EcoDharma Explorations
We’re honored to announce EcoDharma Explorations, a collaborative short series co-created in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Spirit Rock. This offering is part of Spirit Rock’s newly seeded EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program, an initiative that brings together the wisdom of diverse communities and Buddhist teachers who are shaping the future of environmental activism.
We invite you to learn more about this growing collaboration and join us in practice, reflection, and collective action. We’re deeply grateful for this opportunity to be in new partnership with One Earth Sangha and Spirit Rock.
Registration for the upcoming exploration is open now at One Earth Sangha. This program is donation-based, with no required registration fee. We welcome your contributions to support this program.
EcoDharma Explorations are monthly gatherings that focus on different facets of EcoDharma. Recordings are provided for anyone who cannot attend or wishes to revisit a gathering. Please stay tuned for more gatherings coming in 2025!
Upcoming Discussions
Future sessions will be announced through our regular email list as soon as registrations open!
A Tree of Peace:
The Power of Remembering the Indigenous Design of American Democracy
With 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.
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.
A Path Towards Trust & Equanimity:
How to Nurture Beloved Community in Divided Times
With Konda Mason
Join us for this 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 explored what pathways toward deeper trust and equanimity can look like in these uncertain times.
Guiding questions include:
In what ways do the other three brahmavihārās — loving-kindness, compassion, and appreciative joy — support or deepen the cultivation of equanimity?
What role does compassion play in healing the divisions within and between us?
How do we return to connection, commonality, and the spiritual center within ourselves, our communities, and our democracy?
This session looked at the practices of deep listening and collective remembering as vital doorways into compassion and relational grounding. We recognize that the work of bridging divides cannot happen without an embodied understanding that the self is inseparable from the Earth, and without the courage to engage in our own inner healing and transformation. Together, we’ll explored these practices as both personal and collective commitments — a foundation for building bridges across differences and co-creating authentic communities rooted in trust, care, equity, and shared humanity.
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