None of those things are bad. Many are necessary. But there’s a hidden assumption underneath them: power lives somewhere else.

In governments. Corporations. CEOs. Billionaires. International institutions. People with platforms. People with money. People with qualifications. People whose job description apparently gives them permission to change things.

And our role becomes largely one of trying to influence them. I literally made a career out of this, spending every day trying to convince someone in government that they should be doing something different. (I mean, they probably should. That’s just not the end of the story.)

Because we’ve become so focused on changing the people and institutions that have had power ascribed to them, we’ve forgotten the innate power that exists within all of us: the power to participate in creating the world, in every moment.

The crises are spiritual

This is what I mean when I say the crises are spiritual. Not that there is an angry God seeking vengeance for our sins. And not that we can “love and light” our way out of complicated, structural crises.

I mean that we’ve lost our sense of who we are, what we are part of and what we are capable of. We’ve forgotten that we are living beings, embedded in a world of constant motion; interconnected with one another and the rest of life, and capable of shaping the systems we so often experience as something happening to us.

Look around. We are not passive participants in any of this. We are constantly creating — first in the smallest, most invisible ways. What we repeatedly give our attention to becomes easier to think; what we repeatedly think shapes how we speak and act; what we repeatedly do becomes habit.

Buddhist teachings have explored this kind of conditioning for thousands of years. Yogic philosophy describes saṃskāras: impressions left by our thoughts and actions which, through repetition, become patterns that shape how we think and act in the future. Neuroscience gives us another language for the brain’s capacity to change: neuroplasticity. Or, as Carl Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

What if societies have saṃskāras too?

Saṃskāras are often described as grooves or tracks in the mind. Through repetition, the groove becomes deeper and more established. Like a well-trodden path.

While writing this, I was reminded of the term “desire path”: the name we give to a path created simply by enough people walking the same route. I learned this courtesy of a lovely Welshman I met in a London park, and I remember thinking, what a charming little term. These unofficial paths exist because someone, at some point, thought: well, why not walk this way?

But they’re also a perfect analogy for societal saṃskāras. One person walks the route. Then another. Then another. The grass wears away and the track becomes more defined. And once the track is there, the next person is more likely to follow it.

Photo by Charlotte Fosdike on Unsplash

We create the path, and then the path begins to shape where we go.

Isn’t that, in some sense, how we create a society? Ideas become actions. Actions repeated become norms, which in turn become cultures and institutions. Those institutions then shape the people born into them, who walk paths they had no part in creating because they appear to be simply the way things are.

And still: paths can change.

This is where our power lies. In choosing a path and walking it. Maybe it’s a path already trodden by others. Probably it is. We all have people who have inspired us; we’re all walking in someone’s footsteps. And every time we walk a path, we make it a little easier for someone else to find.

But this requires us to change our relationship to power. To stop seeing it only as something that exists elsewhere, which we petition and pressure and plead with, and start recognising it as something we also exercise — from the thoughts we feed through to the words we speak and the decisions we make.

It also requires us to stop thinking so linearly about cause and effect. We want to know: Did it work? Did I make a difference? Did anyone notice? The Bhagavad Gītā offers a useful corrective: “Your right is to action alone, not to the fruits thereof.”

The ego doesn’t particularly like this. You may never know how many people you inspire.

But flip that:

You may never know how many people you inspire!

You don’t know who will see the path you’re walking and think: Oh. We can go that way.

So choose your path wisely. Love or fear. Despair or possibility. Nihilism or wonder.

And walk.

Warmly,

Natalie

Even when you have answered the emails, attended the meetings and ticked things off your list. Somehow, there is always the feeling that you could have started earlier, finished later or squeezed a little more out of the hours in between.

A while back, if I wasn’t at my desk by 8:30am, I felt like I was already falling behind. If I closed my laptop at 6pm and someone messaged afterwards, I felt guilty for being unavailable – as though I had snuck off early rather than simply finished a full day of work.

Working in the charity sector gave that guilt a particularly convincing justification. When your work is connected to a cause you care about, there is always more that could be done.

For a long time, I assumed that was why I struggled to switch off. I cared about my work. Perhaps the feeling that I should always be doing more was simply the price of doing “mission driven” work.

But that wasn’t the full story. Because even when nobody expected me to work late, and I didn’t want to, I still felt like I should. Even when I had done everything required of me, switching off felt uncomfortable.

And I don’t think this feeling is unique to any one line of work – or even to work at all.

It’s pervading every part of our lives

Perhaps you feel it on a rare Sunday spent doing absolutely nothing, only to find yourself wondering whether you should have deep cleaned the kitchen, gone for a run or started a new side project. Perhaps you question whether reading is a good use of your time because, at the end of it, you haven’t produced anything. I still do this.

Even our hobbies increasingly seem to require something to show for them. A run uploaded to Strava. A painting worthy of sharing. Simply enjoying something no longer seems to be enough. Even “wellness” has become about constant optimisation: wake up early and ace the morning routine, or feel guilty for it. I’ve been there – tracking macros, wearing the watch, mining the data, making sure next week beats this one.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has a name for this: the achievement society. We're not disciplined by a boss or any other external force anymore. We discipline ourselves, relentlessly, and we call it ambition. I like to call this internalised capitalism.

The mini economy of the self

I think we’ve started treating ourselves like mini economies: always expected to be producing, improving, optimising and growing.

But the economic logic we’ve absorbed asks something of us that doesn’t exist anywhere in nature: endless growth.

Nature, which we are, moves in cycles. There are seasons of expansion and seasons of rest. Periods of flowering, shedding and renewal. Nothing blooms all year round.

And, dare I say it, we are far closer in our genetic makeup to a plant than a line chart and a bell curve.

Thankfully, a growing number of economists, policymakers and thinkers are beginning to question the idea that endless economic growth should be the primary measure of a successful society – Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and Tim Jackson’s work on post-growth among them. Instead, they are asking a much more fundamental question: shouldn’t an economy serve life, and not the other way round?

The cracks are showing

I think there’s a parallel in lifestyle and culture too. The biohacking movement is revealing its limits, perhaps best exemplified by Bryan Johnson – a man who built a global following on the promise that he could out-optimise death – recently revealing he has an autoimmune disease, the kind that doesn’t respond to a protocol. “Self-help” books are getting a bad rap. People are starting to realise you can just, you know, live. You’re not a project. And you can still have dreams and ambitions and want to better yourself without the guilt, fear and obsession.

So what do we actually do with this?

Not, I think, another framework. Not a challenge or a 30-day reset promising to fix the very impulse that got us here in the first place – that would just be the same logic dressed differently.

Maybe it’s smaller than that. Maybe it starts with noticing the guilt when it shows up – at 6pm, on a Sunday, halfway through a book we’re enjoying – and asking it a simple question: whose voice is this, actually? Because it rarely turns out to be ours, or a boss, a client or even the cause you care about. More often it’s a market logic you never signed up to, one that measures a life by its output the same way it measures the value of a company by numbers on a spreadsheet or a person’s worth by their LinkedIn credentials.

You are allowed to have a season that produces nothing visible. You are allowed to close the laptop at 6pm and let the message wait until morning. Not because you don’t care, and not because you’ve stopped wanting to grow or succeed – but because growth, like everything else in nature, needs a winter as much as it needs a spring.

Warmly,

Natalie

I was due to travel to Uganda for work and needed a yellow fever vaccination. It was one of those relentlessly grey October days in England – the kind where the rain seems determined to soak you in the 30 seconds it takes to walk from the car to the pharmacy.

I stepped into the consultation room and, as any British person would, opened with:

“It’s miserable out there, isn’t it?”

The pharmacist, whose name was Blessing (which somehow makes this moment quite poetic), smiled and said:

“Oh, I don’t let things like the weather affect my day.”

It stopped me in my tracks. That wasn’t how the script was supposed to go. She was supposed to agree. We were supposed to spend a few seconds bonding over how awful the weather was before moving on with the appointment.

Instead, she opted out. And I remember thinking: wait... she’s right, why do we do this?

The habit of looking for what's wrong

That tiny interaction made me notice how often my mind reached for the negative by default — not because I genuinely felt that way, but because it was habit. And once I started paying attention, I realised it wasn’t just me.

Maybe it’s a particularly British thing, but when someone asks how we are, our default response is often, “not bad.” Which seems to imply not good either. And given the chance to complain about something, we will.

