Facilitators: Pål Dobrin, Therese Asplund
This session is designed as a meditative practice and sharing of experiences among the online community at the Transformations Conference 2023. Based on the Buddhist tradition of the Four Immeasurables – loving-kindness (friendliness), compassion (willing to cease suffering), appreciative joy (feeling happy for others), and equanimity (calm based on wisdom) (Sujiva, 2003), this meditation session will guide the participants on a journey into the heart. The heart has to have its place, and be heard. We have ignored it much too often, notably as current approach to realizing climate and sustainability targets has been predominantly techno-economic informed by rational choice models of decision-making (O’Brien, 2018). In addition, feelings of stress, anxiety and pain is often associated with the threats climate change poses. This meditation guides our focus to the subtle awareness within, to self-love, to wishing happiness to others and non-human life forms on Earth. It offers kindness, humility and feelings of interconnectedness. At the end of the session, we jointly explore engagement when coming from a place of compassion, kindness and altruism rather than stress, anxiety and pain. The presentation is part of a transdisciplinary and collaborative research project between partners Empaticus – an organization with long experience of widom traditions, contemplative practices and inner transformation and Department of Thematic Studies – unit of Environmental Change, Center for Climate Policy Research at Linköping University with expertise in the intersection between sustainability transformations, sense-making, and communication. In particular, the project 1) develops a conceptual model for inner transformation processes, 2) empirically investigates experiences of personal transformative change, 3) simultaneously engage in partnership for personal sustainability transformations. The presentation is supported by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS under Grant No. 2021 -01254.