College of Science

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Introduction:

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Hi, my name is David Pace and this is Pace Yourself, a University of Utah College of Science podcast on wellness. 

[musical interlude]

Today my guest is LaUra Schmidt. LaUra graduate with a master’s degree in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah in 2014 and is author of the book How to Live in a Chaotic Climate ten Steps to Reconnect With Ourselves, Our Communities and Our Planet. She is the founder with co-founder and wife Amy Lewis, Reau of the Good Grief Network. One of the first emotional support groups for eco anxiety, climate, grief and collective trauma. 

Good Grief Network has grown quickly globally with around 5500 “good grievers.” I like that term, globally and over 120 facilitators trained in over 20 countries. She now lives in Lansing, Michigan. 

Welcome, LaUra. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 1:39

Thank you so much, David. I’m grateful to be here. 

 

David Pace 1:41

It is great to have you here on this rainy, rainy day in April. I am soaked. 

So, LaUra, thank you again for being here. I just wanted to kind of give a scope of the let’s call it a movement, right? Of the kind of work that you’re doing. And this comes from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. And they talk about the five major themes across interventions for individual and group treatment of eco-anxiety. And this is the kind of work that you’re doing. And sort of the five major themes are” 

• practitioners, inner work and education,
• fostering clients, inner resilience, 
• encouraging clients to take action, 
• helping clients find social connection and emotional support by joining groups 
• connecting clients with nature

So it sounds pretty pretty comprehensive. 

So tell us a little bit about how this all started for you. I mean, I know that you have a degree in environmental humanities here from at the U. And you might want to talk a little bit about that program, if you don’t mind, since it’s fairly new here. But tell us how this all started for you, the Good Grief Network. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 3:16

Yeah, it does have its origins right here in Salt Lake City. I think, you know, no path is easy to explain, but I was a biology major and environmental studies major and a religion major in undergrad. 

 

David Pace 3:28

And wow, what a combination. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 3:29

What a combination. And, you know, read the IPCC for the first time as an undergrad and just realized that we’re not doing enough to mitigate what I thought at the time was the worst crisis to face humanity up to this point. And so. 

 

David Pace 3:45

IPCC is. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 3:46

Oh, yes, inner, inner. 

 

Intergovernmental Panel. [IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations.]

 

David Pace 3:52

That was Julia. Hi, Julia. We’ll be talking to you in just a few minutes. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 3:55

Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. 

 

David Pace 3:58

So it’s the international group that we kind of reference frequently about the global implications of climate warming. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 4:07

Yeah. 

 

David Pace 4:07

And what can be done? 

 

LaUra Schmidt 4:08

Put a bunch of scientists together, put a bunch of data together in research together, and kind of just give us an assessment of the state of the climate. And every publication is more dire. Every publication is more worse. Every publication gets more work. 

 

David Pace 4:22

I like that. 

 

‘THE GREAT UNRAVELING’

LaUra Schmidt 4:24

And what’s nice is in the last couple, they’ve acknowledged that colonization has direct impacts for it. And so I feel like we’re seeing a cultural turn into understanding that business-as-usual in the way that our societies are set up with the exploitation and extraction definitely correlate to the demise of our planet. And we can talk about that or not talk about that. 

But environmental humanities: I ended up coming here because I heard Terry Tempest Williams speak on a different podcast, and she explained environmental humanities as a combination of art and activism. And it kind of just gives us a place, a cohort of support to explore where we’ve been as humanity and kind of trajectories about where we’re going. And I thought that was a really freeing frame to come and explore. And since my background was really heavy in science with biology and environmental studies, I chose to spend my time here at the U, focusing on things like sociology and psychology, like the whys of why we function the way we do, how our brains are wired to take shortcuts. Just learning a lot about humans and how humans organize.

 

David Pace 5:31

In your book, which incidentally, Terry Tempest Williams, who’s kind of a rock star here in Utah, blurbs your book wisely, I think. And I really enjoyed reading what I have read of the book so far, by the way. 

Tell us about what this “great unraveling” is and “the long dark,” because you kind of start out kind of setting up … well, the first step, actually, in your in the different steps that you talk about in the Good Grief Network program is to accept the severity of the predicament. 

