For those of you who have been faithful followers of my blog since it started in 2009, for my most recent followers, and for everyone in between, it’s time to make it official: I will not be blogging at 350orbust.com any longer. Although I did say goodbye back in July of 2013 (see Shift Happens post), I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop blogging entirely. So my posts became sporadic until four months ago when I stopped posting entirely.
I haven’t stopped my climate activism, just shifted gears. One of the reasons I had no time to pay attention to 350orbust was that I was writing a book. Unfreeze Yourself: Five ways to take action on climate change NOW for the sake of your family, your health, and the planet is now published and available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
If you are a follower of my blog and would like a peek at the book, especially if you are interested in reviewing it on the Amazon or Barnes & Noble websites, send me an email at 350orbust@gmail.com. I’m happy to share it.
I’ve also been exploring the connection between personal and planetary healing for the last several years, spurred on by my own experience of climate trauma, the deeply distressing experience of bearing witness to the suicidal behaviour of our society. It is hard to look at the data science is giving us about the urgent need for action on the one hand, and observe the obliviousness, if not outright hostility, of people to the climate crisis on the other.
In his best-selling book The Body Keeps The Score, Harvard psychiatrist and trauma specialist Dr Bessel van der Kolk discusses how traumatized people often disassociate from their bodies. A massage therapist described to me how a paramedic stressed by difficult scenes he had witnessed at work was initially unable to feel her hands massaging his limbs. Dr van der Kolk’s work confirms that this disconnection from the body happens when what we have been through is too painful to feel.
At this point in history the majority of us have collectively disassociated from the body that sustains life, the Earth. Our individual bodies can’t survive without the water, air, and food that the Earth provides us. Yet as a society we are filling the rivers, oceans, land, and atmosphere with toxins. This suicidal behaviour is painful to bear witness to. I believe that most of us are traumatized by what is happening to our environment, whether or not we realize it.
~Unfreeze Yourself: Five ways to take action on climate change NOW for the sake of your family, your health, and the planet
Besides publishing a book and contemplating starting another one, I’ve also launched a wellness practise, Tapping Courage, offering neurofeedback, meridian tapping (EFT) & therapeutic touch. I have been a therapeutic touch practitioner for several decades, and neurofeedback is an intriguing modality for me that is producing exciting results with my clients. It is tapping, however, that has helped me the most with the emotional toll my climate work has taken on me. One of the great things about EFT is how accessible it is; it can be learned by anyone with 10 minutes to spare (go to EFT pioneer Gary Craig’s website emofree.com for lots of free resources) and there are thousands of videos on YouTube that will take you through a tapping session. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to check these resources out.
As a healing facilitator, I offer one-on-one guided tapping sessions online via Skype. In these sessions I show people who feel hopeless and despairing about, or traumatized by, the ecological crisis how to release their pain and fear and allow themselves to care deeply about themselves and the world again. If this sounds like something you may be interested in, you can contact me by email at tappingcourage@gmail.com, visit the Tapping Courage Facebook page, or go to www.TappingCourage.com.
Blessings to each and every one of you reading this. I wish you courage on the journey.
“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold…Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” ~ Helen Keller
Thank you for all you have done, are doing, Christine. I’ve enjoyed your blog and learned a lot from you. Will see you somewhere down the line.
Thanks for touching base, Jane. I hope our paths do cross again.
Thank you for years of inspiration and enlightenment Christine. I’ll miss your blog, look forward to your book, and wish you all the very best with your private practice.
Thanks so much for your kind comments, and for the well wishes. I do hope you keep in touch – those of us who have the courage to look at the climate crisis without (too much!) flinching need to stay connected!
I think “delusion” is the appropriate term here. “Climate crisis” = Climate bollocks.
LOL. Of course, can’t say goodbye to 350orbust without a climate denier dropping in. As President Obama said this week, those people who still want to deny the reality of climate change will be lonely, “because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.”
But don’t let that stop you, Jimmy.
Yep, delusion… pot, kettle; I think you need to look in the mirror, Jimmy.
Another door opens. Exciting. All the best Christine. 🙂
Thanks Catherine, for the support and your help with the book. Your copy should be delivered soon. 🙂
Christine, you’re a wonderful human being. I’ll miss your well-grounded attempts to drag me back down to touch reality.
One last typo alert for you:
“…a peak at the book…”
should be:
“…a peek at the book…”
😉
So glad you dropped by to say goodbye, p, and of course do some final copy editing for me. Both are much appreciated! Take care of yourself as well as this world.
You say ‘goodbye’, I say…
Hello again, Christine, hope you’re well!
I now have access to the Kindle app, so I’ve just bought an eBook copy of ‘Unfreeze Yourself’. Looking forward to reading it!
I also took a side-trip to booklinker.net, a handy site that offers free links that automagically directs folk to the amazon site in their neck of the planet. I created a link for your book; here ’tis: http://mybook.to/UnfreezeYourself 🙂
Christine, I check your blog way too infrequently. So I just discovered you are no longer doing it. Definitely a loss to the “green” community. But I understand completely. I am on the verge of deciding whether to continue (blogging) myself. Opposition, even hostility, to the science of climate change is palpable and, sadly, way too often from the faith community. It boggles my mind that so many can so easily reject facts and evidence out of hand when they can be so plainly seen all around us. Glad to hear you are also “keeping your hand” in the struggle in other ways. And I wish you all the best with your book Anyway, I’m so glad we met that time in Wpg. Perhaps our paths will cross again some day. BEST!