Reconnecting with Nature: The Power of Deep Ecology with John Seed and Karin Raven Steininger

In this episode of Embodied Pathways, I had the immense pleasure of welcoming two remarkable guests: John Seed, a pioneering figure in the Deep Ecology movement, and my dear friend, Karin Raven Steininger, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker and Deep Ecology  facilitator. Together, we explored the profound connections between humanity and the natural world, delving into the themes of activism, grief, and the healing power of nature.

We began our conversation by discussing how John and Raven found their way into activism. John shared his unexpected journey, which began in a Buddhist community in northern New South Wales, where a call for help from a neighbor ignited a lifelong passion for environmental protection. Raven spoke about her deep connection to the Earth through Paganism, emphasizing that activism is an inherent part of her spiritual life.

A significant portion of our discussion focused on the experiential Deep Ecology Workshops that John and Raven have been facilitating. These workshops aim to heal the myth of disconnection between humans and the natural world, allowing participants to listen to their own wisdom and the wisdom of the Earth. Raven described the workshops as collective experiences that create space for grief, anger, and empowerment, while John emphasized the importance of feelings in driving ecological identity and action.

We also touched on the concept of embodied knowing, which aligns with the podcast's theme of "Embodied Pathways." Both John and Raven agreed that our bodies are primary routes to consciousness change, and that reconnecting with our ecological identity is essential for meaningful activism. They highlighted the need for ongoing practices and rituals that remind us of our interconnectedness with the Earth, drawing parallels with Indigenous ceremonial life.

As our conversation progressed, we explored the role of gratitude in Deep Ecology, with Raven articulating it as an invitation to recognize the abundance of the Earth. John shared a fascinating perspective on the ancient cycles of partnership between humans and the natural world, illustrating how our very existence is intertwined with the life processes of our planet.

We concluded the episode by discussing the importance of awe and joy in our connection to nature, and how these emotions can empower us in our activism. Both John and Raven are currently engaged in exciting projects, including upcoming workshops and conservation efforts, which reflect their commitment to fostering a culture of connection and healing.

This episode is a heartfelt reminder of the power of community, the necessity of ritual, and the joy that comes from reconnecting with the Earth. I hope you find inspiration in our conversation and feel encouraged to explore your own relationship with nature.

John Seed online:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnseed.deepecology
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnseed_deepecology
Substack:  https://substack.com/@johnseed
Podcast links, essays, music, films etc. and occasional blog posts at https://johnseed.net/ and https://rainforestinfo.org.au/johnseed.htm
Thinking Like a Mountain text: http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/TLAM%20text.htm

Deep Ecology workshop with John Seed , Karin Raven Steininger and Brother Tenzin, Bellingen, NSW,  Australia, April 25-27 2025: https://events.humanitix.com/deep-ecology-with-john-seed-k

Transcript

Reconnecting with Nature: The Power of Deep Ecology with John Seed and Karin Raven Steininger

Adrian:
About 35 years ago, I came across a book called Thinking Like a Mountain, Towards a Council of All Beings. One of the book's authors was an activist called John Seed. That book has been hugely influential on my thinking and practice, so you can imagine how excited I am to welcome John to the Embodied Pathways podcast. 

John: 
Hi Adrian. 

Adrian:
 Hi John - there’s more to say! John has dedicated his life to rainforest and biodiversity protection since 1979. He's the founder of the Rainforest Information Centre and a key figure in the Deep Ecology movement. John co-created the Council of All Beings and has led global workshops for 35 years to foster a deeper connection with nature. And the universe has truly blessed me, because we're also joined by one of my dearest and oldest friends, Karin Raven Steininger.

Raven is an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, writer, Deep Ecology facilitator, and activist. Raven has taught at pagan spiritual retreats in Australia and the UK, focusing on our interconnectedness with nature. Raven's concerns about activist burnout led her to John's work, and she's been facilitating Deep Ecology workshops for several years. 

Adrian:
 A huge welcome to both of you. 