So I suspect that’s why you open with the long, dark and what you call the long dark and the great unraveling. Give us the bad news. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 6:20

Yeah, well, both terms are not mine. The Long Dark comes from Francis Weller, and the Great Unraveling is popularized by Joanna Macy. But the idea is and, in the beginning, I talk about how we’ve climbed a very treacherous mountain, and we can’t come back the way that we’ve come. There’s just too much destruction. There’s, you know, we’re literally unraveling our biosphere. We’re increasing our social injustices, we’re degrading our ecosphere, basically, and we can’t keep doing that. 

So, in the most simple terms, the Great Unraveling is an invitation to do things differently. But acknowledging that it will be a rocky descent down that mountain. 

 

David Pace 6:57

And an unknown descent. That’s certainly why it’s dark there. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 7:01

Well, in like Francis Wheeler’s term, the Long Dark, he says that in the alchemical traditions that only certain things happen in the dark. You know, like in order to build something new, there has to be a time of dying and decay and composting. We can’t just have something new without this descent. And I think that there’s a lot of power in there. Our culture, tries to, like always gear us toward the light and towards positive things. And we’ve forgotten that actually, in every life cycle there is a descent, there’s an unraveling, there’s an undoing. 

 

David Pace 7:31

The valley of the shadow of death. Yeah. If you want to get biblical about it. 

 

STEPS FOR ‘GOOD GRIEVERS’

 

LaUra Schmidt 7:35

Yeah. And so, yeah, the first step in the ten-step program that we run through, Good Grief Network, which is a peer-to-peer support group, the 10-step program is just one of the programs that we run. But actually the ten-step program was my thesis here at the University of Utah. It was nine steps then, if we’ve evolved. 

 

David Pace 7:55

As you should. 

 

LaUra Schmidt  Yeah. Well, in especially for the state of the world, right, it’s constantly changing. And so, we are very open that we change, and we amend and we’re discerning in our steps, but we feel like we can’t move forward until we have sort of a picture of understanding the severity of the predicament, until we’re able to sit with the fact that things are bad, things need to change. But then where do we go from there? 

 

David Pace 8:17

Okay, so that’s the first step of this program. So just to be clear, the book is one thing and then the program is another, but it’s obviously interrelated. How you actually metabolize is, I think, a word that comes up in the book, this crisis, this long dark…

 

LaUra Schmidt 8:36

Well, and I. 

LaUra Schmidt 8:38

The book is more of the kind of philosophy, a call bend of how we move through this time. The actual support group is allowing everybody to come with their journeys, their reality about how they’re moving through this time. 

And so, it is a point of connection. It’s knowing that you’re not alone, It’s knowing that other people have these thoughts and that other people have resilient strategies that maybe we can share with one another. 

 

David Pace 9:00

So, the gentleman that you referenced earlier uses the term alchemy or alchemical. I’m quite fascinated by that because other than the fact that we think of our alchemy as being silly and something that we don’t do anymore, the notion of it is kind of magical in the sense that we are entering the unknown and combining different properties, materials, critical minerals to create something new, and so I like that term a lot because it kind of suggests a kind of a magical, unexpected outcome. 

 

‘ROOM FOR THE UNIMAGINABLE’

LaUra Schmidt 9:40

Yeah. And I think there’s some freedom in that, right? I like the invitation into magic in these times because we don’t know where we’re going, and a lot of us, actually, don’t have a historical understanding of where we’ve been. And I feel like we can loosely define “magic” in whatever way we want to it into that unexpected realm, which also goes with the second step, which is be with uncertainty. And I feel like so many of us are looking for a projected outcome. We need rigidity. The culture trains us on rigidity. And so, if we’re able to let go of that, able to let go of our expectations, then there may be be room for magic. Mary Oliver says, Leave some room for the unimaginable. 

 

David Pace 10:19

That’s the poet. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 10:20

That’s the poet. 

 

David Pace 10:21

She’s wonderful. She is. It’s just. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 10:23

Brilliant. 

 

David Pace 10:24

It’s lovely to have you draw up her name, actually, because I think that the tone of her

 

discourse, of her poetry is very spiritual. 

So, the central question of the book, as you’ve described it in the book, is how can we live full and meaningful lives as the world changes in everything we thought we knew is challenged, which is exactly what you were just saying. 

And you also say that we see ourselves as “bridge builders and mash-up artists by exploring a number of disciplines and modalities, funneling them through our life experiences.” That’s one of the values of this book, by the way, is that it’s personal a lot of personal stories from you and your wife Amy. And I think that that’s how I see it mash-up is that it’s alchemical, right? It’s bringing a lot of different discourses together and ideas together and finding new landscape in there. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 11:38

Mm hmm. 

