How can we transform mindsets to address climate change?

Dr. Thomas Bruhn, Research Group Leader of A mindset for the Anthropocene at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, and Laureline Simon, Founder of One Resilient Earth, discuss techniques to foster inner change, and the many questions that emerged around their work on climate change, as their mindsets started to shift.  

Laureline: Thanks a lot, Thomas, for accepting to tells us about A Mindset for the Anthropocene, which is the program you’re leading at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. I am fascinated by this programme as it addresses through a scientific perspective how mindfulness and other contemplative techniques can support sustainability agendas through inner transformation, and also lead to a more profound, lasting and maybe radical change. What drove you, as a physicist, to work on mindfulness?

Thomas: My interest in contemplative practice routes back to my youth. As a child, I had asthma, was introduced to breathing practices, and fortunately got rid of my asthma. Also, my religion teacher, who was a Catholic priest, introduced me to Buddhist meditation. I always appreciated this contemplative approach and being in nature. However, my interests in physics was always separate from my interest in questions of self-inquiry. So, the interest in mindfulness is not a new interest for me. What is new is that I could give it a space in my scientific context. I started my professional career working on system science, such as climate engineering or CO2 utilisation out of a concern for the state of the world. And my self-exploration process took place in private spaces: I was meditating in my free time.

And what catalysed my shift in this professional context was that I was hosting various strategic dialogues among decision-makers for all kinds of environmental challenges. My observation was that many people would talk of all these things very intelligently, but no real action emerge out of it as long as people do not find ways to connect meaningfully. And I was often stunned at this atmosphere of competition and collective narcissism. I was wondering:

why is it that mindful attitude towards the world and the cultivation of compassion have such meaning for many people personally, but seem to have no space in a field where people say that they care so much about the state of the world? How could this be so distinct?

I then had the chance to integrate my personal inquiry process in this field where I felt the human dimension and connection to the Earth were lacking.

Laureline: And did you intuitively feel that mindfulness and contemplative techniques were the best approach to quiet down this narcissism you mentioned and foster connection? That’s how I felt when I was co-organizing Resilience Frontiers two years ago and had brought together 80 visionaries and thought-leaders from around the world for a collective intelligence process to generate a vision for post-2030 climate resilience. Based on my own practice, I felt that mindfulness and zen meditation techniques could help ground participants in their bodies, so to speak, and connect them to a shared human condition. I would perhaps do things differently today, but did you have a similar approach?

Thomas: I would say there was a step before we even thought of specific approaches. For a long time, we were just sitting with people and sharing our question about the disconnect without providing any answers. Surprisingly, many people resonated with this issue but were concerned about the legitimacy, and possible loss of professional credibility when speaking up for meditation for instance, and engaging in this field. At the same time, we were surprised at how much solid research work is done on mindsets and how it is relevant for behaviour change and for social relationships. We realized it’s all there, it is just not considered in this particular context of efforts for sustainability. And by listening to our peers, we realized they essentially needed scientific language and legitimacy for this kind of integration process. We also realized that we were not the only ones interested in this question. There are actually a lot of people who are ‘hidden’. And last, we realized this group needed practical support on how to integrate this in their daily practice, as they were feeling trapped in systems that prohibit expressions of their whole human and emotional dimensions.

At the IASS, we could approach this integration process from a scientific perspective which I felt had also a lot of symbolic value. We have created a space where the dialogue between these two fields can take place and provided a way for people to connect with each other, so that they could find approaches relevant to their contexts. And then it was a longer process to find which tools or practical approaches resonate with the practices in these fields. I don’t believe in the idea that everybody should just meditate half an hour every day and suddenly our whole systems are going to change. But we did find a way to include self-reflexive elements into our workshop processes and also in allowing people to connect in the beginning of workshops, they can bring in their own subjective dimension into the whole process.

Laureline: You’ve made me curious about the contemplative tools or practical approaches you mobilize in addition to mindfulness. There are so many approaches backed by different religions or wisdom traditions. What do you experiment or not experiment with? How do you select those techniques, especially as you may not know all of their impacts beforehand on the group, since you are in the process of experimenting?