Raven:
 Hey, hi Adrian! Great to be here. 

Adrian:
So let's jump into my extremely long list of questions. I got very excited about this interview, so I've got lots to explore. So just to kick us off, I'd like to get a sense of how this started for each of you. What first brought you to activism? 

John:
So I just stumbled into activism. I was living in a Buddhist community in northern New South Wales, organizing meditation retreats, and we're growing our own vegetables and building our own houses and delivering our own babies. And one day, a neighbour called for help, saying that the Forestry Commission was about to start logging the rainforest at the end of Terrania Creek Road, and we had to stop them. And I'd never been to the end of Terrania Creek Road. 

I didn't know there was a rainforest there. I didn't know what a rainforest was. I didn't know there were rainforests in Australia, but I was into helping the neighbours. 

And so I showed up and something happened there that turned my life upside down and changed everything. And I can't really remember more about it than that, except that all of a sudden I was a different person. And what had just started out as a sort of neighbourly friendliness turned into an abiding passion that has, you know, I hitched my wagon to that star and I've been hanging on for dear life ever since. 

How about you, Raven? 

Raven:
 Oh, look, it's such a wide question. It's like, for me, it's really hearing the cry of the Earth. I was very much involved in Paganism, and so for me, the Earth was always my cathedral and my spiritual home and just where I worshipped. And so having the increasing awareness that you could hear the Earth crying, you just, as a part of practice, needed to and had to. Firstly, just, you know, going on marches, and that seemed to be very much a thing of joining the collective voice. 

But more recently, just really needing to have my feet and boots on the ground and like needing to be more on the front line, because there's something that's very, very extraordinary about being in the forest and hearing when you hear the forests being cut down, and that in itself hurts the heart. You know, so I think kind of, for me, activism is something that it's a part of my practice, it's a part of my practice as being a human who loves the Earth. So there's not so much a beginning, it's just an acknowledgement that that's just, that's what we do. That's what one has to do is being a part of human who loves the Earth. 

Adrian:
 It's just part of your life. And that's coming across from both of you. It's something that called you. And that became this is what my life's all about. One of the key things I want to explore with you is the experiential Deep Ecology workshops that you've been facilitating. I've had some experience of them, but I'm imagining many listeners won't have much idea of what they are. Could you briefly outline what they're about? 

John:
 You want to start this time Raven? 

Raven:
 Ah, what are they all about? They're about, it's a collective experience by which people can listen to the inherent nature of their own wisdom and listening to the wisdom of the Earth. And it sounds very woo-woo, but it's actually very, very practical. And it's whereby people come together with the intention of healing the myth of disconnection that we have between us and the natural world. And there's a variety of processes. But at the very heart, it's simply it's the intention to come together.

When we talk about listening to the wisdom of the Earth, that includes listening to the wisdom of our bodies and to our emotions. There's a lot of grief that we have and a lot of anger that we have and a lot of inability to speak truth when it comes to how the ravages of what's happened to our planet affects our spirit. And so, with a Deep Ecology circle, there's space whereby we come together and we can transform, but firstly, listen and acknowledge the truth of our wisdom of hearing the grief of the Earth and hearing our own responses to that. 

That's a part of a Deep Ecology workshop. And then there's also, as we talk about the Council of All Beings, which is again, listening to wisdom. And it's listening to not only our own wisdom as humans, but listening to the wisdom of the cycle of life and of the planet herself. 

And it's very, very profound. I'll let John jump in on that. 

John:
 Yeah, well, what she said. And maybe I'll just add that those feelings of grief and rage and terror that all of us are feeling is part of an ancient wisdom that has accompanied us since the beginning of time, that every one of our ancestors was intelligent enough to reach the age of reproducing itself before it was consumed, going back 4 billion years. And it's only very, very recently that cognition has had any part of that, that what we call feelings is what remains in us of the ancient intelligence that allowed that incredible survival against all odds and against every challenge, that those ancestors knew what was safe and what was dangerous, knew when to flee and when to fight. And we've kind of come to assume that we're going to be able to think our way out of the mess. 