 

David Pace 11:40

There’s a lot of things that we could talk about, obviously. One of them is exactly what you were talking about: communicating, maybe, to people the severity of the crisis that we are in and trying to navigate — Actually, this is where we introduce Julia, Julia Saint Andre, we would like to welcome you today. Julia is a senior in communication with a minor in physics and also one of our esteemed science writer interns here at the College of Science. 

So, thanks for being with us, Julia. 

I wanted you to talk briefly since we brought up the term communication, because the beginning of this conversation needs to be how do we communicate maybe the severity of the crisis that we are in called climate change. 

Tell us about your honors thesis research and how that relates to climate change. And maybe you can direct any questions that you may have to LaUra, who is steeped deeply in this work, not only in terms of communicating what’s going on, but how we individually navigate what’s happening. I will give everyone a preview: it has to do with humor. 

 

HUMOR IS POWERFUL

 

Julia St. Andre 13:01

Yeah. So my honors thesis project was kind of born out of my experiences growing up in a world that is very defined by climate change and especially the mass media landscape is kind of really saturated with climate change news. 

And I think that I grew up caring about it and I grew up being, you know, very involved all the way through high school with as much as I could. And then I think at a certain point I kind of burned out, which is something that I’m sure a lot of people experience that you talk to. 

But yeah, I’m coming at this from a communication perspective, obviously, and my emphasis is science, health and environmental communication, which are all, you know, very tied to this issue. So, this thesis was me, I guess, being curious about how we can communicate more effectively about climate change without increasing that kind of feeling of despair. 

And what to me, like, I sense this feeling of apathy from my peers or almost like, yeah, oversaturation desensitization, those kinds of things where you’ve just heard so much bad news and so, so much bad, like future to look at, and then you kind of start to feel numb to it. 

And that’s kind of what I was hoping to investigate. How can we get people not to feel numb any more? How can we get them to care? 

So, the avenue that I was investigating was through humorous communication. I compared a very traditional news media report from the BBC and then a late-night comedy show from the same year that we’re talking about the same issues, but in very different lights. 

And I just kind of measured people’s reactions to those. And the interesting thing that we found in our analysis so far is that there is a decrease in apathy with that humorous communication. People felt less numb towards the issue and cared more about it. And so that was really, you know, exciting. 

But I’m wondering, like obviously from your perspective, working with people who are a part of this network, what have you found to be effective in alleviating that apathy and that grief and how we can communicate with each other and also with the public to… yeah, I guess to be not more positive, but maybe a bit more in the middle, I guess. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 15:29

I feel like your work goes before my work. I feel like I catch the people who are burned out, who are already feeling that apathy, and our solution once they’re already in that place, is to remind them that they’re not alone and to help them feel connected and to give them a place to voice their concerns. 

I feel like a lot of the numbness in the apathy comes from feeling like we don’t have any agency to change anything. You know, it’s just like, okay, another report. What am I going to do about that? You know, especially for those of us who are incredibly concerned and have tried to do all the personal changes that we can. 

And so I feel like giving people a space, an empathetic space, a connective space to talk about their feelings, to move through them, and then to help them reclaim their personal agency in a time when these systems just feel so overwhelming. 

I feel like that can help. 

But I am so interested in humor as a gateway, because I think you’re exactly right that, like much of the predicament, is framed as so serious, so dire. It’s happening now. It’s going to continue to happen. And so how do we open up to more humor? And I’d love more insights from you about that. 

 

David Pace 16:34

Your research, by the way, I had the great opportunity of seeing her [Julia’s] presentation long ago with complete with the PowerPoint and just as a preface to maybe your response to LaUra’s question, you have talked about doing a larger scale survey, which is what you’re using to collect data. So I’d like to hear more about that as well. 

 

Julia St. Andre 16:59

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I’m nowhere near an expert on this. My thesis mentor is a professor in communication here, Sarah Yeo, and she’s done a lot of amazing work about humor in science communication and how we can use that to, you know, educate people. And it’s really effective in science. And so this my project is kind of a more specific look at that with climate. She’s super knowledgeable and I’ve been very grateful to work with her. 

