Spirit Rock’s EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program
Spirit Rock’s EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program (ETCP) launched in January 2025 to unite the wisdom of diverse communities and Buddhist teachers at the forefront of environmental activism. Over the next three years, we will offer online lectures, class series, in person retreats, and training programs, designed to engage and support communities at the intersection of spirituality and climate action. Through these offerings, we aim to nurture resilience, deepen climate awareness, and inspire meaningful action across diverse communities.
This work is made possible through the collaboration of visionary partners who share a deep commitment to Earth, Dharma, and collective transformation. Braided Wisdom, One Earth Sangha, Aloka Earth Room, andAwake in the Wild, along with our Core Planning Team—Ayya Santacitta, Bonnie Duran, Carol Cano, James Baraz, Kirsten Rudestam, Kristin Barker, Mark Coleman, and Yong Oh—bring diverse experience and wisdom to the heart of this initiative. Their shared stewardship guides the EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program through programming, community engagement, and teaching, strengthening our collective capacity to meet this moment with compassionate action.
Mission:
Our mission is to support existing interfaith spiritual leaders and activists working to address climate trauma, fostering resilience and joy, while also empowering a new generation of activists, leaders, and global citizens. Together, we will advance climate justice and curate sustainable change that resonates deeply with our communities.
Goals:
Establish a sustainable program infrastructure that places joy, mindfulness, and a deep love for the Earth at the core of climate awareness and activism.
Engage diverse cultural and spiritual partners to bring a radically compassionate and connective approach to our work, fostering a restorative and liberatory culture.
Transform the culture of climate and social justice activism by normalizing joy-based, connective social action, and transform Dharma culture by weaving interconnection, humility, and generosity into every aspect of the path.
Upcoming
Short Program Online Sunday, September 27 | 10:30am-12:30pm PT
Venerable Clear Grace Dayananda shares the practice of walking meditation as radical sacred action. Whether moving through the sacred and the suffering, or the ache and the uprising of a polycrisis, this practice reminds us that our planet's true nature is our own true nature. They invite us to explore how this movement, whether standing or walking, acts as sacred repair and nurtures Beloved Community. This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom.
For environmental professionals carrying the weight of environmental destruction, we invite you on a six-month journey to meet the ecological crisis from a place of steadiness, balance, and resilience rather than depletion and burnout. This program weaves Buddhist wisdom, nature-based practices, and a community of peers to nourish and support you through these difficult times while strengthening the impact of your leadership.
Loving Engagement in a Time of Transformation
In September 2025, Spirit Rock hosted
Refuge and Response: Loving Engagement in a Time of Transformation
— a four-night, invitation-only retreat exploring the intersection of contemplative practice and engaged activism. Drawing on Buddhist and Earth-based teachings, the gathering offered space to reconnect with clarity, resilience, and compassionate action for a changing world.
We’re living inside real darkness—fires and smoke, violence against immigrant communities, a fractured political landscape, the steady creep of techno-fascism. For many of us dancing with despair is a daily practice; we teeter on the fine line between hopelessness and our commitment to acting on behalf of what we love. It’s natural to want to get away from this despair as quickly as we can, but what if we stayed with it for a moment longer? What could it teach us about how to live well in these unprecedented times?
This session doesn’t seek to assuage our despair, but instead, to open an honest conversation: a space to turn toward the weight of what we’re all carrying, truthfully, without negating and without drowning.
Watch the Recording
July 26, 2026 - An EcoDharma Exploration with Dekila Chungyalpa, Compassion in Every Breath: Social Transformation Begins Right Here
What do we and our societal systems need to transform given how we are now experiencing a cascade of environmental, climate, and social crises globally and locally? Dekila Chungyalpa, the founding director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been working with faith leaders and culture keepers of Indigenous traditions for over 18 years, collaborating on solutions that answer this question.
In this gathering, Dekila will invite us to follow our breath to the very source of the greatest compassion; Mother Earth herself; as a practice that can fill us up with courage and sustain us for what is to come. She will weave her personal story as the daughter of a Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher, the environmental values she was taught while growing up in Sikkim in the Eastern Himalayas, the lessons she learned while working on biodiversity conservation around the world, and the realizations that led her to bridge the worlds of faith and science.This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom.