And the guy who coined the term Deep Ecology, the late Arne Naess, who was the Professor of Philosophy from Oslo University and himself a great activist who was arrested for chaining himself to a fjord to stop the flooding of that fjord. He said, we can't think our way out of the mess. He said that ecological ideas won't save us. 

We need ecological identity, ecological self. I used to think that as an activist, my job was to raise awareness that once everyone was aware, we'd be okay. Wrong. 

Everyone's aware. We're far from okay. And it turns out that unless the thoughts are supported by the passion of those feelings, they're sterile, that the thoughts don't help us, that we just feel paralyzed. 

We know what's going on, but there's nothing we can do. It's too late. What can one person do anyway? So there's just this tremendous surge of energy that comes when people listen to each other, their deepest feelings that have never been welcomed before, that have never been invited, where it's never been safe to express them. 

We've been taught to fear those feelings. And once we have that experience, when I met Joanna Macy and first learned this from her in 1986, she called her workshop Despair and Empowerment. And it's not that we do the despair circle and then do an empowerment circle. 

It's just that once we meet the despair honestly and courageously and in company and community, empowerment just zooms to the surface and stuns us with the extraordinary lie that we've been told that somehow we're going to be damaged by these feelings. Far from it. That's an amazing experience. 

Adrian:
I remember when I first went on one of these, it was the thought of diving into the grief was frankly a bit terrifying. But having gone through that, it is hugely empowering. And just leading on from what you're talking about, the Deep Ecology and Joanna Macy's work, something that's very fundamental for me is this sense of, as he said, we can't think our way out of this. 

So I sometimes talk about embodied knowing - that that's where it needs to come to. And this whole podcast series is called Embodied Pathways. So there's this sense I have that the body is a primary route to the kind of consciousness change that we need. Id be really interested to hear your thoughts on that whole area. 

John:
 Maybe I'll jump in and say, yes, I agree 100 percent. And Arne Naess said that what we need is ecological identity. And he called for community therapies to heal that illusion of separation between ourselves and the living Earth. And so one way of framing the Deep Ecology processes is an attempt to give substance to Arne Naess's call. But when we think of our identity, you know, in the workshops, we look at who we are underneath that social veneer of name, rank, serial number, religion, language, nationality, and all of these kind of very recent constructs to the reality that every cell in my body is descended in an unbroken chain from the first cell of life on Earth. 

In the last hundred million years, 95 percent of that time, my genes have been enveloped in the rainforest. No wonder it was able to call me when it did. It's only very recently that I stumbled out onto the plane, blinking and decided to make my living on two legs and all the rest of it. 

That ecological identity, the very first point of contact before we look out at our connection to the more than human world and the connection to deep time, is our very body, that here we are. Here I am with, I've recently learned, a larger population of bacteria in my microbiome that don't share any DNA with ‘me’, ‘me’ in air quotes, but that outnumber the number of cells in my body. And this incredible symbiosis that I am, I need to nourish that whole thing before I can even move out beyond that, that that is my senses, that that's where all the knowledge comes in. That's who I fundamentally am. It's not like I'm some kind of vehicle that carries me about. 

Adrian:
 Raven, is there anything you'd like to add? 

Raven;
 I'd love to listen to John, because it's just like, you just absorb that, the whole sense that we are a universe, that sense of community within. 

But the one thing I wanted to kind of touch on a bit is bringing this work into the world. And often, by being taught the myth of separation, we're often kind of, because we live in a very mechanistic world, and that kind of this ideology of separation is something that enables our world to go and to mine and to ravage and to destroy, and not just the Earth itself, but each other through war and through other kind of like degradations and terrible things that happen. I think in terms of the way that Deep Ecology itself, it heals, it's using a universal language, and it's using a language that is, it's not brand new. 

