Joanna Macy (1929 to 2025) was an American scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology, and an environmental activist, who created the Work That Reconnects: a body of practices for facing the pain of the world and turning despair into empowerment and action. She was a Buddhist, not a shaman, yet much of her work is shamanic in its tone, and her practices of gratitude and of turning despair into empowerment run all through Therapeutic Shamanism.
Who was Joanna Macy? #
An American scholar, teacher and activist whose life’s work was helping people stay present to the state of the world without being crushed by it. She was born Mary Joanna Rogers in Los Angeles on 2 May 1929, and studied religion at Wellesley College. In the 1960s her family lived in India, Tunisia and Nigeria, and in India she worked with Tibetan monks and lamas who had fled Tibet, which began her lifelong path in Buddhism. She went on to a doctorate at Syracuse University, completed in 1978, on mutual causality in Buddhism and general systems theory.1
From 1980 onwards she led workshops and taught around the world, and from 1987 she and her husband, Fran Macy, made their home in Berkeley, California. She died there on 19 July 2025, aged ninety-six.2
What is the Work That Reconnects? #
A set of group and personal practices that help people feel their pain for the world, and then turn it into empowerment and action. It began as ‘despair work’: Macy published her first article on it in 1979 and led her first public despair workshop in 1980, and her book Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age followed in 1983, at a time of widespread fear of nuclear war. On a tour of Australia in 1985 she met the Australian activist John Seed, and together they created the Council of All Beings, a communal ritual in which people speak on behalf of other life-forms. The work was renamed deep ecology work, and later the Work That Reconnects.3
Its best-known shape is a spiral of four stations, which Macy and her co-author Chris Johnstone name “Coming from Gratitude, Honoring Our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes, and Going Forth”.4 The spiral is meant to be travelled again and again, not completed once. There is more on the practices themselves in What is the Work That Reconnects?
What are the three stories and active hope? #
Two of Macy’s ideas reach well beyond her workshops. The first is the three stories of our time. In ‘Business as Usual’, little needs to change and the plot is about getting ahead; in ‘the Great Unraveling’, the evidence of ecological and social collapse is told; and in ‘the Great Turning’, people refuse to let the second story have the last word and work for the move from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining one. Macy and Johnstone do not ask which story is true. All three are happening, and the question is which one we put our energy behind.5
The second is active hope. “Active Hope is a practice”, something we do, not a feeling we wait to have, and not a forecast that things will turn out well.6
What did she write? #
Many books, alone and with others. Amongst the best known are Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (1983); Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (1988), with John Seed and others; World as Lover, World as Self (1991), on Buddhism, systems thinking and the ecological self; Coming Back to Life (1998, with Molly Young Brown), the practice manual of the Work That Reconnects; her memoir Widening Circles (2000); and Active Hope (2012, with Chris Johnstone), which brings the Work That Reconnects to the reader in book form, to be read alone or, as the authors encourage, with others. With Anita Barrows she also translated the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.7
How does her work connect with shamanism? #
Through what its practices actually do. Although Macy herself was a Buddhist, the Work That Reconnects “is heavily shamanic in its tone, and many of the practices could be described as shamanic practices”. These include holding a Council of All Beings, various deep-empathy and shapeshifting practices, and listening to and honouring other life forms.8
Even its name is shamanic, “because, from a shamanic perspective, a healthy human is an inter-connected human.” The sickness in modern society, and the madness that has led to the social and environmental crisis, comes from our being disconnected, and that includes disconnection from the Earth dressed up as spirituality. This is why there is no tradition in shamanism of renouncing the world. The shaman’s role is to be in the world and to hold the sacred balance between the beings that live within it, which makes shamanism “a path of embodied spiritual activism.”9 See How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural Power-loss?
Was Joanna Macy a shaman or an animist? #
Not in the sense those words have here. She was a Buddhist, a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, and an activist, and her life’s work was teaching, writing and campaigning.10 Therapeutic Shamanism recognises a kinship in her work, in practices that bring people back into felt relationship with the rest of the living world, arrived at from a different direction. Calling someone an animist because their ideas overlap with animism would be claiming them for a tradition that was not their own.
Why does despair matter in shamanic practice? #
Because practising shamanism opens us up. It makes us more aware of what is around us, including the state of the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer and what humans have done to it, and that “can sometimes feel overwhelming and even lead to feelings of despair.” There would be no point to the practice if it just led to despair: it would do us no good, and we would be of no help to the people and Peoples around us. So the despair has to be managed, and gratitude practices are one quick and effective antidote. “Another strong antidote to despair is to transform it into empowerment”, which is where Macy’s work comes in.11
If we sink into despair and let it overwhelm us, then things really are hopeless, both for society and for our own one and precious life. The way through, as Macy shows in Active Hope, starts with standing and facing things as they really are, and feeling our feelings about them. “We need to be the shamans, the people in the tribe who are prepared to see the things that most other people prefer to avoid.” Once that is done, the energy of despair can be turned into empowerment and a determination to act.12 See Why is gratitude an animist practice? and What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
What part has her work played in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
A large one, and a personal one. Paul Francis came across her work in his twenties, when it was still called ‘despair and empowerment work’, and it was his own introduction to gratitude practice. It became an essential part of his personal practice and of Therapeutic Shamanism, and he feels “a deep, heartfelt gratitude towards Joanna Macy and her work”. Active Hope is the book of hers he usually suggests to people.13 Many of the ideas and practices of the Work That Reconnects are taken into Therapeutic Shamanism and adapted to it.14
Paul counts Macy amongst his personal heroes, alongside people such as Carl Rogers, Wilhelm Reich and Derrick Jensen, whilst putting none of them on a pedestal, since heroes are flawed individuals who show us not how to be flawless gods, but how to be a human being.15