We seem to have developed a habit of subtly priming one another to look for what’s wrong, what’s missing, or what could be better. Which is a strange thing to do, considering our brains are not neutral observers of reality. What we repeatedly direct our attention towards becomes the world we experience.

Anyway, since then, I’ve made it a habit to look for what’s good. To be grateful for the smallest things, and, where I can, even the challenges.

It’s going surprisingly well. Most of the time I experience life as magical, even in the mundane moments.

In yogic philosophy, there’s a name for this: santosha — contentment, one of the foundational practices in the tradition. Not resignation or renouncing all desire, but the deliberate choice to find sufficiency in what’s already here, rather than treating happiness as something waiting on the other side of the next achievement or acquisition.

But here’s the thing: I think gratitude — or santosha — is more than a pleasant personal practice. It may be one of the most subtly transformative ways of relating to the world. It rewires our relationship to life while disrupting a culture that relies on us feeling constantly dissatisfied.

Who profits from your dissatisfaction

Once I started noticing my own manufactured sense of lack, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere else too — as well as noticing the industries built to profit from it.

Gratitude cultivates a sense of abundance. Our society, in countless subtle ways, cultivates the opposite. It tells us we are constantly lacking, and therefore easy to convince that we need more.

This matters because whether we recognise it or not, our economy doesn’t only produce value and exchange, but shapes desires. A culture that encourages us to feel perpetually insufficient is one in which consumption becomes the obvious solution. Gratitude interrupts that cycle. Not by rejecting consumption altogether (I’m a big fan of intentional purchases) but by making us a little harder to convince that more is always the answer.

And so here is the new normal.

The fast fashion industry continues to expand into a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, while unwanted textiles are dumped in deserts and synthetic fibres shed microplastics into rivers and seas. By 2050, the weight of plastic in the ocean could exceed that of fish.

Meanwhile, by the age of fourteen, around one in four girls report depressive symptoms, growing up in a culture that relentlessly monetises insecurity and teaches us that our bodies are projects in constant need of improvement. Women are sold impossible standards of beauty. Men are sold impossible standards of status, productivity and emotional self-sufficiency.

The underlying message is remarkably consistent: you are not enough. You do not have enough. There is something missing, and the answer lies just beyond your reach.

This is the emotional fuel that consumer capitalism runs on. Not because of some grand conspiracy, but because it’s what happens when the profit motive meets human psychology.

Our brains evolved to associate acquiring more resources with safety and security. Even if we intellectually understand that endless consumption isn’t good for us — or for the planet — that isn’t the part of the brain making most of our decisions. And so, we are remarkably susceptible to stories that promise we’ll feel happier, safer or more complete if we just acquire a little more.

A different kind of reward

I’m not suggesting that gratitude is going to transform our economic system overnight. But cultivating genuine appreciation for what is already present in our lives — which, importantly, signals safety to the nervous system — may be an overlooked piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a world that can thrive within planetary boundaries.

Perhaps the challenge isn’t simply to suppress our desire for reward, but to redirect it. To lean into the parts of our brain that find joy in connection, generosity and belonging. To get the same little rush from sharing, repairing or participating in a community as we do from buying something brand new that we definitely didn’t need.

So I think it starts as simply as this: saying, life is quite nice, actually.

Not because life is always easy or joyful or the sun is always shining, but because it also isn’t the bleak, meaningless experience that can supposedly be fixed with another hit of cheap dopamine.

It’s a playground. A place to explore, experiment, create, connect and share. Not to extract, consume and compete to have the most.

Life is quite nice, actually

So in that spirit, I’m going to make a habit of sharing things I’m grateful for and invite you to do the same – whether here in the comments, or just in an interaction with someone you know. Here’s why my life is quite nice, actually:

• It’s the green season in south Sri Lanka, which isn’t just green — it’s like the colour got turned up past where it should reasonably go.

• I got to reunite with Creamy, my favourite dog of the village (and she walked me part way home)

• I discovered, courtesy of my housemate, that you can put chilli on pineapple and it tastes good.

• Every day there is a pretty cloud formation.

• The side-of-the-road vegetable stalls sell produce that looks like it’s just been harvested from the earth.

None of these things are particularly impressive. That’s the point — not waiting for a big win or new thing to feel grateful, but noticing that any ordinary day is already stacked with reasons to think life is quite nice, actually.

Warmly,

Natalie

These things are very real. But I’m increasingly unconvinced that crisis is the whole story.

I used to work for a big NGO trying to solve just about every global challenge there is: humanitarian crises, climate change, poverty, inequality. Before that, I worked in politics. The logic behind my career decisions was always the same: do something that makes the world a little better.

Then I left that ecosystem to pack up, slow down, and deepen and share my personal practices: yoga, meditation, energy work. That took me to Sri Lanka, where kindness is in the oxygen, island time is real, and life seems to move to a different rhythm.

From the outside, this could easily read as an escape. An abandonment of a career that was actually quite purposeful. I don’t see it that way. Because I think there’s something we miss about the current moment that the news cycle constantly pulls us away from: the bigger picture.

The deeper crisis

That these crises share a common root. And I don’t think it stops at bad policymaking, human greed, or even capitalism. I think beneath them is something more fundamental: the illusion of separation. (Bear with me. This is where it gets a little yoga teacher.)

The perception that we are isolated individuals, cut off from each other, from nature, and from the world we participate in. That we are primarily self-interested beings, competing for survival and status. That this is simply “human nature”.

Scaled up to societies and nation states, that logic becomes the justification for violent borders, militarisation, extraction, hoarding wealth in tax havens, and destroying ecosystems in the name of growth.

These things make much more sense when you believe your wellbeing is separate from everyone else’s. But spoiler alert: it isn’t. We are deeply interconnected with the rest of life. Which can sound abstract or slightly esoteric until you remember how literal it is.

Everyone — and everything — is connected

The breath we exhale becomes the tree’s inhale. The food we eat emerges from living soil. Most of the elements that make up your body were forged in stars long before Earth existed. We are not separate from nature. We are nature. Or, as Eckhart Tolle puts it, maybe we are even the whole universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.

And we exist in constant, subtle exchange with one another too. Science, not just spiritual traditions, knows this. One study found that audiences responding emotionally to the same film scenes altered the chemistry of the air so consistently that researchers could predict what kind of scene was playing based only on people’s breath.

Our internal states literally shape our environment. It’s no surprise that systems built on disconnection don’t seem to make us well.

Microplastics are in oceans and rainwater, but also in human blood and brains. Deplete the soil and we deplete the nutrition in our food. Loneliness increases mortality risk. Stress travels through families, workplaces and communities.

The damage rarely stays contained. This is where I started to realise my own work – focused almost entirely on creating change in the external world – had been missing something important.

Because we cannot solve crises born of disconnection while reproducing the same patterns that sustain it. Burning ourselves out. Living entirely in our heads. Treating ourselves like machines. Optimising everything for efficiency, output and the future when the most meaningful parts of life are relational and in the present.

This isn’t to say that yoga, meditation or breathwork are the answer to systemic crises. Obviously. But meaningfully dissolving the illusion of separation – enough that we can imagine and build something different – requires an inward journey, too.

The missing half

In the karmic traditions of yoga and Buddhism, suffering is understood to arise from Avidyā (अविद्या): a fundamental misperception about the nature of reality, particularly the belief that we are separate from one another and the living world.

English doesn’t really have an equivalent for Avidyā. Or perhaps more accurately, modern Western culture doesn’t leave much room for one. (We do, however, have approximately 90 acceptable ways to sign off a work email).

We are taught to privilege what can be measured, rationalised and perceived through the senses, despite the fact we know our perception captures only a fraction of reality. We analyse life at such a microscopic level that we can lose sight of what it means to be alive.

Which is maybe why intellectual understanding alone can feel strangely incomplete. We already know, intellectually, that we are interconnected. But knowing something conceptually is not the same as feeling as though it is true.

And this is where I reluctantly have to defend yoga. And meditation, breathwork, time in nature, ceremony, art, prayer, even plant medicine. Any practice that help us to belong to the world rather than just observe it.

And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that, as the world seems to become more fragmented and dysfunctional, that people are craving these things more: community, meaning, slowing down, time in nature, a sense of purpose, mystical experiences. Because maybe what is collapsing isn’t life itself, but the way we’ve been taught to live it.