Watch the Recording
June 29, 2026 - The Intersection of Spirituality and Climate Awareness
Short Program Online Monday, June 29, 2026 | 6:30PM - 8:30 PM PT
Carol Cano, a core teacher in the EcoDharma & Transformational Culture program, invites us to see the ecological crisis as more than a policy problem; it's a call to spiritual practice. Drawing on her early training in a Thai forest monastery, she explores how the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the four brahmavihāras (loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity) can help us stay present without becoming overwhelmed, and respond to the crisis from wisdom rather than fear.
Watch the Recording
June 28, 2026 - An EcoDharma Exploration with Renee Lertzman, The Myth of Apathy: Meeting the Paradox of Inaction with Compassion
This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom. We are awash in an array of deeply painful, systemic and seemingly intractable problems in our world. Geopolitical conflicts are finding their way to our communities and neighborhoods, supply chains hang in the balance of a warming and violent world, and social contracts are fraying. Our world’s tangle of troubles have found us, whether we like it or not.”
Amidst all of this, we have a responsibility to update our own perceptions about why people respond the way they do. We often direct our anger, grief and sadness towards ourselves or others who are “not doing enough.” This session goes underneath this dynamic, to surface the psychology of facing existential crises that seem so intractable and out of control. We will explore frameworks and tools that help reset this looping of “I am not doing enough” and “they are not doing enough,” grounded in Dharma and evidence-based psychological practice. What possibilities might such a reset open up for us all?
Watch the Recording
June 14-July 29 - Belonging to the Earth: A Journey into Land, Lineage, and the Sacred
Speaker SeriesOnline June 14-July 29 | Dates and times variable, see details below.
What does it mean to belong to this Earth? In a time of profound ecological and spiritual disconnection, this online series calls us to explore land, lineage, and the sacred. and practices of Right Speech offer as support?
Hosted by Dharma teacher and social justice activist JoAnna Hardy, “Belonging to the Earth” brings together visionary voices at the intersection of ecology, art, and the sacred. John Francis, the Planetwalker, spent 17 years in silence and 22 years walking the Earth as an act of devotion. Osprey Orielle Lake, founder of WECAN International, is a leading force in the global Rights of Nature movement. Poet and Guggenheim Fellow Camille Dungy illuminates the deep, often erased bonds between people of the African diaspora and the land.
Guest Speakers & Schedule:* Sunday, June 14; 10:00-11:30am PT with John Francis Wednesday, July 15; 5:00-6:30pm PT with Camille Dungy Wednesday, July 29; 5:00-6:30pm PT with Osprey Orielle Lake
May 24, 2026 - An EcoDharma Exploration with Rhonda Magee, Right Speech in a Time of War
Short Program On-Land Sunday, May 24 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM PT (1:30 PM - 3:30 PM ET) An EcoDharma Exploration with Rhonda MaGee: Right Speech in a Time of War - Reflections on Practicing the Eightfold Path Together, Now This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom. In a time of war, polarization and isolation, what do the teachings and practices of Right Speech offer as support? In this meditation and discussion, Rhonda V. Magee will share reflections on her efforts to continue working to increase connection and conversation in a time when free speech, commitment to human rights and other supports for speaking truth are under attack.
Watch the Recording
April 26, 2026 - An EcoDharma Exploration with Brian Lesage, Earth Day Reflections on Fluid Perception, Kinship, and Humble Participation
This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom. On Earth Day we pause to notice how the world that appears depends on how we perceive. This talk explores two perspectives: we can participate, and we are not in control. When these are interwoven, often something in us softens. As human centered perception loosens, we begin to sense ourselves as one being among many beings, a life interwoven with other lives. The boundaries between “me” and “world” can feel a little more fluid through the body. In that widening, the Earth is no longer only a problem to solve, but a vast community of beings we are woven into.
Watch the Recording
April 18, 2026 - Earth Day: The Power of Love
Short Program On-Land Sunday, April 18 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
James Baraz, MA, Carol Cano, MA, Ayya Santacitta, Greg Dalton, Jessica Serrante, Renda Dionne Madrigal, PhD, Coryna Ogunseitan, and Dean Hoaglin Earth Day: The Power of Love At this moment, the Earth and many living species are threatened by humanity’s unawareness. It’s natural to feel frustration or anger when you care deeply about our planet and its more-than-human inhabitants. Yet the most powerful force for healing arises from wise stewardship and love. Join us as we celebrate the natural world and reconnect with our love for this beautiful home through meditation, music, presentations, and experiential practices outdoors on the land (weather permitting).
