Picking up from last week’s newsletter about eco-anxiety, I thought I’d share an insight from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche — the antidote to climate despair, he says, isn’t necessarily finding hope but generating gratitude.

There’s a real paradox in that answer and it’s one I’ve been wrestling with ever since I sat down with him on a visit to Canada. As Aldo Leopold wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” If we’re living with dread about the ravages of climate change, if we’re attuned to the destruction of the living world around us, isn’t an effort towards gratitude a denial of reality? At best, a type of mental trickery? Maybe just some New Age psychobabble?

But you can’t accuse the Tibetan meditation masters of gurgling untempered platitudes. The compassion and joy they exude is so impressive precisely because they have survived tremendous violence and misery — the invasion and genocidal occupation, desperate escapes across the Himalayas. Tibet may have fallen from headlines but the Chinese Communist Party’s police state (one million Tibetan children in residential schools) continues to this day.

Advice from the lamas comes with vivid awareness of suffering and humanity’s potential for destruction. And Mingyur Rinpoche is extraordinary even among Tibetan teachers. Suffering from panic attacks as a child, he began meditation training at age 11, wrote several books, founded an international network of meditation groups and was put in charge of a series of monasteries. And then, one night he disappeared.

He spent four and a half years wandering incognito, begging for food on the streets of India and training his mind in caves below the melting Himalayan glaciers. I was eager to ask Mingyur Rinpoche what he’s learned about coping through catastrophe.

The real mental trickery, he said, arises from our mind’s tendency to fixate. Show the mind nine wonderful things and it will fixate on the 10th if that one’s negative. “All or none thinking becomes stronger and stronger in extreme crises.”

And so, it requires a deliberate effort to achieve any clarity and move forward making good decisions uncoloured by confusion and distress. The antidote he prescribes is the conscious cultivation of appreciation and gratitude. The traditional Tibetan practice apparently consists of collecting small white stones and moving one for every positive thought or feeling that arises — a way of making the ephemeral tangible.

Mingyur Rinpoche suggests an updated version of the exercise: keeping a gratitude journal. “Write down five things every day,” he recommends. It doesn’t matter what scale but he recommends appreciating small things, especially at the start.

But there’s no reason not to appreciate bigger items, too. His own list includes humanity’s collective action against the ozone hole — a possible prototype for broader action to defend our precious planet.

“Slowly, slowly you will make new connections in your body,” says Mingyur Rinpoche. “You will make neuronal connections and your brain will change.”

He’s not spewing pseudoscience here. One thing I left out of the mini-bio is that, before and since his wandering retreat, Mingyur Rinpoche has been collaborating with neuroscientists and psychologists, even acting as a test subject for studies scanning the brains of advanced meditators at the University of Wisconsin. As the neuroscientists say, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

A gratitude journal can be one practice among several in cultivating gratitude. But however you proceed, “Don’t let your mind stick too tight on results,” he emphasizes, echoing millennia of Buddhist teachings.

“Let go, but don’t give up.”

Solid advice, whether we’re connecting inwards to transform ourselves or connecting outwards to transform the world.

After emerging from his wandering retreat, Mingyur Rinpoche published an unusually candid book about a near-death experience and the lessons he learned. He called it In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying.

That love for the world is something he clearly wanted to communicate to people grappling with climate anxiety. By cultivating a mind of appreciation and gratitude, we cultivate balance and clarity. And, as those neuronal connections strengthen, Mingyur Rinpoche says we’ll discover for ourselves that “if you love the world, the world loves you back.”

You’ve probably heard several variations on the saying, we protect what we love. Jacques Cousteau had a version and it’s often attributed to the Senegalese forester Baba Dioum who gave a famous speech to the UN General Assembly in 1968 declaring: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love.”

There’s a concerted effort underway to inject more of that approach into climate activism. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson pulled together essays by an amazing group of 60 women in their 2022 anthology, All We Can Save. That book catalyzed the ongoing All We Can Save Project and its All We Can Save Circles — “like a book club, but a cooler, deeper, extended version.”

There’s an annual Show the Love campaign in the U.K. run by the Climate Coalition. It was a dramatic shift in climate messaging when it first launched in 2014. After testing a series of possible messages, “the ‘things we love’ theme clearly emerged as the strongest overall message, and for conservatives, the only effective message.”

The Show the Love campaign rolled out based on a positive narrative of shared values and identity and the common experience of love and care. One notable result has been an influx of conservative organizations joining the Climate Coalition and similar campaigns have been picked up by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in the U.S.

One Canadian example is the Harm to Harmony Project, “a collaborative climate action art project” held in New Brunswick every year. If you’re an artist interested in exploring “a relational perspective to the natural world,” I’m afraid you’ve just missed the deadline to apply for funding and mentorship (but maybe if you show them some love, they’ll love you back).