Maybe, without fully realising it, we’re responding to the crisis itself. Maybe every collapse contains the seed of a transition, and the falling apart is also, somehow, a falling together. That’s the working theory, anyway.

Warmly,

Natalie

It makes sense. A resting sea turtle takes just a few breaths per minute, drifting through the ocean, nibbling on seagrass, for a very long time. A hummingbird takes around 250 breaths per minute and gets just a couple of bright, frantic years.

It’s funny, because we associate slowness with boredom or lack. Slow is what we don’t want to be. Last in the race. The one who falls behind. And look, I don’t want to slow down my 5km time or be the last to catch the punchline of a joke (it happens more than I’d like to admit). But I do want to make the right kind of slow cool. Because I think it matters.

We are living in a world built on speed. Modern civilisation rewards a narrow set of ways of being: speed, force, constant doing.

And yet, across ancient cultures, there’s been a shared understanding that life moves through balance. Yin and yang. Sun and moon. Masculine and feminine. Complementary forces that animate everything. When one is overexpressed at the expense of the other, things start to distort.

Which might just describe where we’ve landed. We’ve forced, extracted and dominated our way into late-stage capitalism and climate breakdown. Our ecosystems and our nervous systems are paying the price. In other words, we’ve built a hummingbird world. And while hummingbirds have their place, so do turtles.

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

Where do we go from here?

In some ways, I think we’re already drifting back toward balance. Hustle culture doesn’t have the same shine it once did. More people are questioning jobs that demand constant output and constant availability. There’s a growing pull toward different rhythms, time in nature, prioritising connection and being discerning with our time and energy.

I don’t think any of this is a coincidence. It feels like a cultural correction for an imbalance that’s reached its peak.

And the more we lean into that shift, the better our chances of building a different world – one that doesn’t burn through our life force and the ecosystems we depend on. But that’s not easy work. It means going against the grain of everything we’ve been told makes us valuable as human beings.

Because the systems we live in don’t just sit outside of us, they live inside of us – in our nervous systems, our beliefs. Many (probably most) of us have our sense of worth tied to productivity, to output, to how our lives look rather than how they actually feel.

I’ve been in a long process of unpicking that myself. Unlearning urgency. Slowing down enough to hear my own intuition and what I actually want from life, rather than the constant noise and internalised beliefs about what I should be doing.

And honestly, it’s hard. There are definitely days where loud voices in my head tell me I’ve lost the plot, even if the quiet inner knowing assures me I’m on my path – a path that is meant to be taken in slow, intuitive steps rather than leaping from one thing to the next.

Anyway, this is why I think slowing down needs a rebrand. Because slow is not passive, it’s not unambitious. It’s a state we need to access to live healthy, fulfilled lives and a side of the energetic equation that we need to embrace if we have any chance of sustaining life on this planet. Because on both a personal and a collective level, the yang needs the yin like the inhale needs the exhale. Extraction without regeneration cannot sustain life, whether that’s the life of a human body, a community, or a planet.

So, that’s why I’m here to tell you that slow is sexy, actually. Why?

Slowness is presence

We tend to think of slowing down as putting the brakes on life. Limiting our ambition. Sacrificing things because we have less time. But I want to challenge that.

I think the pull many of us feel to slow down isn’t about doing less, but about being more present in what we are doing. Because when you’re moving at 100mph, always thinking about the next thing, it’s almost impossible to be here for your own life. And your presence makes life more full, not less.

There’s a reason so many spiritual traditions point us in the same direction. Buddhism speaks of non-attachment and returning to the present moment. Yoga invites us to move and live with awareness.

How many times have you achieved something you once dreamed of, only to move straight on to the next thing, barely pausing to enjoy it? Maybe slowing down isn’t about missing out or reining in your desires and goals, but creating a life you actually get to enjoy as well as strive for.

Slowness is discernment

It’s being more intentional with our energy and our choices. Saying yes when something feels aligned, and letting something go when it feels off. If I think about it, most of the mistakes I’ve made have come from urgency.

And I’m not suggesting we hesitate if we’re being chased by a lion. That’s exactly when speed is useful. But most of us aren’t in that kind of danger, and yet our nervous systems are wired as if we are — constantly reacting or on edge.

And when we live like that, it doesn’t just affect us individually. It shapes the world we create. Because a lack of discernment at the personal level scales and becomes cultural. We consume more than we need. We buy things out of impulse rather than intention. We stay plugged into a constant stream of news that leaves us overwhelmed rather than meaningfully engaged, and we scroll instead of engaging with something deeper.

Slowing down, even slightly, starts to shift that. Fewer things, chosen more consciously. Information we can actually process. Attention that isn’t constantly fragmented. These might feel like small changes, but over time they’re a big disruption to systems that are keeping us stuck, sick and disconnected.

Slowness is graciousness

Alright, look — this is where slow gets actually sexy. Because there is nothing sexy about being interrupted mid-sentence, or rushed through a conversation. And yet it happens all the time.

I think we could all be a bit more gracious. A bit slower in how we meet other people. When we’re rushed, people become obstacles. Interruptions. Things to get through. When we slow down, they become people again.

But life feels very different when you’re not constantly trying to get past it. When you’re not treating every interaction like something to optimise or move on from. When you actually listen — not half-listen while preparing your response, but properly listen.

And if you zoom out, this isn’t just about individual interactions. We’re conditioned to be extractive or transactional in our relationships. What can I get from this person? What’s the outcome? What’s the point? It’s subtle, but it shapes everything.

Slowing down interrupts that pattern. Being present with someone, without rushing or extracting, is a form of care. And care is the missing foundation that we need to build economies and communities that serve life.

Back to balance

There is a space for speed. For yang energy. We literally wouldn’t exist without it. But the world, and our lives, are a dance between the yin and the yang, the doing and being. And right now, we’re pretty far out of step.

Maybe slowing down is how we find the rhythm again. How we find coherence.

So let’s embrace it.

Warmly,

Natalie

And yet, many people committed to social and ecological change find themselves exhausted, numb, or stuck in cycles of burnout. The dominant Western psychological paradigm, with its focus on individual pathology and symptom management, often struggles to meet this moment. At the same time, organising, advocacy, and collective work can offer meaning and agency, but they do not always bring us relief, nor do they always lead directly to the change we hope for.

So how do we stay engaged without collapsing, hardening, or giving up?

This reflection brings together two complementary perspectives:

• Natalie, a yoga and meditation teacher with a background in climate justice policy, working at the intersection of individual and collective wellbeing

• Parker, a psychotherapist working directly with climate activists and changemakers navigating grief, anxiety, and burnout

We offer the idea of inner climate as a way of naming the emotional, nervous-system, and meaning-making terrain we each carry within us. Just as the outer climate shapes what is possible for life on Earth, our inner climate shapes how we show up in the wider world. Tending to our inner lives is not an escape from the external world, but a prerequisite for meeting this moment with clarity and care, and for imagining futures beyond the ones we have inherited.

So, here are four ways to support your inner climate and navigate an increasingly complex world:

1. Let the body speak

Natalie

Emotions do not live only in the mind. They are lived experiences in the body. Anger, fear, grief, and overwhelm often register first as physical sensations: a tight chest, shallow breath, a clenched jaw. Yet in a culture that privileges cognition, speed and constant analysis, we are trained to override these signals in order to remain productive and functional. Over time, this can create chronic activation, exhaustion, or a sense of disconnection from ourselves.

As Gabor Maté puts it, “To say the mind is connected to the body is incorrect… they are not connected; they are the same system.” In a culture that depends on us being disconnected from our bodies’ wisdom, stepping out of mental narration and into direct bodily awareness can be a subtly radical act.

Practices such as body scan meditations, yin yoga, slow movement, or conscious breathing allow awareness itself to become regulating. The aim is not to fix what we feel, but to create enough space for the body to communicate what the mind may struggle to process on its own.

In times of uncertainty, the breath can also be a particularly reliable bridge back to the present. Balancing pranayama, such as alternate nostril breathing (nadi shodhana), helps us find a midpoint between action and rest, so we feel energised without becoming scattered. This matters because sustained engagement does not come from perpetual urgency or constant agonising about what the future holds.

