The Work That Reconnects is a pioneering form of group work that began in the 1970s. It demonstrates our interconnectedness in the web of life and our authority to take action on its behalf. It has helped many thousands around the globe find insight, solidarity, and courage to act, despite rapidly worsening conditions. Based on systems theory, spiritual teachings, and deep ecology, its methods are described in Coming Back to Life, the book Joanna Macy wrote with Molly Young Brown.

The History of the Work

This group work arose in North America in the late 1970s, when it brought together many antinuclear and environmental activists as well as psychologists, artists, and spiritual practitioners. Workshops, ranging in length from an evening to a week, in churches, classrooms and police armories, drew many thousands of people from within and beyond movements for peace, justice, and a safe environment. Because of my 1979 article "How to Deal with Despair," and my 1983 book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, it first became known as Despair and Empowerment work.

In the mid-1980s we began calling it Deep Ecology work, thanks to the consonance and inspiration we found in the deep ecological perspective. By then the work was spreading to Europe, Australia, South Asia, Japan and the Soviet Union. In 1988 Thinking Like a Mountain: toward a Council of All Beings, which I co-authored with John Seed, Pat Fleming and Arne Naess, was published, reflecting new forms of the work; and subsequent workshops often took the form of Councils of All Beings.

Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect our Lives, Our World, which I co-authored with Molly Young Brown, appeared ten years later to provide an up-to-date description of the theory behind the work and some sixty of its exercises, both new and old. Here the group work, reflecting the breadth of its applications, is called simply the Work that Reconnects.

The Goals of the Work

The central purpose of the Work that Reconnects is to help people uncover and experience their innate connections with each other and with the systemic, self-healing powers in the web of life, so that they may be enlivened and motivated to play their part in creating a sustainable civilization. In order to do this, we pursue these contributing goals:

• to provide people the opportunity to experience and share with others their innermost responses to the present condition of our world
• to reframe their pain for the world as evidence of their interconnectedness in the web of life, and hence of their power to take part in its healing
• to provide people with concepts--from systems science, deep ecology, or spiritual traditions--which illumine this power, along with exercises which reveal its play in their own lives
• to provide methods by which people can experience their interdependence with, their responsibility
• to, and the inspiration they can draw from past and future generations, and other life-forms
• to enable people to embrace the Great Turning as a challenge which they are fully capable of meeting in a variety of ways, and as a privilege in which they can take joy
• to bring people into mutual support and collaboration in working for the world

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