Becoming the Water Body
A perspective-shift practice from the Ocean Ambassadors Compass: imagine being your local river, sea, or one of its animals or plants, and voice its needs and challenges in firs…
Relating R2
Connectedness
Feeling a sense of belonging to a larger whole, such as humanity, the planet's web of life, and the spiritual dimensions of existence.
Tools for this skill (16)
Connectedness in decision-making
To ensure that awareness of connections informs actual decisions. When facing significant decisions, include explicit consideration of connections: • How does this decision affe…
Connection to Impact
Genuine care for affected communities and ecosystems drives more authentic sustainability efforts than compliance alone. This practice strengthens felt connection to those impac…
Council of All Beings
A communal ritual in which participants set aside their human identity, are "chosen" by another life-form, often make simple masks, and then sit in council speaking AS that bein…
Despair Ritual
A communal ritual in which sorrows for the world are spoken archetypally — moving between small groups and the whole circle, voices joined and witnessed — building emotional sol…
Enhancing Sensorial Connectedness
A day with a local ecosystem: participants engage it through their senses — observing, listening, touching, collecting in situ — and reflect on interdependence and appreciation…
Making connections vivid and real
To move connectedness from abstraction to felt reality by creating direct contact with those the team is connected to. Periodically create experiences that make the team's conne…
Nature Quest
Structured solo time in wild nature in three phases: preparation (practical questions, naming worries, setting intention), the quest itself — going alone to a chosen place, leav…
Onboarding in Transdisciplinary Collaboration
A team-forming opening for transdisciplinary projects: students, teachers, and external partners build meaningful connection before building work plans — sharing backgrounds, mo…
Reflecting on belonging to larger wholes
To cultivate the felt sense of belonging to larger systems. Periodically create space for reflection on the team's place in larger contexts: Our team within the organization: Wh…
Sit Spot Practice
Each person chooses one spot in nature and returns to it again and again — sitting quietly, observing what lives and changes there through weathers and seasons, journalling afte…
The Interdependence Trace
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Connectedness (VCoL collection): Choose something you use or benefit from. Trace backward: Who made this possible? What resources, labou…
The Ripple Recognition
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Connectedness (VCoL collection): After completing an action, pause briefly and trace its ripples. Ask: 'Who might be affected by this? H…
The Symbiosis Meditation
An eight-minute guided imagination journey through the elements of your own body — earth (bones, teeth, weight), water (blood, inner oceans), air (breath, oxygen), fire (heat, t…
The Web Awareness
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Connectedness (VCoL collection): Pause for 10-15 seconds. Consider the web of connections that supports your work: the people who create…
Truth Mandala
A ritual structure for honoring pain for the world. The circle is divided into quadrants holding symbolic objects — a stone (fear), dead leaves (sorrow), a stick (anger), an emp…
Also develops it (32)
Climate Circles / Climate Cafés
Hosted talking circles where participants voluntarily share what the climate crisis stirs in them — fear, anger, guilt, hope — in a confidential, non-judgmental space with no fi…
Collaborative mapping of interconnections
To make visible the connections between factors relevant to a challenge. When facing a complex challenge, dedicate time to mapping the system together. Start by identifying key…
Connecting to larger purpose and movement
Hope is sustained by connection to something larger than immediate circumstances. Regularly connect the team's work to larger context: • How does what the team does contribute t…
Council (Circle with Talking Piece)
A circle process with a talking piece: only the holder speaks, everyone else practices devoted listening. Guidelines — speak from the heart, listen from the heart, be spontaneou…
Creating genuinely inclusive engagement with external actors
To model inclusive practice in how the team reaches out and collaborates. When planning engagement with external actors, consider who is being included and who might be left out…
Cultivating a mindful relationship to consumption and resources
Beyond specific practices lies a deeper question about orientation—the team's fundamental relationship to consumption and resources. Create periodic opportunities to reflect on…
Cultivating Awe
A solo imagination-and-reflection journey designed to evoke awe — vastness, wonder, the sense of something larger than oneself — and then harvest what it shifts: meaning, apprec…
Examining and reducing the team's environmental footprint
