The headlines are relentless. Ice sheets breaking like hearts. Fires spreading like hate.
Personalities looming, smiling as the planet banks degrees like those personalities pick its pockets.
If you’ve found yourself staring at a climate article with that peculiar, hollow sensation in your chest, not panic exactly, although that was once there. Instead a deep ache of watching something too precious for words slip away. It won’t solve much to know it but you’re not alone.
Lean in, it’s storytime
Years ago, I put all my energy, my actual working life, purpose and energy all the way in to renewable projects. It was amazing, we found loopholes in the system and communities could generate huge sums for altruistic projects while we demonstrated that there were workable alternatives.
Cleaner air, cooler seas and a fairer future.
Then, not long ago, I learned that one of the largest wind farms in the country, might be going on to power one of the most controversial oil platform in decades.
I wish I could say I was surprised but truly what a felt was a blunt punch of truth land squarely in my guts.
A strange cocktail of disappointment and recognition, even though deep down, I know the story is rarely clean cut. The ace has been plucked and ripped in two, they’d flashed their hand but they’re counting cards with help from those sitting in the back.
In yoga, we talk about dvandvas, the pairs of opposites. Light and dark. Effort and ease. Heavy and light.
In my case, maybe, hope and harm.
We want our choices to land on the “right” side, but the world keeps showing us that they rarely sit neatly in one hand.
If this is not a lesson about ahimsa (non-harming) and how impossible it feels when harm is woven into the very structures we live inside and actions we need to take to navigate to hope.
I anm naturally led to satya (truthfulness) and how often the truth is not a single thing, but a braid of contradictions that need to be embedded in context.
This isn’t a story with a tidy end but I am going back to renewables knowing there will be days I’ll need to lie on the floor.
It’s a reminder that sometimes our work plants seeds in soil we don’t control. That the same wind that turns a turbine can also turn a drill. That living with complexity means staying present, even when the edges don’t yet line up.
Climate anxiety is not just fear. It’s grief. Earth is your mother. Like an angst teen that love for what was is disappearing. That empty ache is your body trying to make sense of a threat that is both everywhere and invisible.
In the space where you notice what’s true without deciding what to do about it yet.
Listen, Yoga doesn’t fix that, it doesn’t make the world less on fire. But it gives me a way to stay with the sensation without turning away.
My Meditations for a Burning Planet begins here, not with action plans or solutions, but with the quiet practice of noticing and sitting quietly in a similar state of knowing.
The way breath moves through a room. The way grief changes shape when you let it be seen. When you let it out.
The way connection feels when you remember you’re not the only one awake in the dark.