Thomas: It is a continuous iterative learning for me, because we are not claiming to do fully objective science. At the same time, we have a normative basis, assumptions and experiences of our own. And I would say the boundaries that we draw are changing every step of the way. In the beginning of the project I honestly felt flooded and overwhelmed with that diversity. I also learned that not all people come with the same humility into that diversity: a lot of people want to convince others that their own approach is the right one, particularly when it is about aspects of mindset transformation. It was a learning process for us to understand that we have to draw certain boundaries and that they are not necessarily so much about the approach itself, but about how people introduce a certain practice into the field and honour that diversity. It also means that we usually offer these approaches to people, but we don’t impose them on a whole group so that our participants are always free to choose what resonates most with them.

Having said that, of course, we feel that there are certain approaches that we do not want to include at a certain point, as too many participants may struggle with them. There is also the question of how deep the self-inquiry should go and how able we are to handle the dynamics and conflicts that may emerge from it. One of our colleagues is a psychotherapist, and she brings in some perspective that allow us to say “this is as deep as you can go in a group of 20 people” for instance. Besides, through our work, we are also engaging with the scientific foundations of these approaches. And as much as I would say that there are lots of wisdom traditions that I honour, regardless of whether any scientist has done research on it or not, it helps me to be able to follow them cognitively, as I am very much interested in combining experience and science.

So in the end an approach is chosen when it resonates at both experiential and scientific levels, and when it is introduced by a person whom we trust and who shares our values in terms of diversity.

Laureline: And so when you talk about approaches that were already studied or tested through science, are you referring to psychology, neurosciences, sociological studies of the effects of such approaches…?

Thomas: Originally, I felt more inclined towards what you would call hard sciences like neuroscience, probably because I’m a physicist. Yet, more and more, I begin to understand sociology and social psychology processes, and feel they also provide a lot of really meaningful insights. But sociology, psychology and neuroscience are probably the three main disciplines that are relevant for me, separately and in conjunction, in the first few years of this project.

Laureline: And does your team envision to apply those scientific lenses or foster new research to explore the effects of shamanic techniques for instance, which may not have been studied as much as mindfulness meditation? Or do you essentially mobilize existing modern science on techniques that are quite wide-spread in the West? Last, could studying different wisdom traditions lead you to integrate other scientific approaches, including from Indigenous knowledge systems, than the ones mentioned before?

Thomas: Psychosocial research, which combines insights from psychoanalysis and social sciences is very interesting to me at the moment. This approach builds for instance on semi-biographic, qualitative interviews with people, combining the research with an exploration of the biographies of the interviewees to study their mindset. That’s super interesting because often we treat research as if it was distinct from the researcher, while anthropology and sociology clearly show that this is not. I also feel that whole field of eco-philosophy is incredibly important to help us explore the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the methods we use. We can feed those findings into our discussions with other researchers to help them reflect on their own underpinnings, which is often neglected. So, philosophy has a certain emphasis for me. But because our capacities are limited, we do not go further in terms of transformation through our own research work.

Laureline: Reflecting on our subjective relation to the research approach is always fascinating. It highlights how much the research method we choose is determined by our own (often unconscious) biases. Besides, each research method enables us to ask only a specific set of questions, which in turn is likely to determine what part of our research object we study. Yet, and hopefully, our biases will evolve in the course of research projects. At One Resilient Earth, we are also keen to explore how a better integration of Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems and ‘modern science’ (for lack of a better term) could shed light on respective blind spots and foster new ways of understanding. This also means addressing the assumptions of both knowledge systems, which sometimes clash.

Thomas: I find myself constantly challenging my own underpinnings and witness that they are changing as the project progresses. When the project started, I was still largely assuming there is an objective state of the Earth, and inner transformation could be a means towards helping the healing of the Earth. The longer the project progresses, the more I am moving towards a relational understanding of subjective and objective worlds. It is as if my own mindset is shrinking more and more into my own smallness, and relational field, and I wonder how I could be entitled to worry about the state of the Earth as a whole. Shrinking to my relational field means being with the people I am connected with, in the place where I live and with the practices I am engaging in, right here, right now.