But yeah, our survey was only University of Utah students. It was, by the time we whittled it down, probably about 100 responses from U of U students. And that’s like a relatively homogenous sample. You know, we’re all around the same age. We’re all college students, but I’m really, really interested to try and replicate this study at some point in the future with a bigger project to see how people from different ages, different demographics, different locations, different political leanings — all of those factors — how they play into people’s reaction to this, this kind of media. Because I think that one thing I pointed out in my presentation is that humor is tricky because it’s incredibly subjective, but that also means that it’s very powerful because if you can tailor it to the right group of people, if you can figure out what they find funny or who they find funny, there’s kind of an element of trust, and there’s also an element of truth in everything that’s funny. 

And so I think that’s kind of what makes it a really interesting avenue. And I think a lot of what I’m interested in is how do we communicate with people who don’t already care? Because I know that you and I and everybody in this room is already very tuned into this kind of stuff. And maybe we’re on the side of being oversaturated and feeling apathetic. 

But I’m interested if we can reach the people who maybe just don’t care at all or don’t think that they have to, and how we can use humor to maybe get into those groups and communicate with them. 

So yeah, that’s kind of the project. Right now. I’m in the writing phase, but I would love to replicate the study on a larger scale. 

 

David Pace 19:04

Yeah, I think that Julia is also a documentary. . . What am I trying to say? You make documentaries. 

 

Julia St. Andre 19:17

Documentary studies, minor. 

 

David Pace 19:18

And it’s really been interesting to watch her try to walk the middle path. She’s been talking about the Big Cottonwood Canyon and, shall we call it, the threat or the reality or the hope in some people’s minds of building a tram, right? 

 

Julia St. Andre 19:38

A gondola in Little Cottonwood. 

 

David Pace 19:40

But to watch her documentary is to watch her finesse very carefully that line without alienating anyone using, I think, there’s a little bit of humor in there, but more to the point, it’s very measured and very respectful of everybody involved. 

So, anyway, thank you for being here and for sharing that because I think that, like LaUra was saying, she’s the catcher. You’re kind of the pitcher over there. 

Yeah. No pressure at all. But she is. And your work with Amy and your group is about kind of, well I think the way you talk about it, LaUra, is to co-create a brave container to practice being vulnerable and calming our nervous system. 

So, we’re talking about not just climate here, we’re just talking about what it’s like to be a human in 2025. We express our emotions. I’m quoting now from the book: “explore new ways of thinking and seeing the predicament, and are open to creative responses that become available once we process our feelings and connect with others.”

I suspect humor and comedy is probably in there. “We build resilient community by learning how to see people again and co-envisioning life-sustaining paradigms for the future.” 

In fact, at some point I think you quote Thich Nhat Hahn in his term “interbeing,” maybe that’s a good point to, a launching point to talk about some of the actual work that you’re doing in these peer-to-peer network groups. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 21:25

Yeah, there is a lot there. 

 

David Pace 21:26

There’s a lot there. 

 

A CRISIS OF CONNECTION

LaUra Schmidt 21:28

I think I want to speak to the fact that so many of us feel isolated and disconnected and alone with our understanding about the severity of the predicament. And we’re not taught really well how to be vulnerable with one another. And so, I feel like those of us who are aware and who want to create some sort of healing spaces need to actively push against the cultural norms and figure out ways how to connect. 

And I actually feel like Environmental Humanities [Graduate Program at the U] was a really great model for that. I mean, we came together and read really hard materials and then discussed it, and there was space for us to have our emotional realities honored while we’re reading these really intense books or watching these documentaries. 

And so, what happens if we learn how to actually trust one another?, 

What happens if we’re able to put our guard down a little bit and actually do things differently? I feel like what we’re working against is a culture that tells us to isolate and to compete and to not feel. And I’m thinking about humor. Julia’s project with humor is like humor makes you feel something, and like a report and IPCC report doesn’t make you feel anything unless you’re well versed in how to read it. And that already is a skill. 

You know, you have to be highly educated to even enter into that report. Even the executive summary, which is supposed to be the thing for lay people. It’s not accessible. Scientific reports are not accessible, but humor is, laughing, is, you know, finding something funny. And I love the notion that Julia said that there’s a little bit of truth in humor and so we can relay a lot of information that’s complex, that’s not been communicated well through things like humor. 

I think the real goal is to feel something and then to have a space to feel something, to feel connected. 