2. Reframe hope & despair

Parker

From the atrocities in Gaza to the unfolding sixth mass extinction, hopelessness is a rational response to bearing witness to mass suffering. It can be infuriating when others, especially those choosing apathy, insist that we must “stay hopeful.”

But hope is not a monolithic experience. The late Thich Nhat Hanh taught that mindfulness requires an object. We cannot simply be mindful; we must be mindful of something. I believe hope operates in a similar way. We cannot just have hope. We must have hope in something.

Rather than sinking into undifferentiated despair, we can ask two clarifying questions.

What do I not have hope in?
This might include political leaders, economic systems, or the likelihood of justice under current conditions. Naming this clarifies where collective action or resistance might be needed.

What do I have hope in?
Perhaps nature’s capacity for regeneration, the innate compassion of children, or the resilience of our ancestors. These answers reveal what nourishes us and what we want to cultivate more of in the world.

This practice helps break despair into something more precise. Hopelessness often arises because we care deeply. Otherwise, we would simply feel apathetic. Over time, despair can become clarity, and hope can become a compass for the kind of world we wish to build with others.

Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash

3. Shift from problem solving to predicament-navigation

Parker

Human brains are wired to identify and solve problems. Distress arises when we recognise a problem but cannot solve it.

The polycrisis magnifies this dynamic to an unprecedented scale. Many of us run endless mental calculations about what actions might have the most impact, only to arrive at exhaustion and despair. How can individual or even collective efforts matter when over 100 million barrels of oil are still produced every day?

Even when we turn toward political organising and direct action, which are essential, the scale of harm can make those efforts feel like drops in the ocean.

What happens if we reframe the polycrisis not as a set of problems to solve, but as a predicament to navigate?

This reframing does not deny urgency or absolve responsibility. It reflects reality. Climate change may once have been a problem fully solvable, but decades of political inaction and fossil-fuel propaganda have foreclosed that possibility. Unprecedented change is already underway and will continue to unfold.

Seeing this as a predicament creates a small but important shift. It opens space to ask different questions: How do we want to live through this? What kinds of communities do we need? How do we build resilience for the long haul?

As Bayo Akomolafe writes: the times are urgent; let us slow down. This shift does not make grief or overwhelm disappear. But it can loosen the grip of impossible expectations and interrupt the cycle of burnout driven by trying to carry what no individual nervous system was designed to hold.

4. Remember you are part of something larger

Natalie

Turbulent times often generate a feeling of responsibility. A responsibility to stay informed, activated, or “on” at all times. For people working in social change or crisis response, there is a sense that if we loosen our grip, something else will fall apart.

This mindset fuels over-responsibility, anxiety, and burnout. It can also generate a sense within us that responsibility sits at an individual level.

Many philosophical and spiritual traditions offer a counterpoint. In yoga philosophy, one principle is Īśvara Praṇidhāna, often translated as “surrender.” Surrender, in western cultures, is frequently interpreted as passivity. “Surrender” in this context points to something else entirely.

It’s more about loosening the hyper-individual “I.” It is about remembering that we are embedded in ecosystems, histories, movements, and lineages far larger than our own striving. For many of us, it might also mean remembering we are part of an intelligence beyond the human and beyond the Earth, whether that’s God or the Universe. Zooming out in this way helps us to feel that responsibility is shared, and our agency and capacity to act only exist in relationship to others.

This perspective does not deny action. But it can soften the grip with which we hold it, making it possible to stay engaged without burning out or shutting down. When we remember that we are part of something larger, compassion becomes less about heroic effort and more about viewing our efforts, however small they may be on some days, as part of a tapestry of life, movement and change.

Our wellbeing is the work

Living through this moment often means holding cognitive dissonance: caring deeply, while participating in systems that cause harm. Avoidance and overwhelm are human responses. But they don’t have to be our default.

Looking after our wellbeing isn’t indulgent. It’s part of the work. It helps us stay open rather than defensive, and act from connection and clarity, not just stress and urgency.

There’s no single blueprint. But there are shared practices and perspective shifts that make our care for the planet – and all the life on it – more sustainable. After all, a regenerative planet requires regenerative movements and people.

Warmly,

Natalie & Parker

This belief shapes – or maybe more accurately, limits – almost everything.

On a personal level, it shows up as resignation. This is just how I am. I’m bad with money. I’m not creative. I’m a terrible public speaker. I fail in relationships. We mistake current patterns for permanent traits, forgetting how much we’ve already changed just to arrive at this moment. We forget that often our past selves would barely recognise us.

On a collective level, the same logic is projected onto the world around us. The systems we live inside – economic arrangements, political structures, cultural values – start to feel like laws of nature rather than human creations. Extractive capitalism becomes “just the way things are”; animal agriculture becomes the default way we feed ourselves; the exploitation of people becomes framed as an inevitable feature of how power operates.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

We argue about how to optimise inside these systems, but struggle to imagine genuinely different ones. What’s interesting to me is that this doesn’t really feel like a belief in the usual sense. It’s not something most of us consciously chose or argued ourselves into. It’s more like a default setting.

And default settings usually make sense in context.

When humans are operating from survival, it’s not particularly helpful to be thinking about long-term growth or transformation. If your nervous system believes resources are scarce, danger is imminent, or belonging is fragile, then the priority is staying alive and staying safe. Novelty actually feels like more of a threat.

The problem is that many of us are no longer in immediate physical danger, but our nervous systems don’t seem to have got the memo.

We live in bodies and minds shaped by centuries of manufactured scarcity, violence, extraction, and competition. Even when our material needs are met, our internal landscape may still be organised around threat. So we default to short-term thinking and low expectations of change – personally and collectively.

When we’re operating in this way, imagining a different future can feel naive or even irresponsible. We might say we’re “being realistic” when often it’s just fear and limitation wearing sensible shoes.

None of this means that change is easy, or that structural constraints aren’t real. The systems we live in shape our internal wiring, and transformation doesn’t happen through willing it or through imagination alone.

But it does mean that our baseline states shape us — and the world — more than we often admit. History didn’t end. It never does. Humans are not static creatures, and neither are the worlds we build.

So if you’re a change-maker, or simply someone who longs for a better future, let this be the message: the future is not blocked by what exists now. Constrained, maybe — but not closed. What feels fixed is often just what feels familiar.

Warmly,

Natalie

Long before neuroscience, productivity culture, or anyone telling you to “think it through,” ancient traditions placed the heart at the centre of human life. In yoga philosophy, the heart sits at the midpoint of the body’s energetic system — between the lower centres associated with safety, survival and embodiment, and the upper centres linked to insight, meaning and consciousness.

A bridge between the material world and the non-physical.

Photo by Florian Cordier on Unsplash

Western culture, meanwhile, crowned the mind as the CEO of the body. Rationality at the top. Emotion quietly demoted. The heart kept around for romance and poetry, but politely excluded from decision-making. Which, honestly, explains a lot.

But here’s the part where science becomes mildly inconvenient for that way of living.

The heart is not just pumping blood around your body. It has its own intrinsic nervous system, sometimes called the “heart brain,” with tens of thousands of neurons. Researchers studying this relationship have shown that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends back.

I don’t pretend to understand the full mechanics of this. But I have spent enough time paying attention to my body to notice that the quality of those signals seems to matter.

When I’m stressed, rushed, or living mostly in my head, everything feels like a crisis. Thoughts get louder but not wiser. Decisions feel urgent, and perspective narrows.

When I slow down, deepen the breath and drop attention into the body, life feels different. There’s more ease and more space. Thinking becomes clearer, and what once felt like a mountain often reveals itself to be a molehill.

These states don’t live purely in the mind, even though we’ve given so much power to our thoughts that it can feel that way. They depend on how well the whole system is communicating — heart, brain, body together.

Science has a term for the state in which the heart and brain are working in sync, exchanging more ordered signals: heart coherence. The research suggests this state is reached not just with slower, regulated breathing, but with intentionally orienting toward certain emotional states — feelings like gratitude, care, or love (yes, intentional gratitude is the cheat code to life).

Which helps explain why Antonio Damasio, a very well respected neuroscientist, put it like this: “We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think.”

That line is powerful because it reverses the hierarchy we’ve been living by.