It's been beautifully articulated by John and by Arne Naess, and by a lot of practitioners in the space. But it's a knowledge that's a part of our human heritage. And in indigenous communities, this is the very DNA of culture and of society. 

And it's something that we have been lied to by our culture, telling us that we are somehow only worthwhile if we are units of production, rather than units of community, and community with ourselves and with our own souls, but also in community with life all around us. And so what Deep Ecology workshops do is that we take the knowledge that is inherently us, our birthright as humans, and in a way, packages it up in a way that our materialistic Western mind can understand using a language that we can utilise in a group so that it doesn't feel as though it's too woo-woo or too out there. But it is something that is fundamentally an important and vital part of our human arsenal in terms of being able to let us be warriors for the defence, and in the kind of widest time, that kind of sense that we are fierce in our love for the planet, and using tools of deep connection enables us to go forward and to fight for our planet, and without burning out. 

And I think in my own work, particularly at first bringing this work to activists, often in meetings, and everybody's so heady, and it can be so overwhelming, and the forces that are arrayed against us can seem to be so extreme that we're often on this treadmill of fighting and meetings and fighting and meetings and doing. If we can remember to stop and know that we are held by the Earth herself, and by us working and listening and being in community with the Earth, we end up being energised, and we end up, by acknowledging, relying on each other, but also the fact that we are held and we're supported. And it can really help to assuage those feelings of burnout, because there's a place to come home to.

Adrian:
I've attended a couple of these workshops, and it came as a real wake-up to me that it's a practice. I think that leads out from what you're saying, that our culture constantly reinforces this illusion that we are separate. And these workshops are something we don't just do once, but it's a process that needs constant renewal, and we need to be reminded again and again of the reality of our interconnectedness. 

John:
It seems to me that the workshops are synchronous with the kind of ceremonies and rituals that all Indigenous people have practised throughout time, and continue to practise where they've been able to do so, that I've never found a single example of an Indigenous community that's maintained its ceremonial life, that doesn't regularly stop the day-to-day and meet to focus on who we are underneath all of that, to focus on all our relations, to focus on our interconnectedness with the living Earth, and to realign ourselves again and again and again, because there must be this tendency in humans to just veer away into merely social conceptions of who we are. A recent study, which has impacted me a lot, I heard it on the Huberman podcast, that they posed a problem to people that only 10% of the people could solve, but when they gave the problem to groups of three or four people, 80% of them could solve it, because that's how we're made. That's who we are. We are social beings. We come together. We were never meant to solve problems by ourselves. 

So having been separated from each other, as well as separated from the Earth, and somehow convinced that we are merely skin-encapsulated egos, I think Joanna said, the reality of who we are has been stolen from us, but it's so close, so that people come to the workshops complaining that they've just lived utterly urbanised lives, and surely they are never going to be able to find their way back, as though it's a long way away, and everyone falls straight into it, and within 24 hours is just testifying to this incredible experience of coming home to who we have been all along, and the apparent distance from where we are now, it's just an illusion also that we're that close all the time. 

Raven:
I love the fact that that sense of it's so close, because it's a thing. It's like the moment a group decides that we are going to lean into connection and to listening, it's as though the Earth herself turns or opens and just leans forward, and any kind of veneer of separation, it dissolves.

One reason - there's so many - but by having the workshop, or by going to a workshop, or by having the experience over and over and over, the trust of falling into a consciousness and a wisdom greater than ours, it just becomes more and more manifest. It's almost just like we've just got this dial in our minds, and the moment we give ourselves permission just to spin the dial towards listening, it's just like the world just comes rushing in, knowledge just comes rushing in. 