And this brings us back to the point of spirituality. Like it’s not a crisis of data, it’s not a crisis of reports. It’s a crisis of connection. We don’t even know how to reconnect to ourselves. Which gets back to your comment about nervous systems, like our nervous systems are being amped up and amped up and amped up with every news report, with everything that’s happening politically — specifically right now, — we don’t even know how to settle ourselves. We don’t know how to take care of ourselves. And in amped up nervous system is more likely to create conflict. It’s more likely to jump to conclusions, usually not the most sort of cooperative conclusions. 

And so, I feel like nervous system regulation and awareness of our nervous system state is the first step to activism. Like how? What are you doing to take care of yourself? What are you doing to be the best community member you can be and then take your action from that point. 

 

David Pace 24:05

What are the symptoms of climate grief? 

 

David Pace 24:13

Well, you talk about The Matrix as and yeah, I want to get into the pop culture thing here because I felt like it was actually a very interesting analog. 

 

SYMPTOMS OF ECO-DISTRESS

LaUra Schmidt 25:04

So you asked a little bit about like symptoms of eco-grief or eco-anxiety. And I think it’s important to name that it can manifest in a lot of different ways. 

I actually have a lot of trouble with the term eco-anxiety because it sort of pigeonholes us into just anxiety as a response. But I prefer things like eco-distress. Okay. But the idea here is that you feel overwhelming amounts of grief, anxiety, fear, helplessness, hopelessness, etc.

And I think that it becomes incredibly pervasive. And you, I don’t know, you feel helpless to do anything about it. You see what’s happening in the world. You feel like you don’t have the agency to change anything. And when you actually take a look and take a step back, you realize that, like the climate crisis is only one branch of a very big tree that is built on exploitation and extraction. 

And so, then you realize that, you know, we’ve been in crisis for quite some time. These social injustices have been happening to lots of demographics and particularly those most marginalized. And so I think what ended up happening too, is those of us who, I don’t know, had our ideal imagined future taken away from us, tend to feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, the future I’ve been planning for maybe is not accessible anymore.’ Like there’s a deep pit of despair when you’re like, ‘If we can’t keep going the same way that we’ve been planning for, then what next? You know what? What happens?’ 

And so, for me it was a sense of like base-lessness. It was a sense of like, oh my God, there’s so much harm, there’s so much destruction. It’s not just climate, it’s not just ecocide. It’s the way we treat one another. It’s the othering. It’s the political polarization, it’s the inability to see human beings and feel connected. 

 

David Pace 26:50

So it’s since I was going to ask the question, we’re dealing with the climate crisis. Why does it have to be wedded to social justice and social-cultural constructions in general? But I think you just answered that and you call it “instrumental to the cause,” this social justice piece. And I think that this is where you could really talk about the existential crisis that we are living in is not just related to a warming planet, but it’s emblematic of many other failing systems, including social justice. Is that correct? 

 

LaUra Schmidt 27:31

That is absolutely correct. And Amy and I like to say that the same systems that are allowing us to devour ecosystems, that are allowing us to alter the climate’s habitability for us humans, are also the same systems that allowed and enforced slavery and still allow racism. 

It’s racial capitalism. It’s the idea that we put a value on life, like we commodify life, and then we do it with regard to things like race, with ableism, sexism, you know, all these “isms” that we’re living within. I feel like the climate crisis is the magnification or the hyper-focus of what happens when all these systems prioritize profit, when they prioritize individualism, when they prioritize white bodies instead of actually understanding that we’re all deeply connected, that we’re all intimately related to one another.

I think that the climate crisis for me feels like the biggest manifestation of a system gone awry, of a system that just forgot about us being animals and deeply interconnected with the world around us. 

 

David Pace 28:52

And this whole notion right now that we’re going through the current administration where, you know, it’s a zero-sum game, right? There’s got to be a winner, there’s got to be a loser. And this kind of raw ambition for power, political power, you name it, But it’s all about power. 

And I mean, when you were talking, I was thinking, about that aspect as well. And they’re also interrelated that it seems like there’s multiple entry points into this that could really inform how we look at not only the climate crisis but all of the other crises that we are kind of enmeshed in right now. 