Watch the Videos
March 22, 2026 - An EcoDharma Exploration with Dr. Patricia June Vickers: Healing and Transformation
Short Program Online Sunday, March 22 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
An EcoDharma Exploration with Dr. Patricia June Vickers: Healing and Transformation: Weaving Ancestral Wisdom with Contemporary Healing Modalities
Dr. Patricia June Vickers
The Tsm’syen peoples of the Northwest Coast of British Columbia live by the Ayaawx (ancestral law), a living system of teachings expressed through social process, sacred stories, protocol, and relationship between human, land, to Supernatural and most powerfully experienced in Potlatch. This offers an overview of Ayaawx as guidance for daily living, including cleansing practices and teachings on soul loss and soul retrieval. It weaves ancestral wisdom with contemporary healing modalities such as neurofeedback, Deep Brain Reorienting, and Somatic Experiencing for addressing PTSD, and includes practical self-regulation exercises that cultivate internal calm and embodied resilience.
Watch the Recording
February 22, 2026 - An EcoDharma Exploration with Guhyapati: The Ecology of Social Movements
Short Program Online Sunday, February 22 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM An EcoDharma Exploration with Guhyapati: The Ecology of Social Movements Guhyapati
This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom. Social movements are complex, and the Ecology of Social Movements framework helps us act strategically within them. It shows how interconnected forms of resistance, diverse roles, and experimentation build resilient movements for deep change. We’ll explore key frameworks and reflect on our place within the wider movement ecology.
Watch the Recording
February 13 - June 26, 2026 - Holding Ground: Inner Resilience for Environmental Changemakers
This training supports activists, changemakers, and earthkeepers in cultivating resilience amid intersecting crises. Through mindfulness, compassion, and nature-based practice, participants strengthen their capacity to stay connected and engaged in the work of justice and ecological renewal. Together we explore ways to meet grief and uncertainty, nurture joy and meaning, and build communities of mutual support grounded in our shared belonging and collective action to defend and sustain life.
January 25, 2026 - An EcoDharma Exploration with Deborah Eden Tull: Embodied Changemaking
Short Program Online Sunday, January 25 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM An EcoDharma Exploration with Deborah Eden Tull: Embodied Changemaking Deborah Eden Tull
Recognizing the overly yang tendencies of the dominant paradigm–marked by speed, bright lights, force, and depletion–this session offers an exploration of receptivity and relational presence as we navigate The Great Unravelling. This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom.
Watch the Recording
November 23, 2025 – Introducing the House of Yin: A Sanctuary for Spiritual and Queer Liberation
Sunday, November 23 | 10:30am - 12:30pm Introducing the House of Yin: A Sanctuary for Spiritual and Queer Liberation Sonali Sangeeta Balajee
This event is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom. Learn about the House of Yin, a liberatory community-learning home for reflective and relationship-grounded practitioners who want to continue to fortify the Yin in themselves and their work in the world.
Watch the Recording
October 26, 2025 – An EcoDharma Exploration with Kaira Jewel Lingo: Becoming a Force for Nature
Short Program Online Sunday, October 26 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
An EcoDharma Exploration with Kaira Jewel Lingo: Becoming a Force for Nature
Kaira Jewel Lingo
Life on Earth is really going through it right now. Humanity’s reckoning with itself is on, and we’re all feeling, albeit unequally, the very real and interlocking consequences of centuries of human and ecological exploitation. To make a bad situation even worse, we also must contend with the unfolding chaos, injustice, violence, breakdowns, and instabilities of all orders and magnitudes across the globe. It’s a hard time. Many of us are trying our best. We work to increase our awareness of the massive systems of harm, connect with aligned others, and act courageously, and yet, here we are. Where do we begin, again?
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
Watch the Recording
September 28, 2025 – An Eco Dharma Exploration with Konda Mason: A Path Towards Trust & Equanimity
Short Program Online Sunday, September 28 | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
An Eco Dharma Exploration with Konda Mason: A Path Towards Trust & Equanimity
Konda Mason
Join us for a timely and powerful conversation with Konda Mason on how to re-center relationships and nurture beloved community as a response to systems of dehumanization and polarization. Together, we’ll explore what pathways toward deeper trust and equanimity can look like in these uncertain times.