For a long time, emotion has been treated as something that interferes with clear thinking — something to manage, override, or rise above. Ancient traditions don’t seem to agree. In yoga philosophy, emotion is not a problem to be solved but part of the terrain of being human. Wisdom doesn’t bypass the body straight to the mind; it moves through it, through nadis and chakras which conveniently appear to correlate with the nervous system, endocrine glands and major centres of sensation and emotion.

Living more from the heart doesn’t mean abandoning your mind’s logic. It means allowing thinking to be supported by the body and its emotional intelligence.

The mind is a powerful tool. It was just never meant to work alone.

It might be time to give the heart its job back.

Warmly,

Natalie

There was one part of this year’s COP outcome that genuinely gave me hope: the agreement to establish a mechanism to accelerate a just transition — the very issue I was campaigning on before I stepped away from my old job. But even that hope is tempered. COP texts are always thin. They gesture at transformation while avoiding the decisive choices. And yet again, the hardest decisions have been deferred to future summits, at a time when the window to restore balance to our ecosystems is vanishing fast.

And this — the limits of policy, the way we keep circling the same patterns — is part of what made me take a break from my career, spend time in India, and deepen my spiritual practice. And it’s exactly why I keep coming back to the importance of spiritual ecology: the worldview that understands the climate crisis as a crisis of relationship — between humans and nature, between communities and power, and between our inner state of consciousness and the outer systems we create from that state.

Photo by Rolf Schmidbauer on Unsplash

The worldview we’re missing

Because when you look closely at these negotiations, it’s not just political will that’s missing — it’s a worldview. We’re trying to fix a crisis of relationship with tools built on disconnection. We negotiate over carbon while ignoring the consciousness, culture, and nervous systems that drive political and consumer choices in the first place.

You cannot restore a living planet with a mindset that treats land, water, minerals, and people as inputs. You cannot build a just transition on the same extractive logic that created the injustice.

This is something Indigenous peoples have been saying for generations — long before COPs existed. Their leadership has always been grounded in reciprocity with the Earth. Yet in global negotiations, their knowledge is still treated as peripheral rather than foundational. The world is slowly catching up to truths they never forgot.

Because spiritual ecology begins with a simple understanding: the Earth is alive, intelligent, and relational. And we are part of the Earth — so we are, too. When we forget this, we build systems that treat land, water, forests, and people as resources to be managed and consumed. When we remember it, we create cultures rooted in respect and reverence. If more people felt that truth, they’d be far less willing to destroy the living systems that sustain them.

The disconnection we’ve normalised

And when you sit with that for a moment, you start to see how far our cultures have drifted from any real sense of reverence. You can fly to Kathmandu, feel momentary awe at the Himalayas and then return home to spend most of your waking life tapping on a plastic keyboard under an LED glow. Maybe you visit a park now and then, but even there nature is trimmed, managed, contained. Even the crows seem slightly confused by city living.

This disconnection is especially stark in the UK — one of the most nature-deprived countries on Earth. We’re more comfortable with concrete than with wildness. We’ve normalised environments that make it almost impossible to feel part of anything larger than ourselves.

And this is where spiritual ecology becomes more than a philosophy. It’s about the everyday structures that rekindle our sense of belonging to the living world. Forest schooling. Community gardens. Permaculture design. Rewilding. Mindful walking. Teaching children (and adults) how to be in relationship with the natural world rather than simply consuming what is extracted from it, or analysing and intellectualising it (I have so much to learn here myself).

This is also why I’m doing the work I’m doing now: yoga, meditation, breath and energy work. These aren’t “escapes” from the world. They’re practices of reconnection — to the body, to presence, to awareness — which are the foundations of spiritual ecology. When people feel more connected to themselves, they naturally feel more connected to the Earth, and to an intelligence beyond the Earth. And when that connection deepens, their choices — political, economic, personal — begin to shift. That’s how inner practice becomes outer change.

COP summits — and especially the tireless activists and campaigners who shape them — are essential. Without that work, we’d have no global cooperation and far less climate action. But until we shift the worldview underneath our decisions — until we repair the relationship — we’ll keep producing outcomes that look like progress in headlines yet fall short in reality, because they’re built on the same consciousness that created the crisis in the first place.

The good news is that relationships can be repaired — and worldviews can evolve.

Warmly,

Natalie

Across history, in cultures that never interacted, people noticed the same thing about human beings: we don’t run on a single mode of energy. We’re wired for two. Ancient Chinese philosophy named them yin (feminine) and yang (masculine). Ancient Indian philosophy mapped them as pingala (sun) and ida (moon) channels. Greek thinkers described Apollonian logic and Dionysian intuition. Even neuroscience nods to the pattern with two hemispheric tendencies — one analytical, one imaginative.

None of these systems were talking about gender. They weren’t separating people into “masculine” and “feminine” types. They were describing functions — two complementary ways of knowing and moving through the world that exist in everyone, and that need to be in some degree of balance for us to function well.

Our yang, solar or masculine energy is active, structured, and about doing. Our yin, lunar or feminine energy is receptive, intuitive, and about being. These two energies complement each other.

But the world we’ve built overwhelmingly favours just one of these energies — the active one. We celebrate speed, productivity, analysis, decisiveness, and constant motion. We trust the part of us that plans more than the part that senses. We prioritise output and undervalue intuition, reflection, rest, creativity, and integration.

It’s no surprise people feel depleted or disconnected.
We’re trying to live on one energy source when we’re wired for two.

Photo by Tim Dennert on Unsplash

I say this with a certain amount of self-awareness, because rushing used to be my personality trait. I walked everywhere at the pace of someone late for a flight. If I wasn’t early, I was stressed. If I wasn’t working, I felt guilty. My downtime had a moral undertone to it, as if rest needed to be justified or earned. And while I would have said I was generally happy, I was restless and rarely present.

But somewhere along the way, I accidentally started appreciating the moon — both the energy and the actual thing in the sky — and stopped tying my worth to constant doing. My friends know this too well: try taking me for a walk after dark without me interrupting the conversation to say, “Aw, look at the moon.” It won’t happen.

And the more I paid attention to the pull toward balance, the more I started noticing the same shift everywhere around me. People talking about overwhelm not as a personal failing but as a sign of an unsustainable way of living. People craving rest, depth, gentleness, space to think, space to feel. It feels as though something in our collective system is trying to self-correct.

The active, solar, yang energy isn’t the problem. It’s vital. It builds things, moves things, brings things into form. But without the yin qualities — the introspection, the imagination, the intuition, the pauses that let our systems recalibrate — action becomes hollow or unsustainable. We get things done, but don’t quite feel ourselves in any of it.

The traditions that spoke about sun and moon, yin and yang, masculine and feminine weren’t being mystical for the sake of it. They were describing something practical: systems function better when both energies are participating. Action needs awareness. Motion needs meaning. The doing part of us needs the being part of us like inhalation needs exhalation.

And what gives me a sense of optimism is that even in Western cultures, which may never fully embrace the language of yin and yang or ida and pingala, something in us still seems to be drifting back toward balance. Meditation has gone mainstream and yin yoga is quietly booming. But even among those who don’t embrace these practices, people are trying slower mornings, fewer commitments, digital boundaries, time in nature, and gentler rhythms of work and life.

We’re not abandoning the sun — we’re just rediscovering the moon we sidelined. And when enough people shift toward balance in their own lives, our cultures will inevitably follow suit.

If you’ve been feeling the pull to slow down, trust it — it might just be your second energy source asking to be let back in.

Warmly,

Natalie

That question — or maybe something deeper beneath it — brought me to India, where I’ve spent the past month studying yoga.

Even as I write that, it still feels slightly surreal. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be spending autumn 2025 in the foothills of the Himalayas, rising before sunrise to chant mantras and breathe through one nostril and out the other, I would’ve laughed.

Back then, yoga to me meant movement — something I did occasionally in a studio, or traded off for Pilates. Like many of us, I thought yoga was asana. It wasn’t until the beginning of this year that I began to understand that the physical practice is just one small limb of a vast, ancient philosophy — a body of Indian wisdom passed down for thousands of years as a guide to living in harmony with ourselves, with others, and with the wider web of life.

That realisation changed everything. It gave language and structure to the values I’d already been trying to live — balance, gratitude, discipline, awareness — and made me fall in love with yoga as a way of being, not just moving. I’m deeply grateful to my teachers in Rishikesh, who helped me deepen my understanding with such clarity and care. (And I thoroughly recommend Nirvana Yoga School if you’re looking to do something similar.)