 

THE GOOD GRIEF PROGRAM

I wanted to talk about the actual program. You call it a roadmap in the book. And to me, it kind of reminds me of the Pirates of the Caribbean. “So they aren’t really rules. They’re just guidelines,” right? Yeah. And we are in an evolving situation. I like the fact that this book might be different if you were to write it again, especially since it was before the election. But let’s talk about the actual program. What happens in these peer-to-peer gatherings? It sounds like you always have two facilitators. Why two facilitators? 

 

LaUra Schmidt 30:21

Holding emotional space for an existential crisis of this magnitude is really hard. It’s really taxing and it’s really wild. And so we have two facilitators, one to support ourselves as facilitators. You have that emotional support from your co-facilitator, but also a lot of people understand and live through this situation differently. So a co-facilitator has been trained for 32-plus hours with us, on the philosophy — a lot of what’s in the book — but on the philosophy of what’s happening right now, intersectional party. And so you have that support and that knowledge base. And then in addition to that, you’ll have about 13 people in the group, 13 participants.

And we didn’t want to just do a one off. We didn’t want to do just like weekend workshop.But what happens after that weekend workshop? You don’t see those people anymore. And so, I don’t really feel like trust is built. 

And then while I was here and studying at the University of Utah, I was also in the Adult Children of Alcoholics program. And so I’m going there every week and like, Oh, what happens is you learn how to trust people again. You learn how to let people hold your sensitive stories and your wounds. And so much of what’s happening right now is the playing out of “woundedness,” the playing out of harm, and us not having the tools as a society to manage them. 

So what happens is the workshop happens, you wrap up, you never see those people again. But if you have a ten-week program, then week after week you see the same faces you hear the stories, the vulnerable stories of people who are just trying to show up and do their best and a deeply traumatizing culture and you learn to love them. 

And what happens when we love people is we’re revolutionized by it? What happens when we use the step roadmap? You know, things like understanding our biases. 

 

David Pace 32:13

Right? That step number five, I think you develop awareness of biases and perception. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 32:19

Yeah, well, because our brains trick us, you know, like we’re literally hardwired to make mistakes, to make assumptions, to make things easier. There’s just too much information, too much data coming at us, so our brains have to sort it. But in addition to that, we’re playing-out cultural stories that have biases attached to them. 

If we’re living out trauma, we’re that’s a bias, right? That biases our perspective. 

And so, this is a step that allows us to really assess and take accountability for the fact that we’re like living through a bunch of narratives that maybe need assessing. But we also work steps that are having to do with gratitude and beauty and connection. You know, like what sustains us when it feels like there’s nothing else to focus on. What are these, like deep-seated resilience strategies that are available to us no matter what? And that step directly comes from EH.

Like Terry Tempest Williams is like the Queen of beauty. She teaches us. 

 

David Pace 33:14

So not that she’s a beauty queen. Maybe I’m not. Maybe she is. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 33:18

She’s. Yeah, I mean, she just emanates beauty. She teaches us how to look for beauty. And that’s a strength of the program is like you really focus on why beauty matters and not in the, not in the like. “Oh, that’s beautiful.”  It’s like every cell in your body is transformed by something that, like, brings you awe, and that is what we’re looking for. And that like creates a spaciousness, or rather that only can be created with the spaciousness that dominant culture doesn’t really create time and space for us to have. 

 

David Pace 33:47

So that’s step six: Practice gratitude, seek beauty, create connections. That’s definitely the poet in Terry Tempest Williams, coming forward. And also there’s a lot of Buddhist overlap, and I’m hearing this notion of being present and mindful and, one of the other steps, which is step three, is to honor your mortality and the mortality of all. That’s very Buddhist, at least in my reading of it.

 

THE MISSING STEP: MORTALITY

LaUra Schmidt 34:17

Yeah, Well, and it also we use the frame of death anxiety and terror management theory quite a lot. And I think it’s really appropriate for what you were saying earlier about these people who are like hoarding a bunch of power and wealth. Like when our survival is threatened, we really double-down on our cultural biases, on our symbolic immortality. 

And we can talk about that or not, but the idea here is that, like our fear of death really manifests unconsciously unless we take the time and the energy to make it conscious. 

And so, that was the stuff that was missing. When I said I defended my thesis here and there were nine, we ran through the pilot and did not have a dedicated space to talk about mortality. And we realized that was the elephant in the room that needed a space we have to talk about mortality. We have to talk about that. The fact that we’re dying, that we’re in unprecedented times of dying, and what that means, because it’s both natural and normal and a deep injustice. 