Mindfulness is a relational practice, and the functional relationship of inner transformation as a means to an end is something I cannot hold anymore.

But I know I am engaged in a transformation of my way of being in relationship with myself, with other people, with natural beings, with patterns, with ideas – and keeping on questioning the underpinnings every step of the way, which is super challenging.

Laureline: Intuitively though, it feels that it is what ‘ mindset transformation’ should entail: engaging into the process without knowing where it takes us, not tying ourselves to old ways of thinking, continuously grounding oneself in the moment and questioning the underpinnings of our thoughts and actions. And from my own experience, what is both thrilling and disorienting is that as a new relationship to the world around us emerges, it is likely to question all the assumptions we started with, including that of our own agency. Because, if we start deconstructing the system of thoughts and practices we built to understand the world around us through lenses such as finance, politics, sociology…, which are often the logical basis for our actions in the world, and if we acknowledge that our actions are largely about controlling even when we wish to find ‘solutions,’ repair or heal, then how do we rethink agency? What would a more relational and less controlling approach to agency entail?

Thomas: That’s the tough process I did not fully anticipate at the start of this project, as I was led to reflect on my own cultural upbringing and history. As much as I understood that I am part of the problem by participating in a system that has generated an unhealthy state of the world, I had not realized how deeply ingrained conditionings are. How much anxiety, pressure and oppressive dynamics I have internalized, shaping the way I look at the world and respond to it. Yet I feel science is helping me through the crumbling of my old mindset and emergence of a new one. Complex systems science addresses emergence, self-organisation and more fluid relational dynamics that differ from mechanical systems. That’s exactly what I observe in my own becoming. But I also feel I ‘understand’ less and less, and feel how scary it is to let go of belief systems and assumptions that I have lived with for decades. This has also led me to be more compassionate with older people who have grown up in other times with different beliefs and maybe with a lot of collective trauma when you think of Nazi Germany for instance. My students are more excited to explore how the mind works.

Laureline: This does raise the question of the collective trauma work that may need to be done – even when working with younger generations. I was recently studying how trauma can be passed down generations through epigenetics, which means that the traumas of our ancestors are still in our bodies, literally. It feels essential to acknowledge this reality when we are working towards social change, and thus reactivating both historical and sometimes very recent traumas related to the violence, abuse and injustice stemming from patriarchy, colonialism, racism… It seems that working on trauma should go hand in hand with our efforts to stop the harm from being done. Because it feels that unless we work on trauma, we may just replicate the violence, injustice and abuse when trying to stop it, in an unending cycle. Yet, as someone who has been working through some trauma myself, I fully understand why people may not want to confront it. It can be terrifying to face the mixture of violence, shame and isolation that comes with it. But do we have the choice?

Thomas: I fully resonate with that, and am also increasingly aware of how this trauma is embedded in the political structures and technologies that we grow up with.

So we may feel personal freedom but the trauma may already be perpetuated in the structures that hold us. We also need safe spaces to work on trauma.

My question at the moment is: how can we create spaces that are safe enough for the amount of trauma that can be processed in a certain context?

Laureline: I feel that trauma work is part of the mindset transformation process we discussed earlier, and that it will take us places we cannot imagine. Working on trauma, including trauma related to climate change, has led me to relate to traumatic experiences that can take place anywhere in the world and throughout history, at the most unexpected times and through experiences that could be really overwhelming. Can trauma work and the whole transformation process ever be safe?

Thomas: Of course, there is no existential safety, but I meant, safe enough in a given context. For instance, my process as a researcher and also as a human has benefited a lot from the safety that my director provided throughout this project. Another element that is part of my spiritual practice is to ask myself in any situation, what am I afraid of and how do I feel safe? What is at stake? Although I love the trees, people and art on this Earth, I am also a soul. So what should I be afraid of if this is just a journey that my soul goes through in this material world? And it is part of my breathing practice also to just feel the space within my belly and feel that safety inside. A deep peace and stillness. And when I can connect to that place, I can deal with my anxiety and fears. So the question of safety is both about the inner feeling and the outer conditions. How do we maintain safe conditions for humans to develop within planetary boundaries? And can the development of our inner safety help us deal better with volatility, ambiguity and uncertainty so that we may not have to rely on existing structures to feel safe?