So it feels fitting that my first post since finishing my training is about what yoga looks like when it steps off the mat and into daily life. Here are five ways to practice yoga that involve no downward dog or chaturanga.

1. Pause and appreciate your warm cup of tea, or the food in your fridge

Santosha (contentment) invites us to be grateful for what we already have, rather than longing for what isn’t ours. What I love about yoga is that it doesn’t ask us to give up our desires — it knows wanting more is part of being human — but it does ask that we pursue those desires from a place of appreciation, not lack.

When we operate from gratitude, we stay present in the process, not just fixated on the end goal. What we achieve feels more fulfilling because we’re actually there to experience it.

Santosha is also about accepting and trusting the process — which makes it useful on the mat, too. Especially when you find yourself face-planting out of crow pose nine times out of ten.

2. Speak gently, even when someone frustrates you

Ahimsa (non-violence) is choosing kindness when irritation would be easier.

The obvious part of non-violence — not harming others — doesn’t need explaining. But ahimsa also lives in the small moments: how we talk to people, how we respond under pressure, how we speak to ourselves.

It doesn’t mean avoiding accountability or confrontation. It just means not feeding the loop of anger and fear. This is peace-building in its simplest form.

(Also, please don’t kill bugs. They’re just doing their thing.)

3. When a plan changes or something goes “wrong,” notice the urge to fix it

Aparigraha (non-grasping) asks us to loosen our grip on how life should look.

It’s not about apathy or giving up. You can still hold a vision for your life while staying open to how it unfolds. Because when we cling too tightly to one outcome, we miss the magic of the alternatives life is trying to show us.

Aparigraha also extends to material things. Lose your favourite sweatshirt? You’ll survive. (Probably even find a better one.)

4. Journal your thoughts

Svādhyāya (self-study) is the ongoing practice of watching your own mind — your habits, reactions, and the stories you tell yourself.

Journaling is one way to do it, but so is simply observing: how you speak to yourself, what triggers you, what you avoid. Most of us move through life without pausing to ask why we do the things we do.

This kind of awareness doesn’t just make life easier internally. It changes how you show up with other people — how you listen, how you speak, how you take responsibility for your part. The more you understand your own patterns, the less likely you are to project them onto the world around you.

5. Remember you are part of something bigger

Īśvara Praṇidhāna is often translated as surrender, but to me it’s really about perspective. It’s the practice of loosening the ego’s grip — the constant belief that you’re running the show — and remembering that you’re part of a much larger rhythm.

Call it nature, the universe, consciousness, God — the name matters less than the recognition that life is happening through you as much as it’s happening around you.

Surrender, in this sense, is active. It’s paying attention, doing your part, and then trusting in an intelligence beyond yourself. This kind of trust and humility makes life feel more peaceful — and that peace tends to ripple outward.

To me, practicing yoga off the mat is really just asking: how gently can I move through the world?

When we start to live that way — with a little more balance, awareness and compassion — it doesn’t just bring inner peace (though the inner peace is great, and I do recommend it). It shifts how we show up, how we treat people, and the kind of energy we put into the world. We tend to underestimate that — but it’s those small shifts that make the big changes (like in politics and culture) possible.

Because, while my policy and activist brain loathes to admit it, changing the world actually does start with changing how we move through it.

Warmly,

Natalie

But the moment you remember the person or people in question are fully human – with stories, contradictions, a favourite ice cream flavour, or a pet they adore – hate begins to lose its oxygen.

Few things illustrate this more than the way migrants are spoken about. Politicians and newspapers reduce them to numbers, to a “surge” or an “influx.” A wave. A swarm. Language that deliberately strips away humanity, turning people into something faceless and threatening. It’s no wonder fear and resentment spread when the stories we’re told are emptied of names and faces.

How often have you met someone who insists we should close our borders to people from whatever region the government or media is scapegoating at the time, yet, the moment you bring up an actual person from that region, they hesitate and say something like: “Oh, I didn’t mean them.”

When the “other” stops being an abstraction and becomes your colleague, your neighbour, your postman, the narrative cracks.

We can all spot this dynamic when it’s aimed at people we sympathise with. But here’s the catch: humanising can’t only extend to the friendly neighbour, the hardworking colleague, or the person experiencing injustice. That isn’t full humanisation, but rather, a kind of conditional acceptance. The real test is whether we can resist judging and categorising people when they’re strangers, when they unsettle us, or when their beliefs clash with our own.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

We’ve all been there

I’ve definitely judged “the racist”. I’ve put them in a box, and told myself I already know everything worth knowing about them. It’s not the same as hurling slurs, but it is still a form of dehumanisation. The moment I reduce someone to nothing more than their worst view, I stop seeing them as a whole person. I stop asking what fear or pain might sit beneath those beliefs, what experiences shaped them, what humanity still lives alongside the prejudice.

Doing the opposite (holding back judgment long enough to ask what actually drives a belief or behaviour) doesn’t excuse the harm. But it does stop us from hiding behind easy, shallow caricature.

This idea runs through many traditions and movements. Gandhi spoke of it as “hate the sin, love the sinner.” bell hooks described love as a political force – a daily discipline of recognising each other’s full humanity, even across deep divisions. Restorative justice movements remind us that we can hold people accountable for harm without reducing them to the harm they’ve caused. And Marianne Williamson – one of my first spiritual teachers – teaches that beneath fear and prejudice there is always love, however deeply buried. All of these voices remind us of the same truth: the harder work, and perhaps the more transformative one, is to fight the belief without erasing the person.

This feels especially difficult right now. It’s hard to grasp how some people, including those who shape our institutions and governments, can support or turn a blind eye to a blatantly genocidal regime. It’s hard to comprehend how someone can look at a person crossing a channel or an ocean and see a threat, when all you see is someone simply trying to survive. And it’s hard to find compassion for someone who seems comfortable dehumanising others. But doing so is as essential as it is hard.

I should add: it’s easier for me to say this as someone who has never been on the direct receiving end of hate. I don’t doubt that writing these words would be more challenging if I had ever been reduced to a slur or a stereotype myself.

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Humanising is an addition, not a replacement

Throughout my career, I’ve worked with or beside frontline activists, small and bold organisations pushing the edges, and larger institutions working change through relationships and networks. I’ve seen how every part of a social movement has its place – the pragmatic, the confrontational, the diplomatic. All of it matters.

What I’m exploring here is just one strand of that tapestry, or perhaps a single thread that should run through all of it, but that often gets left behind: the inner work of refusing to put someone in a box, even when it feels easier and when anger and judgment feel more righteous. This isn’t about excusing harm or weakening resistance, but about holding onto nuance: remembering that no one is defined solely by a single belief, and refusing to let our assumptions do the work for us.

And maybe that’s the key: humanising isn’t only for the sake of those we disagree with. It’s for us too. It stops us from hardening, from closing off, from slipping into cynicism. Because if hate thrives on certain conditions – distance, fear, caricature – then dismantling those conditions, which is well within our gift, is ultimately what might bring us toward something much kinder.

Warmly,

Natalie

I usually like to keep my writing on the lighter side. I describe myself as an eternal optimist – and I am. But I also used to work in humanitarian advocacy on this very crisis. And I cannot ignore that part of me that feels very deeply about this issue.

This post is a gentle attempt to explore how spirituality might help us hold and alchemise collective pain, rather than turn away from it. Because if our spirituality can’t sit with genocide, can’t stay with the truth of what’s happening, then it’s not serving the highest good. It’s just keeping us comfortable.

Photo by Ibrahim Rifath on Unsplash

Before we go further, yes, this is spiritual warfare

The land at the heart of this crisis is considered holy by billions. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all trace their sacred stories back to it. It’s a place of deep reverence as well as profound violence.

Religion is not the only force driving this conflict, but it’s deeply entangled in it. The language of God, scripture, and divine right has been used to lay claim to the land, to justify killing and maiming thousands of people, many of them children. Sacred texts have been weaponised to legitimise illegal settlements, erase histories, and enforce a vision of statehood that deprives others of basic rights. And yet, for many, faith is also a lifeline: a source of meaning, hope and comfort in the face of devastation.

So if this is a form of spiritual warfare, I understand why some might ask: why turn to spirituality to face it? Hasn’t spirituality, or at least religion, already played a role in causing harm?

