Awareness, Care and Sustainability for Our Earth

Bringing Inner Development and Climate Action Together

with Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jamie Bristow, Christine Wamsler, Bruce Barrett, Liane Stephan and Margaret Fletcher

presented: Friday, March 7, 2025

Click here to view a video of the event. 

Can connecting our own inner mindfulness with outer sustainability help us turn toward our future with strength and resilience? Given the increasing pace and harms of climate change, we can sense the rising call for our most powerful actions to heal our relationship with Earth. Developing an embodied understanding of our interconnectedness with all life on the Earth is deeply needed, now. 

In this online gathering, you’ll find: 

• Evidence for how mindfulness supports sustainability behavior, and means for nurturing and developing your own resilience.
• Mindfulness-based methods for creating climate action, grounded in awareness of interconnection and care for the Earth.
• Tools for mindfulness teachers to bring Earth awareness to life for students and practitioners.

This time together will include presentation, question and answer, and guided practice, plus small and large group discussion. Presenters will discuss contemplative methods that help to reconnect to oneself, and nature and our more-than-human kin. Participants will connect, share and learn about ways to explore these methods further from each other and through a variety of upcoming programs. 

Bruce Barrett MD PhD is a family physician, tenured professor, and vice chair for research in the University of Wisconsin Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. His research has focused on design and interpretation of randomized trials, alternative/complementary/integrative medicine, mind-body interactions, mindfulness meditation, placebo effects, and assessment of patient-oriented outcomes. Dr. Barrett has led an interdisciplinary team of physicians, scientists, and mindfulness instructors to develop Mindful Eco-Wellness: Steps to Healthier Living (aka Mindful Climate Action), which is an educational and behavior change program aimed at helping people decrease their carbon footprints while enhancing their personal health and happiness.

Jamie Bristow is a writer linking inner and outer transformation, and a policy advisor on the application of inner development and contemplative practices in public life. His work includes influential reports such as Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out and The System Within: Addressing the inner dimension of sustainability and systems transformation. He currently leads on public narrative and policy development for the Inner Development Goals, emphasising the inner skills and qualities needed for a sustainable transition, and is an associate or fellow of Life Itself, The Climate Majority Project, Mind & Life and Bangor University. For eight years, from 2015 to 2023, Jamie played an instrumental role in the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness, acting as its clerk and serving as Director of the associated policy institute, The Mindfulness Initiative. During this time he worked with legislators around the world to make mindfulness and compassion training serious matters of public policy and catalysts for a healthier political process. Jamie's earlier roles included being the Business Development Director at Headspace, and his rich background encompasses psychology, climate change campaigning, and advertising.

Margaret Fletcher trained and is certified to teach MBSR through the Center for Mindfulness at UMass Medical School, where she also served as an MBSR Teacher and Senior MBSR Teacher Trainer. Ms. Fletcher is the originator of the MBSR & EcoAwareness workshop, which brings together MBSR & MBCT  teachers to develop both their practice and teaching skills around Earth awareness, care, compassion and action. Workshop participants engage in Earth-centered mindfulness practices, consider the historical and social context of climate emergency, and review the MBSR curriculum to identify means for calling out the natural place of Earth in our lives and awareness. Teachers are invited to live into the challenges and possibilities of teaching in a way that invites the Earth herself in as a fully worthy recipient in the circle of MBSR care, compassion and embodied action.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. did his doctoral work in molecular biology at MIT in the laboratory of the Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria. He is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (in 1995), and (in 1979) its world-renown Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic.  He is the author of 15 books, the most recent of which are Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief (2023), and a Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of Wherever You Go, There You Are 2024). They include the bestsellers Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go, There You Are, and Mindfulness for Beginners. In 2018/2019, he published a series of four volumes updating and expanding the 2005 edition of Coming to Our Senses:  Meditation is Not What You Think; Falling Awake; The Healing Power of Mindfulness; and Mindfulness for All. His books are published in over 45 languages.  His work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, health care, neuroscience, schools, higher education, business, social justice, criminal justice, prisons, the law, technology, government, and professional sports. Over 700 hospitals and medical centers around the world now offer MBSR. Jon lectures and leads mindfulness workshops and retreats around the world and online. In the Spring of 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he offered 66 consecutive weekdays of 90 minute online guided meditations, talks, and dialogue, the so-called mitigation retreat:  see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqkYJfT8gsw. His website is https://www.jonkabat-zinn.com.

Liane Stephan is the CEO and co-founder of Awaris GmbH since 2009. Awaris is a global company that provides neuroscience and mindfulness-based leadership programs for global organizations. Ms. Stephan is co-founder and managing director of the Inner Green Deal gGmbH, founded in 2022. The Inner Green Deal focuses on the human dimension of sustainability, offering programs in sustainable leadership, Mindfulness-Based Sustainable Transformation, and nature experiences to a wide variety of audiences. She studied sports science with a focus on motivational psychology and has worked as a coach, facilitator and organizational developer for culture change for more than 40 years for companies worldwide on all leadership levels as well for a lot of NGO`s.