Teams cannot reduce what they do not notice. Creating awareness of environmental footprint is the foundation for responsible resource use. Periodically examine the team's direct…
Expanding the system boundary
To extend thinking beyond immediate context to include broader connections. Periodically apply systems thinking to larger questions: Upstream connections: Where do our inputs co…
Extending the circle of care
To cultivate the team's capacity to care about those beyond its immediate boundaries. Periodically extend empathic attention beyond the team: • Who is affected by our work that…
Future generations perspective
To develop capacity to consider how decisions affect those who come after. When facing significant decisions with lasting consequences, explicitly introduce future stakeholders'…
Gratitude Practice
Appreciation strengthens connection and sustains motivation for long-term sustainability work. When teams notice and name what they value, they reinforce commitment to protectin…
Inviting Non-Human Stakeholders
Role-play that adds the missing chairs: participants embody non-human stakeholders — animals, rivers, trees, future ecosystems — inside a real case or project discussion, speaki…
Jeans Journey
A ten-minute guided meditation that starts in the body and ends in the world: after settling into the breath, attention moves to the felt contact between skin and clothing — scr…
Learning from external perspectives and critical voices
To ensure the team remains open to learning from those outside its boundaries. Periodically seek input from external perspectives: • Invite a stakeholder or community member to…
Listening to Pause
A team dialogue structure built on deliberate silence: each person speaks for the same fixed time (e.g., five minutes); after each speaker, the group holds about a minute of pau…
Maintaining perspective through difficulty
Difficult periods are inevitable. For teams working in awareness of climate and political crises, the broader context itself can be a source of ongoing difficulty. When facing d…
Milestone celebrations and pausing to appreciate
To mark achievements and counteract the tendency to rush past accomplishments. When the team completes a significant project, reaches a goal, or navigates a difficult period suc…
Mindful Nature Walk
The entry-level nature-connection practice: a walk in forest or park with attention deliberately in relationship — naming trees, listening to layered sounds, feeling the carryin…
Perspective rotation in problem analysis
To systematically examine issues from multiple angles. When analyzing a complex situation, deliberately rotate through different lenses: • Operational lens: practical implementa…
Protected time for genuine dialogue
To create recurring opportunities for deeper, more present conversation. Periodically create protected time for dialogue that is not structured around an agenda or task. Explore…
Quarterly purpose reflection dialogue
To keep the team's sense of purpose alive and connected to daily work. Once per quarter, dedicate 60-90 minutes to a structured dialogue focused on team purpose. Address questio…
Recovering and rebuilding after significant setbacks
Some setbacks are significant enough that maintaining momentum is not possible. Resilient teams can recover and rebuild. After significant setbacks, allow time for processing. M…
Seventh Generation
A ritual dialogue across two hundred years: in a double circle, the inner ring speaks as people of the seventh generation hence, asking the outer ring — people of today — what i…
Stakeholder engagement practices
Effective engagement with stakeholders builds support, surfaces important perspectives, and creates allies. Develop systematic approaches to stakeholder engagement: Identify key…
Standing firm on principles under pressure
Teams regularly face pressure to compromise their principles—including pressure on environmental and social responsibility commitments. Clarify in advance what principles the te…
The 4E Model
Individually and in groups, participants apply the 4E model to move from ego-system to eco-system awareness — examining how a challenge looks from progressively wider circles of…
The Milling
The group walks silently through the room in shifting currents; at the facilitator's word, each person pauses face to face with whoever is near for a guided, wordless encounter…
The Systems Game
Everyone silently picks two other people and moves to stay equidistant from both; the room self-organizes into a shifting, settling, reorganizing whole no one is steering. Varia…
Threshold Walk
A miniature quest: carrying one real question, each person walks alone in nature for about an hour, stepping deliberately over a chosen threshold — a stick, a stream, a gate — t…
Widening Circles
In groups of four, each person speaks about an issue they care about four times over: first as themselves, then from the perspective of a person who opposes their view — in firs…
Working through collective resentments and divisions
To address patterns of division that limit the team's capacity. Periodically create space to examine whether the team is carrying resentments or grievances: Are there other team…