It’s a fair question. This isn’t the first crisis in which the name of God and the divine has been invoked to justify violence and colonisation, and it probably won’t be the last.

It’s important to say: religion and spirituality, while overlapping, are not the same. Religion often operates within institutions and hierarchies; spirituality exists within religion but also outside of it, and it tends to centre personal connection, inner growth, and direct experience. But both shape the stories we live by. And what we’re witnessing isn’t just a war of territory and power — it’s a clash of worldviews, a distortion of histories and a total mischaracterisation of the divine. But if spiritual narratives can be distorted to cause harm, then surely they can also be reclaimed to guide us back toward healing.

Choosing love

I believe we’re all spiritual beings. Whether or not we identify that way, whether or not we follow any particular tradition, there’s something in us that seeks meaning, longs for connection, recognises beauty, and aches at injustice. Something that knows – even if not loudly – that we’re not just skin and bone and ego, but part of something much larger, more mysterious, and interconnected. And for many, the essence of spirituality is love.

Not romantic or sentimental love in the way we often confine it. But love as the opposite of fear – the kind of love that recognises our shared humanity and compels us to care.

I’ve heard it said that there are only two sponsoring emotions: love and fear. Everything else – joy or jealousy, generosity or greed, courage or weakness – stems from one of those roots. And the world we build depends on which one we choose to follow. And while love connects, fear divides.

But if that’s true, how do we make sense of the violence committed in the name of religion? Of people who claim to act for God, yet do so without love?

People causing harm in the name of God aren’t acting from true spiritual connection – they’re acting from deep conditioning. Often generational or political or both. But the energy underneath is fear. Fear of the other. Fear of difference. Fear of losing power, identity, belonging.

That doesn’t excuse the harm. But it helps explain it. And it reminds us that the antidote to fear isn’t more fear – it’s love. Love doesn’t have to be passive or naïve. It can still be discerning, it can still be fierce and it can still be willing to look at injustice and name it.

And that’s the alchemy

To meet fear not with more fear, but with love and compassion. To let grief be a bridge, not a wall. To not be hardened by a world that gives us every reason to be.

I know some people reading this will think, how can you show compassion toward a genocidal maniac? I get it. And I’m not saying that we excuse or minimise harm. I’m not talking about bypassing justice or offering blanket forgiveness. I’m talking about choosing not to let our own hearts be corroded by the very forces we oppose.

Compassion doesn’t mean letting people off the hook. It means refusing to let fear and hatred define the terms of our response. It means staying human in the face of dehumanisation.

And maybe the most constructive thing we can do right now is to keep our hearts open in a world that keeps trying to shut them down. That doesn’t mean we need to consume every news article and every devastating image, but we also can’t be a counterweight to what we refuse to face.

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Warmly,

Natalie

You could chalk it up to coincidence. Confirmation bias. Some people (okay, me) might tell you that’s a bit boring, and that maybe, just maybe, something deeper is at play.

Carl Jung called these moments synchronicity: meaningful coincidences that aren’t causally linked but feel too precise to be random. Some people call them signs from the Universe.

Jung believed these moments pointed to a deeper layer of reality – what he called the unus mundus (Latin for “one world”). A kind of metaphysical soup where mind and matter aren’t separate ingredients, but are intertwined. In this view, your inner world and the outer world are in constant conversation, even if you’re not always tuned in.

Jung didn’t uncover anything new

He was a Western psychologist and philosopher giving air time to wisdom that’s lived for millennia in ancient and spiritual traditions.

The Hermetic teaching “as above, so below”, from an ancient Greco-Egyptian tradition, points to the same idea: that the inner and outer mirror one another. In Taoism, the Chinese philosophy of attuning to the natural order, Jung’s thinking finds resonance in wu wei: the art of non-forcing, of moving so harmoniously with life’s current that things seem to align on their own.

In modern physics, echoes of this mystery also emerge. In the elusive world of quantum theory, particles can become entangled – so intimately linked that the state of one affects the other instantly, even across vast distances.

It’s not the same as synchronicity, but it gestures in the same direction: that reality may be more relational and non-linear than we’ve been taught to believe. In fact, Jung explored this very overlap with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, one of the pioneers of quantum theory.

Across traditions and theories, a similar conclusion can be drawn:
There’s a rhythm to the universe, and you might even be able to sync it up with your own.

So, how do you invite more signs and synchronicity into your life?

Well, I’m no expert – just someone speaking from experience. When I first began exploring the spiritual side of life, I read a book called Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson. It’s framed around the idea that our loved ones who’ve passed can send us messages – little signs to remind us they’re still with us. And while I’m not entirely sure I believe it’s individual souls reaching out, the stories in the book are moving, and it did open my mind to the idea that life is always trying to communicate with us.

For me, synchronicities and signs aren’t proof of an afterlife, or of something external intervening – they’re reminders that we’re part of a vast, intelligent and interconnected universe.

When I read Signs, I didn’t yet have the language for synchronicity, but I’d already experienced something I couldn’t explain away and something that felt too precise to be accidental. So I lapped it up. And then, like anyone newly intoxicated by magic, I wanted more of it.

I started trying to will signs and synchronicities into my life, scanning the world for things I could assign meaning to, on the lookout for the next note from the Universe.

But here’s the thing I learned

Synchronicity doesn’t respond well to being stalked. The more I grasped, the quieter it got.

But when I let go of the need for proof or external intervention, and started listening to my own intuition, it came back in full force. In fact, that’s part of what gave me the push to start this Substack. Just as I began seriously entertaining the idea (which at first I felt a lot of resistance to) I overheard a conversation where someone was talking about their own. Hearing that gave me the permission slip I needed.

Even more recently, I’d been toying with the idea of doing a yoga teacher training. Not as a career move or even with a clear plan – it was just a persistent nudge I couldn’t ignore. Still, I found a million reasons to dismiss it: not the right time, not advanced enough in my practice, isn’t it a bit expensive. But the moment I let myself take the possibility seriously, my external world started to respond.

The very next day, I spotted YTT – a common abbreviation for Yoga Teacher Training – on a car number plate. A small sign I could’ve easily brushed off until, one day later, I got news that I was entitled to a sum of money – the exact amount that would cover the cost of the training – from a completely unexpected source.

A sceptic might say, “Sure, that’s nice, but probably just luck or coincidence.” And honestly, I’m not here to convince anyone. But I will say this: if you’re open to just moving with your intuition and letting the world unfold around you, it can offer a profound sense of being guided — and an ability to trust life, rather a need to try and control it.

If more of us were able to live this way*, I genuinely believe the world would feel a lot more harmonious as a result.

*I fully acknowledge that not everyone can. As I’ve written before, I think it comes down to our capacity to regulate our nervous systems, which we don’t all have equal access to. I believe we need to collectively build that capacity in our communities and institutions.

I’ll leave you with this final thought: sometimes synchronicity is a big billboard. Usually, it’s a small sticky note. Either way, it’s always worth listening. Because, in my view, synchronicity is the external world catching up with and mirroring your intuition — and your intuition will always be right.

Warmly,

Natalie

Photo by Imran Abdul Jabar on Unsplash

And depending on the time of day, that might either feel like a profound truth, or like the vaguest statement you’ve ever heard.

But, as someone curious about energy in a spiritual sense, as well as the kind that heats our boilers and fuels our cars (given much of my job is focused on the energy transition), I’ve been thinking about how these two interpretations of energy are connected.

It still blows my mind that when we burn oil, gas, or coal, we’re essentially burning fossilised sunlight – energy captured by ancient plants and organisms millions of years ago.

And if our bodies are energy too (and they are, because everything is) then what’s fossilised in us? What energy are we carrying from our ancestors, our upbringing, the stories and systems we were born into?

Ok, let’s back up.

In physics, energy is what makes the world move. It can’t be created or destroyed – only transferred or transformed. Which means nothing ever truly disappears; it just changes form. Energy moves, flows, accumulates, or dissipates. It’s the vibration of atoms. It’s sunlight turned into sugar by a leaf. Calories turned into your gym session. Petrol turned into forward motion, and then into carbon in the atmosphere. It’s coal burned to generate light. It’s your breath. Your rage. Your love.

You could hear all that and think, duh, that’s obvious, or wow, that’s kind of a miracle.