So how do you hold the tension? How do you wake up every day and embrace more complication and more paradox and more tension? It’s also not a skill that we’re taught very well in the dominant culture. 

 

David Pace 35:24

But to answer that question, you build a container. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 35:26

You build a container, a brave container. 

 

David Pace 35:28

A brave container. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 35:30

Yeah. 

 

David Pace 35:31

And it’s funny that you should mention it’s not funny at all, but death mortality. My niece, I was talking to her the other day. She lives in Boulder, Utah, and they have a death cafe. Yeah. Have you heard about that? Yeah, sure. Okay. Where they get together and talk about death? Yeah, it’s kind of like a book club, 

 

LaUra Schmidt 35:49

I mean, we need to. We need to consciously create space to talk about our death. Otherwise it manifests in all these really toxic ways. And one of those ways is increasing “othering,” which is what we’re seeing writ large. 

 

David Pace 35:59

Yeah, othering. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 36:01

We should, we should have a whole podcast on death anxiety. 

 

David Pace 36:04

Yeah. Okay. Next time. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 36:06

Next time. 

 

GRIEVE THE HARM I’VE CAUSED

 

David Pace 36:07

So, there’s all of these steps, the ones that we haven’t really I mean, we’ve touched on the be with uncertainty. We’re not we’re not very good at that in our Western society. 

Develop awareness. We’ve talked about that. But it’s simple, very practical things like take breaks and rest, you know, I mean. If you unpack that for a while, that can go a lot of different directions. 

Amy talks about under Step 8, grieve the harm I have caused. And she says, “in a paradigm full of impossible choices,” which is what I feel like we are sitting in, that’s not. Amy. That was me saying that little … this is Amy. “No one can do the right thing all the time. Judging others for their actions while living in a broken system is a form of moral superiority that only serves to further divide and isolate us.”

 

LaUra Schmidt 37:06

Amy is a wise woman. 

David Pace 37:07

She is a wise woman. Self-righteousness is a real problem for me. I’m going to just say that right now. So. Let us off the hook a little bit here. So there’s this carbon footprint thing that we are all being told that we need  and David Wallace-Wells has a take on that, which I will share briefly, later, but we can’t do everything, right? And there’s a quote actually from you at one point, I believe in the book or somewhere. 

So, yeah, I just wanted to quote related to this what Amy was just saying, a quote from Clarissa Pinkle Estes is to pronounce it right? It’s actually a signature block in your email “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but a stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach” 

 

So let us off the hook a little bit here if you can make us feel a little bit better about the fact that we’re not doing a good job. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 39:20

I’ll do that with a yes / and, okay. Yeah, I love that you brought in Impossible choices. We talk about that quite a , and it’s the sort of situation where you feel like, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. No matter what, you’re causing some amount of harm. And step eight is really about etching out that space to grieve that we’re living in a world that is set up to make us harm-doers and then to sort of let us fall into the trap of guilt and shame. 

We see a lot of folks, especially younger folks, right, that feel like they couldn’t do anything differently. I felt that certainly for a long time, like, I tried to do everything I possibly could as a human being with low income to make my presence as small as possible. And that’s no way to live either, right? 

And so we need some sort of place where we can be accountable for the harms we’ve caused with a recognition that we’re living in a time of great moral injury, which is a phenomenon that happens when we’re not able to follow our values. 

And that doesn’t mean that we don’t still have those values. It’s just that we try our best to follow our values as we can and sort of cut ourselves slack when we can’t live in those values. 

And this is also where peer-support is incredibly important. It’s the reminder that there’s so many people who want to do things differently. We just need a vision, or we need multiple visions of how to get there. And then we need the fortitude and the courage to start making that happen. 

And that’s, actually, Step 10. And I want to highlight that our action stuff isn’t until ten weeks after we’ve been meeting. Because we don’t want to rush that, right? We want the step about meaningful action to be informed by all the work that we’ve been doing, the deconstruction work, the self-assessment, the community assessment, looking at our biases that should inform the work that we’re here to do and in our world. 

 

David Pace 41:04

Right. So those are the last two steps. They’re very action-oriented. Show up is number 9, and that’s related. We don’t go too much into that. But the felt experience of the body, including sensations, movements, emotions, perceptions. 

