Some days are for living. Others are for getting through.” —Malcolm Forbes
    • “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.” —Sir John Lubbock

     

    Articles

     

    Books

     

    Video

    Step 9: Show up

    Quotes

    • “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.” – Neil Gaiman
    • “It seems clear the mission of our time is to reinvent what it means to be human.” ―Thomas Berry
    • “It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.” —Madeleine Albright
    • “I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
    • “There is a force in the universe, which, if we permit it, will flow through us and produce miraculous results.” —Mahatma Gandhi
    • “I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.” —Joshua Graham
    • “Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.” —Margaret Wheatley

    Books

    • Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

    Video

    Brene Brown‘s (TedTalks):

    Step 10: Reinvest Into Meaningful Efforts

    Quotes

    • “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the
      world needs is people who have come alive.” ―Howard Thurman
    • “If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.” —Marian Wright Edelman
    • “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” —St. Francis of Assisi
    • “Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realize how precious your time here is. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.” —John O’Donohue
    • “In my dream the angel shrugged and said, if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination. And then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.” —Bryan Andrea
    • “Action is the antidote to despair.” —Joan Baez
    • “The Great Work before us, the task of moving the modern industrial civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more benign mode of presence, is not a role we have chosen. It is a role given to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves. We did not choose. We were chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historical task. Yet we must believe that those powers that assign our role must in that same act bestow upon us the ability to fulfill this role. We must believe that we are cared for and guided by these same powers that bring us into being.” —Thomas Berry, The Great Work
    • “The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.” —Wendell Berry

    Articles

     

    Books

     

    Video

     

    Meditations

     

    Audio

     

    Organizations

    350.ORG

    Black Lives Matter

    Citizens’ Climate Lobby

    Climate Reality Leadership Corps

    EarthJustice

    Extinction Rebellion

    Greenpeace

    New Moon Rites of Passage

    Pachamama Alliance

    Radical Joy For Hard Times

    Sierra Club

    The Climate Mobilization

    Writers In The Schools