Because if energy is never lost, only transferred, then everything we do – every gesture, word, breath – creates a ripple. Energy is, quite literally, our currency. We spend it with our attention, our intention, and our emotion. This is what spiritual traditions mean when they say everything is energy. It’s also the same idea behind the butterfly effect that’s been making the rounds on social media lately. (Here’s one of my favourite creative takes on it.)

So here’s a thought experiment:

Look around you right now – at the objects in your room, the light on your screen, the clothes on your body. How much energy did it take for those things to get to you? Whose hands were involved? How far did that energy travel – through time, through labour, through materials?

Personally, I think about this most when I’m sitting with a plate of food in front of me. And when I’m not too ravenous to forget, I quietly thank the energy of the earth that brought it to me. (yes, I am past the point of caring how “woo” this makes me sound)

Now turn inward. How much energy is moving through you right now? Digesting your food, repairing your cells, processing that thing someone said to you earlier.
And how much of it is yours to keep, redirect, or release?

Energy is always moving. The question is: how conscious are we of the flows we’re part of?

Which brings me back to the climate crisis

Because at its core, climate change is a story about energy: the energy we extract or harness, who controls it, who benefits, and who bears the cost. But it’s also a story about forgetting that all energy is connected, and that no action happens in isolation. That any energy, once set in motion, has ripple effects.

The crisis we’re in isn’t just about burning fossil fuels. It’s about the assumption that we can burn through the lifeforce of the planet, without replenishing it, without consequence. When we treat energy as something to dominate, rather than participate in the flow of, we end up with extraction. When we forget that everything is energy, we stop seeing the balances that keep systems alive. The same is true within us: burnout is what happens when we consume more than we restore, when we treat our own energy as endlessly available at the expense of the system that is our body.

And I get that this might sound a bit abstract. But here’s the thing: there is no real separation between the energy that powers your home and the energy you carry through the world. The same logic that justifies extracting oil until climate collapse is what drives burnout and disconnection in our daily lives. We are part of the same circuitry.

So yes, switch to a renewable supplier. Insulate your home. But also notice: where does your personal energy go each day? What systems are you fuelling with your time, your attention, your presence? Even small shifts – resting when you’d normally push through, a good conversation when you’d usually scroll – can change the current. And I personally think that’s pretty cool.

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Anyway, what sparked this post was a little booklet I picked up at a work event I was part of this week (so, big thanks to the person who handed it to me and for however much energy they expended in doing so).

I didn’t meditate. I didn’t really know what spiritual growth meant. And I certainly wouldn’t have connected it to the kind of social change I was committed to in my work.

For most of my career, I’ve worked in a large international NGO, focused on climate justice — on making sure those least responsible for the crisis, and most affected by it, receive the support they need. That work still matters deeply to me. And I still believe in the power of movements to drive meaningful change. I still believe that people working from a place of integrity and care are helping to shape a more just and less fearful world.

But in the background of my life, something else started to shift. Prompted by synchronicities I couldn’t explain, I began to explore meditation and spiritual practice.

And like many world-weary but spiritually curious people, I found myself wondering how all this “love and light” I was beginning to feel more of could possibly coexist with so much injustice and suffering. Somewhere along the way, I started to wonder whether our responses to things like the climate emergency carry some of the same energies — of disconnection and fear — that created the harm in the first place.

It made me question whether policy change alone is enough, or whether the climate crisis is inviting something deeper: a bigger transformation that might require a shift, maybe even an evolution, in consciousness.

I don’t have the answers (who does?). But the deeper I go into this personal and spiritual work, the more I’m convinced that change isn’t just about what we do — it’s also about how we see, how we relate, and what we believe is possible.

This space is where I try to bring together two parts of my life that once felt in tension, and see what happens when I stop treating them as separate. It’s learning in public: a space for curiosity, not mastery.

When the dominant worldview is barely out of infancy

I’ve been wrestling with where to begin. But maybe it helps to start with something obvious, yet easy to forget: the universe is old. About 13 billion years old. Humans have existed for a tiny sliver of that time — around 0.002% — and each of our lives, a fraction of that sliver.

So when the dominant western scientific worldview dismisses the possibility of a higher intelligence, it’s always, always worth asking: on what grounds does such a recent worldview claim to hold the only truth?

I don’t say this to provoke or dismiss. I say it because I used to be sceptical too. It’s hard not to be when you grow up learning that reality is only what you can see, touch, or measure, and that anything true must be proven.

Are we still evolving?

It also raises a question: are we still evolving? In school, the story often ends with humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder, as if we've arrived. But what if we haven’t?

While our biology may only be shifting in subtle ways, maybe the real evolution now is happening in how we think, how we relate, and how we make sense of the world — psychologically, spiritually, collectively.

I’ve been intrigued by scientists like Dr Bruce Lipton, who challenge some of the core assumptions that modern civilisation rests on, like the idea that evolution is driven by ruthless competition and ‘survival of the fittest.’ His ideas point instead to a different story: one where nature evolves through cooperation and interdependence.

That rings true to me. Trees don’t battle for sunlight, they grow together, sharing nutrients through vast underground mycelial networks. Life, it seems, isn’t a fight to the top but a web we belong to, one that thrives not through dominance, but through relationship.

Of course, it’s important to recognise that scientists like Lipton aren’t uncovering new truths — they’re offering Western scientific language for wisdom that Indigenous traditions have carried for millennia.

The crisis of individualism

Our modern world — which is still so new — is wildly out of sync with that web. The climate crisis is, at its root, a crisis of disconnection. Disconnection from nature, from each other, and from ourselves. It’s also a crisis of individualism, and a culture that tells us we must compete to survive and consume to feel whole.

That worldview does seem to be slowly falling apart. More and more people are craving connection and community, and wondering why neither the car, the house, nor the promotion feels as fulfilling as promised. It’s as if we’re waking up to the fact that many of the systems we’ve built are grounded in an illusion.

So I find myself wondering if healing the world “out there” starts with remembering our place in the web.

That might look like many things that plenty of non-spiritual people already do: mutual aid groups, community rewilding, or simply finding small ways to be of service. But perhaps the deeper, more lasting shifts come through the inner work: the spiritual connection and the consciousness shifts that help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the rest of nature.

Stillness as strategy

Just to be clear: when I talk about spirituality (loaded a term as it is) I don’t just mean believing in a higher power that will swoop in and fix things with a miracle. I’m talking about the intentional work of reprogramming the mind — of challenging our conditioned patterns of thought, perception, and behaviour.

And through that process, I believe we reconnect with something deeper. Some call it God, Source, or life force. Whatever the name, to me, it just feels more like an energy that is inherently loving, rather than fearful.

This kind of inner work is also about unlearning the illusions we’ve inherited: that we must compete to survive, that we’re separate from each other and from nature, that we’re limited by what we can see or measure.

I used to see practices like yoga, meditation, journaling, and breathwork as purely personal wellness tools — and they are that. But I’ve come to believe they’re just as essential for collective wellbeing. These aren’t just retreats from the world; they’re ways of learning to meet it more clearly and compassionately, which I believe ripples out into a field we all share — a belief held by many Indigenous traditions, and increasingly validated by quantum physics.

And if that sounds abstract, think about how a regulated nervous system can help you respond to conflict instead of reacting. Or how someone else’s calm energy can affect a whole room. We know from science that emotions, stress, and even beliefs can be socially contagious. So why wouldn’t groundedness, presence, and clarity ripple outward too?

An invitation

I’m not saying that inner work or a connection to a greater intelligence is the answer. But I do think it might be part of it—and maybe one we’ve been overlooking.

What if systems don’t just change when laws change, but when the people inside them do? What if healing our relationship with the Earth begins with healing how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the unseen threads that connect us?

We don’t all need to become spiritual. But maybe we do need to start asking different questions.

Like: What would our communities feel like if more of us responded from love rather than fear (and, crucially, if more of our nervous systems felt safe enough to do that)?

What might we uncover if we created space for the kinds of truths we intuitively sense but can’t yet empirically measure?

I used to think change was something we pushed for. But maybe it’s something we also become—as our consciousness shifts, so does the world around us.

Thank you for reading the first post on Inner Climate, Outer Change.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. If any of this spoke to you, I’d be delighted if you could subscribe or share it with someone curious. I’ll be sharing more reflections on inner work, planetary healing, and the spaces where they meet.

Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

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