But then we get to number 10, and we’re kind of drawing to a close here of the podcast. We don’t have too much more time, but this re-investing in meaningful efforts that you were just talking about. You call it heart-centered activism, and Amy calls it “embracing our inner weirdo.” 

There’s an interesting story in there where she is embracing her inner weirdness and becomes a DJ. And I’m just going to let that as a teaser. You need to read the book in order to figure that out. 

But this brings us to not only the container to heal our traumas, but also to reinvest in these meaningful efforts, which can mean activism. So let’s talk about that for a little bit. This is where I wanted to bring in David Wallace-Wells, who spoke at the Humanities Values Lecture series a couple of years ago. Year and a half ago. 

And he talks about this being a spiritual crisis more than anything, and that maybe if we look at that that way and, as you’ve kind of laid out very eloquently and elegantly here, then maybe we can move forward in a way that will actually prove beneficial. And he talks about individual efforts and then systemic efforts or political efforts, you could call it that. 

And he talks about anchoring our understanding not in apocalypse or normality, normalizing things, which is a big danger as we are likely to do, but instead anchoring our understanding in uncertainty and humility. What we need is a kind of a spiritual conversation within ourselves and with one another. Anyway, talk to us a little bit about that. 

LaUra Schmidt 44:48

I feel sort of pressure of time. I think one that is important. One thing that’s important to say is that top-down solutions are usually laggards. Usually it only changes because there is the political will and people make the top down folks change. 

And so I think what my focus is on, especially with Good Grief Network, is really empowering those of us on a grassroots level to change the questions. So the paradigms we’re creating are much different than the ones that we’re viewing now. 

We need more options. We need more visions of a future that actually abundance is reframed not in as  more consumerism, more stuff, but in more connection, in more relationality and the things that actually bring us joy and meaning. 

And I am of the understanding that if we actually change those things, that we also change the social injustices, that we change the eco-side. When we ask different questions about the world that aren’t focused on profit and focused on the collection of material goods, like we might actually create a that is just and equitable. 

And I wanted to circle back also to you asked a little while ago about like, what do we do? What does the program serve? But if you have a bunch of people that have come together and know how to let go of the outcome of our actions and are still wanting to do those actions because they’re meaningful and they’re the things to do, if you have a bunch of people who know how to embrace paradox, who know how to hold the tension without escaping it, who know how to be in conflict without running away. If you have a bunch of people who know how to be nimble what if we have a whole population of people who know how to stay in relationship, even when things are hard, even when we’re when we’re feeling despair and overwhelmed? I feel like all of those things come from a ten-week program of just coming together and exploring some of the themes we’ve been talking about today. 

 

David Pace 47:20

 

Well, and piggybacking on all of that is, because I think your message is one of hope in the end. And also there is in all of that that you were just talking about, there’s always just the joy of living and of abundant living. Even if we have to redefine what that means alchemically. Because it’s in community that we are able to do big things. And this is a big thing that we’re talking about. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 48:30

It’s a huge thing. And I wanted to go back before we close out. You mention the word The Matrix? You know, the movie, the film, The Matrix? I think that we need an acknowledgement that there are hard times ahead and that it’s so much easier to go back to sleep. [The Sufi Poet] Rumi says, “Do not go back to sleep. You know, the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell. Do not go back to sleep.” I think the invitation here and why we need community is because for these hard times we need to figure out ways to stay awake. 

And the only way to stay awake is being connected and knowing that other people are doing this with you. And this is also the plug for inner work. You know, I just listed off all these things about living with paradox and being nimble. It’s really hard to do that on your own. It’s really hard to do that without a supportive community behind you. 

So the ten step program, everything we’re doing in Good Grit, Good Grief Network, they’re just invitations into further growth. But those are the next steps. We have to stay awake. We have to actually endure these hard times and not go back into the Matrix, not go back to sleep. 

 

David Pace 49:34

I like that. 

 

Well, LaUra, thank you very much for being here today. 

LaUra Schmidt, again, is an alumna of the University of Utah, and she is the author of the book “How to Live in a Chaotic Climate Ten Steps to Reconnect With Ourselves, Our Communities and Our Planet.” And she’s the founder with co-founder and wife Amy Lewis Rowe of the Good Grief Network, one of the first emotional support groups for eco-anxiety, climate, grief and collective trauma. 

Thank you for being here. 

 

LaUra Schmidt 50:08

Yeah, Thanks for your time and questions, David