Laureline: As a woman and a person who has been working on climate change for a while, the current structures stopped making me feel safe a long time ago. They are stable, almost unshakable, but that does not equate safety to me, and even less so for the rural communities in India I worked with, or for the Indigenous Peoples I wish to support. Those structures are built on domination, overexploitation and lead to the degeneration of the biosphere. Yet, we are taught to believe they give safety. We rely on technological fixes. We do not look too far into the future or away from home. We thus benefit from an illusion of safety, till the day we will not be able to maintain it anymore. But the safety that comes with the feeling of being a soul will never go. Then is it about making people realize that they are souls? If so, how can we do that? And can trauma work be an opening to this realization, instead of an experience that hinders people from feeling safe?

Could it be that working with trauma takes you to a place that feels fundamentally unsafe and yet be a necessary passage to reflect on what safety is and how it can be achieved?

Thomas: Yes, that’s is how I see it, too. I agree that trauma work can offer a path into that kind of awareness. I am also very much influenced both by Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance and by Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be. The two books imply that our way of consuming the Earth is like an addiction pattern to compensate for an inner state of anxiety and or a sense of deficiency. And that’s very much what I can observe in my own behaviour patterns. This addiction deprives us of aliveness, meaning, releasing ourselves into the dynamic nature of life on Earth. This includes non-human life because humans are embedded in ecosystems relations, and that relationships are not alive when they are dominant and exploitative. The conditions of the Earth are changing now after 10 000 years of progress through the relative stability of the Holocene. It’s a bit speculative but it feels that the transformation of my own mindset is just a reflection of this collective transformation process in the Earth system.

Laureline: Conversely, what a 10,000-year history evokes in me is curiosity regarding the millions of ways local communities have been living with, speaking about and relating to nature before or on the margin of the various empires and kingdoms that are talked about in our history books. It also makes me question the idea of progress, especially as I interact with Indigenous men or women for whom the past centuries have not meant ‘progress’ but genocide and erasure. Does the transformation of mindset today fit into the linear progress narrative, or is it a break in the trajectory? Can it be a return to an embedded and humbler relationship to the world?

Thomas: Obviously, I don’t really know. I think the Earth is reflecting back to us that it is reaching certain limits and that the path we have been taking has no future. But

I don’t see a kind of breaking, more of new relationship patterns emerging here and there, connecting and forming new resonance fields. At some point it will have become a totally different system, just the way natural systems transform.

And this gives me far more hope than a revolutionary shift from an old system to a new one, according to some binary logic. It means that if we stay present in this relationship and grow a full acceptance of that relationality, different relationship patterns emerge in us and around us.

Of course, there will be persistent forces that will try and continue the existing logic with a slightly different flavour, so to speak. Inner transformation is often used in that way today, with companies providing mindfulness training to their employees so that they can cope with stress more efficiently. At the same time, I do feel a trust in the evolutionary process we are part of. I feel part of that experiment, that life itself will find continuation even if I, as a human, am not involved in it, or even if mankind is not involved in it. Feeling part of this process that is much larger than progress or civilization or ‘greening of the economy’, makes me feel whole. I feel confident that life will find responses that are different from anything that we can imagine in our human form.

Laureline: I can totally relate. At the same time, when I get in that mind space, it becomes almost futile to work for the preservation or the restoration of life on Earth. Do you feel the same? What drives you in your work if your mindset is transformed to the point that you no longer feel a need to preserve, heal, or restore human or non-human life?

Thomas: That’s a very good question that I run into regularly. What comes to mind is that I love the world that I experience right now. I love the people that I know. I love forests. I love the oceans. And I am here to learn how to act out of that sense of love and care for the world. Which doesn’t say that I could ever save anything, probably not, but I feel that process is meaningful, regardless of how much I personally achieve or whether this particular form is meant to persist. I see beauty in this existence.