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
Watch the Recording
September 7–11, 2025 – Refuge and Response: Loving Engagement in a Time of Transformation (4 nights)
Retreat On-land September 7–11, 2025 (4 nights)
Refuge and Response: Loving Engagement in a Time of Transformation
James Baraz, MA, Carol Cano, MA, Kirsten Rudestam Note: This event is convening a select group of experts and professionals in the field by invitation only.
Drawing on both Buddhist and Earth-based teachings, this gathering offers a space to explore the intersection of contemplative practice and engaged activism. Through morning retreat practice and afternoon symposiums, we will cultivate the inner resources and outer connection needed to meet this moment with clarity, resilience, and skillful action for those working toward a more just and compassionate world.
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
August 24, 2025 – A Tree of Peace: A conversation with Dr. Leslie Gray
A Tree of Peace
The Power of Remembering the Indigenous Design of American Democracy
Dr. Leslie Gray
At the core of American Democracy is an image of renewal that retains its inspirational power in the face of any adversity. It is the image of the roots, trunk and branches of a living tree. Some of us today can see this tree quite vividly, and for others the image is outside of awareness—but all may invoke it at this perilous moment in history and remember its message of strength in unity.
The Flag of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee flag, representing the six nations of the Iroquois. You are invited to envision the towering beauty and sparkling leaves of the mighty pine trees of the Eastern woodlands. They can grow as high as 230 feet, can have a diameter as wide as 8 feet and a canopy as broad as 50 feet. You are invited to see these trees not as metaphors or archetypes—but rather as a separate nation of breathing beings with a deeply intelligent organization from which we humans can learn. Only this level of respect will enable you to understand how an indissoluble federal government could derive from a tree.
The Eastern White Pine was the bio-mimetic source of Gayanashagowa (the sacred alliance of the Iroquois) which united five fiercely divided Indian nations. Thereafter it profoundly influenced the binding together of the English colonies into a United States of America and later the joining together of the countries of the world into a United Nations.
By examining The Great Law of Peace—an oral constitution rooted in unity, balance and mutual respect—we will uncover how indigenous concepts of collective governance, consensus building and communal responsibility helped shape democratic ideals embraced by the “founding fathers”. We will also look unflinchingly at what was specifically omitted when they borrowed from Native governance and see in this both the terrible human cost that followed as well as the roadmap to repair.
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
Watch the Recording
August 5–26, 2025 – Devotion for the Earth & Engaged Surrender
Devotion for the Earth & Engaged Surrender
Ayya Santacitta
With Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha as guides, this series explores re-cognizing ourselves as part of a living, intelligent Earth. By training to see ourselves differently, we can uncover a sense of devotion for the Earth that opens us to the sacred, self-regenerative capacity of the biosphere we belong to.
Modernity and its unsustainability lies at the root of our current metacrisis, urging us to cultivate new ways of looking at ourselves and thereby initiating new ways of imagining worlds worth working for. By not rushing to find answers and learning to trust the healing recalibration of the Earth’s metabolism acting through us, unexpected possibilities can emerge.
In these four sessions we will co-create a safe container that supports reverence for the Earth and a humble curiosity for what makes a good ancestor in these transitional times. Practices offered include Dharma reflections, guided meditations, chanting, sharing, and prompts for contemplation. You are invited to bring a capacity for embodied awareness in meditation and an open heart-mind, willing to see your life and the world through new eyes.
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
July 27, 2025 — When No Thing Works: Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse
When No Thing Works
Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse
Norma Wong Roshi
Talking story, weaving poetry, and offering wisdom at the intersections of strategy, politics, and spiritual activism, When No Thing Works is a visionary guide to co-creating new worlds from one in crisis. It asks into the ways we can live well and maintain our wholeness in an era of collective acceleration: the swiftly moving current, fed and shaped by human actions, that sweeps us toward ever uncertain futures.
Grounded in Zen Buddhism, interconnection, and decades of community activism, When No Thing Works explores questions like:
As we stand at a threshold of collective change, what leaps must we make?
