Embodied Ritual Practices for Ecological Grief and Civilizational Risk

Bruce Alderman introduces a constellation of embodied ritual practices — Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects, Tibetan Tonglen and Chöd, shamanic Council of All Beings, and imaginal deep-time walks — as concrete instantiations of what a post-secular religion adequate to ecological grief might actually look like in practice. The Council of All Beings is especially instructive: participants undergo a solitary encounter with a non-human being in nature, then reconvene to speak from within that being's perspective, articulating its suffering, needs, and gifts while humans are initially absent from the circle. This is structured perspective-taking designed to dissolve the ontological boundary between individual selfhood and ecological community. The Tonglen adaptation extends the classical Tibetan practice of exchanging self and other to planetary scale — practitioners breathe in the darkness of civilizational collapse and breathe out well-being as an offering to the world.

What unifies these practices is a movement from bounded individual identity into participatory belonging with the broader living sphere, with grief — not merely gratitude or awe — serving as the primary medium of that transition. They represent a somatic and imaginal engagement with what propositional ethics and theology cannot contain.

Vervaeke identifies this as a conversion point between his cognitive scientific and spiritual commitments. The question becomes: what dimensions must any ecology of practices include to cultivate wisdom adequate to the metacrisis? His answer points toward ecological intelligence, Collective intelligence, dialogical intelligence, and subconscious and algorithmic intelligence — each indexing non-linear structures of reality that exceed propositional capture and demand participatory knowing.