Laureline: In my case I would say that I enjoy creating and nurturing life, in the form of babies, fruitful partnerships, healthy ecosystems, artworks… That’s what drives me in my work today. But then I also feel a huge tension when I think of dalit women and their children in the villages of the Kutch desert in India, whom I worked with in my early twenties with the Indian NGO SEWA. Those women have stayed with me since then, as if I did not leave them when I left India. What’s our responsibility today when we say we care for life? Are we caring for the lives of those women and children sufficiently with the types of life choices we are making?

Thomas: I am having similar questions at the moment. I know a lot of people who have the belief that they have to help, and end up exploiting themselves in the process, reproducing the old mindset, and fuelling an unhealthy co-dependent dynamic in doing so.

I think self-care needs to be at the foundation of any support we give to each other.

This way we can find stability within the self and honestly assess what we can give without needing back. Because if I give more than I have, I create pressure on my surroundings to feed me and compensate me, somehow. Besides, can acting from a place of guilt and shame, be a source of healing? It may just perpetuate patterns. In conclusion, for me, there has to be a healthy balance between self-care and care for others.

Laureline: Who could argue against self-care? I am talking as a mother here. And do you know about ‘healing justice’ which is promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance? One idea is that self-care is critical to liberation. Yet, we, meaning white people here, do have a collective responsibility regarding situations of poverty and marginalization inherent to the system we have benefitted from and continuously reproduced. Maybe if European powers had stayed within their boundaries instead of colonizing and depleting the world starting a few centuries ago, there would be less Europeans running around and feeling that they need to help. And I agree that we should not work from a place of guilt or shame, but this does not take away responsibility and accountability for the debt we have. Lately, I have seen people taking time off for self-care and meditation practices in my working environment, which seemed extremely positive. It often came with the belief that developing a ‘better mindset’ through meditation was already contributing to making the world a better place. And yet, those self-care practices sometimes put more pressure on collaborators who suddenly ended up having less time for their own rest. So I am really struggling with this one. Shall we establish new societal norms with spontaneous self-care accepted by everyone – even donors who would become flexible with their deadlines? Is it about accepting that the system is so damaging that we should support anyone who needs self-care right now, as it may really be about survival for that person? Do we have the community that can help us do so? In the meantime, I try to go for self-care with responsibility and accountability, to ensure that all benefit when we take care of ourselves. What do you think?

Thomas: That’s exactly the tension that we are sitting with. We are a self, and at the same time, we are an embodiment and representation of the history, of a collective, which creates a sense of historical debt or accountability. I have the ability to respond right now as a self, while at the same time I cannot close my eyes to my history. It then becomes my responsibility to navigate the balance between, on the one hand, not being driven by history and destroyed by guilt for what my ancestors did more or less consciously, and on the other hand, not detaching from this history. Let’s be as conscious as possible about exactly that tension and then find our responsibility in that moment.

Laureline: Thanks a lot for sitting with the tension with me.

Maybe a transformed mindset also involves this permanent ‘staying with the trouble’, and feeling empowered in the absence of resolution. Accepting that you’re in for a life-long ride of multiple tensions, punctuated by moment-based hopefully conscious decisions.

That it’s not about finding the perfect formula that will guarantee you always have the right solution, so as to finally feel good.

Thomas: What is important for me in the end is that I do not act out of torture, but out of a sense of love. That means embracing the suffering that I’m part of, that I have caused and that I have internalised. It is not about dissociating and creating new antagonism thinking we did it all wrong, we have to get rid of all those bad things and all the people who did it. So I am sitting in the trouble out of a sense of love, and sometimes not doing anything feels like the most meaningful response. Often I’m hesitant to act because I know my way of acting would just reproduce certain unhealthy patterns. I have done many things that I would not like to repeat. I have witnessed a lot of suffering that I have caused out of unconscious or not conscious enough action. I don’t put it all on my shoulders. And in this moment, I feel totally not knowing. I’m so curious what will be next, but I can’t move ahead to it yet. I’m still in that processing of the last few years. And I am also grieving. I feel both phases need that time. So, I don’t want to be driven into action before that phase is really processed, and my ability to love needs to be recreated in that kind of time. To act out the love to the world. I feel it’s a natural cycle, and also a cycle in nature I observe around me.

Banner photograph: A detail of ‘Breaking the hand that feeds us’ by Julie Sperling.