How can we push through discord and polarization and meet these critical changepoints collectively?
What practices, strategies, and spiritualities can align to vision a sustainable future for our communities and descendants?
How can we step out of urgency to tend to our crises with wisdom, intention, and care?
Zen master and Indigenous Hawaiian leader Roshi Norma Wong’s meditation holds our collective moment with gravity and tender care. She asks us to not only imagine, but to live into, a story beyond crisis and collapse—one that expands to meet our dreams of what (we hope) comes next while facing with clarity and grace our here and now in the world we share today.
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
Watch the Recording
June 22, 2025 — Finding Our Way Through the Polycrisis
After working as a leading climate scientist with a powerful environmental organization in the U.S. for over a decade, Kritee stepped away from the mainstream climate movement to focus on Ecodharma and what she calls “Reindigenizing”—a personal and collective journey back to Earth-honoring, shamanic and animist ways of living. In this Ecodharma exploration, she’ll share why stepping away felt crucial to her. Together, we will explore questions like:
What is the global polycrisis? (Hint: It’s complicated.) What are its root causes?
How are childhood traumas, climate emergency, and racial injustices connected?
What are planetary boundaries, and how do they call us to respect the Earth more deeply?
Why do leading scientists say Indigenous knowledge systems are key to protecting all life?
How did your ancestors live as part of their ancestral lands or ecosystems? If that changed, when and why?
How can we more deeply honor the Earth and our life, community, and work—right where we are?
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
Watch the Recordings
May 25, 2025 — Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse
The world is in a state of panic and injustice is escalating. We need actions to alleviate suffering. Yet if we respond from a place of urgency, we are only adding more panic to the world. How do we move in ways that honor that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast?”
As we face the poly-crisis, how do we escalate our actions without escalating a worldview that keeps us from interdependence? How can we view injustice less as a political issue and more as a manifestation of collective trauma? And how can Buddhist teachings and practices support us in responding skillfully to these times?
Fierce Vulnerability invites us into building a movement with the power to stop injustice while cultivating the love necessary to heal it. One that has the vulnerability to accept the depth of the crises we are in and the fierceness to not get frozen by it.
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
Watch the Recordings
April 19-20, 2025 — Earth Day Weekend Gathering and Celebration
The EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program kicks off with Spirit Rock’s Earth Day Weekend Gathering and Celebration (April 19-20).
Join us as we celebrate Earth Day with a weekend of joyful connection in honor of our magnificent home—this living Earth. Together, we will cultivate Earth awareness and celebrate our interconnection with all life through Dharma talks, meditation, music, and community. Join the Spirit Rock community as we celebrate the power of collective action and step forward as compassionate stewards of the Earth.
This EcoDharma Exploration is presented in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Braided Wisdom, reflecting our shared commitment to collective awakening and compassionate action for the Earth.
Day 1 (Saturday, April 19 | 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM)
Protect What You Love: Interconnection and Engagement
Teacher: James Baraz and Ayya Santacitta Guest Teachers: Christiana Figueres (Online), Leila Salazar-López, and Jessica Serrante Musicians: Jennifer Berezan and Chris Webster (performing together), and Wildchoir
Rooted in love, humility, and generosity, our gathering invites a spiritual, joy-based approach to caring for our planet—one that nurtures real connection, deepens our reverence for the natural world, and fuels positive activism. While sadness and despair need to be honored as natural responses to our climate crisis, we know that meaningful cultural transformation arises not from fear, but from wonder, gratitude, and a shared commitment to protect what we love.
Day 2 (Sunday, April 20 | 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM)
Nurturing Interconnectedness and Strengthening our Relationship with our Beloved Earth
Teachers: Bonnie Duran and Carol Cano Guest Teachers: Dean Hoaglin
This program is designed to create a meaningful space to celebrate Earth Day and foster a sense of unity and collective care towards our Beloved Earth and each other. Join us as we honor the wisdom of indigenous traditions and Buddhist teachings, weaving together practices that deepen our connection to the natural world. Through guided meditations, reflective dialogues, and wisdom teachings, we will explore pathways to live in harmony with the Earth and all beings.
Playlist: Watch the Recordings
Supporters & Partners
Waverley Street Foundation, Braided Wisdom, One Earth Sangha, Aloka Earth Room, and Awake in the Wild.