John:
 Yeah, that's right, and the need for this to turn into a culture of connection, we see that those Indigenous communities would practice their ceremonies again and again and again, and that's not like you go to a workshop and have a big experience and fall in love with everyone and get back into whatever it was, and so we've now created something, and I think maybe Raven created the name for this, which we call Deepening, and where Deepening is exactly the same spiral of the work that reconnects the way that Joanna frames it, from gratitude, to honouring our pain for the world, to seeing with new eyes, to going forth, how we take this back to the world and then ending on gratitude again, that we do exactly the same thing, but this time it's by invitation, and the invitation goes out to all alumni of Deep Ecology workshops, people who have experienced at least one time and want more, and it's free, so it's not like, oh, you know, that you have to keep paying some superstar facilitator, someone to do this, but it's the invitation to make this part of our lives in the way that surely all of our ancestors have done for a quarter of a million years, and only very recently, you know, if Starhawk was right, they had to burn nine million women not so long ago in order to drive this underground, and now it's, you know, springing back out again, and here we come. 

Raven:
 I think also on that, like any of us can offer any of the processes in Deep Ecology, you know, on the page they sound, and they are absolutely extraordinary, but it's an act of faith, and particularly things that are a little bit more, you know, out there, like the Council of All Beings, and like the Council of All Beings is like this extraordinary experience, which is like this unfacilitated space, as it were, in which we're invited to speak and to be an ally of a more than human being or another human being, like, you know, you can be the voice of a rock or a wind or a blade of grass or an ant or a mountain or anything at all which is inherent and of the Earth, and by that opening and letting the wisdom of the Earth speak in an unfacilitated space with no agenda, and I think that's one thing that Deep Ecology also teaches us or lets us remember, is that knowledge doesn't come in a linear form. It's not like, it doesn't kind of come, oh, I know something, you don't know something, I'm going to tell you something, therefore you know it. With Deep Ecology, like, it's about knowledge which is circular and spirals, and it's like expanding and contracting, because like within this kind of space, there'll be experiences and listening to perspectives that we may never have heard before, but it doesn't mean we're going to sit there and at the end of it we're going to solve all the world's problems. Hey, yeah, thanks!

It's more like by having the experience enables us to have another chink of the puzzle that then collectively we gain more insight and more of a facet in terms of how we can be in the world, and that realization itself is the work itself, is the work, and it's very fractal. 

Adrian:
 And listening to some of your other interviews, John, something you brought out, which really struck me, was intention, and that once we have the intention to do this, everything else kind of follows on, and I thought that was a really interesting insight. 

John:
 Well, I think that that follows on from what Raven was saying about the fact that the Earth never pushed us away, that whatever separation exists all came from our side, and the moment that we take an intention together, make a gesture of reconciliation, everything just happens by itself after that, you know, it doesn't need like a brilliant facilitator, and it turns out, Joanna said to me that the intentions - that does all the heavy lifting, and once a group of people gets together with the shared intention to heal that illusion of separation, it hardly matters what you do after that, that anything will serve as a vehicle, the Earth will find its way back in, and all that you need to do is to stop pushing it away.

Adrian:
 I'm also very struck by the power of gratitude, which I know is a big aspect of this work, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts around that. 

Raven:
 Gratitude itself, it's the invitation to stop and to get out of your own sense of scarcity, it's an invitation to look at and to acknowledge that the Earth herself, by Her very nature, is abundant, and what can we do when we're faced with abundance, but just be in awe of it. What does being in awe of abundance mean? It's just being opening your heart and just going, there's nothing I have to do, and if there's nothing they have to do, you don't even have to do gratitude, like it's not, it's not a doing, it's like a gratitude or something, but just stopping and looking and opening, you just go, oh, thank you, and it's that, it's the stopping and opening and seeing, that in itself is the beginning, and the gratitude itself wells up of its own accord, you can use gratitude practices to lift what we are so grateful for, and that in itself is a technique to enable us to simply stop and look and open, and the gratitude, it's that, it's the beginning and the end of the work. 

John:
 One of the practices that I really enjoy, and that speaks to this experience of gratitude, is remembering some ancient ancestors of ours, more than two billion years ago, who learned to capture photons of light from the sun through a new molecule which emerged called chlorophyll, and were thereby able to extract carbon from CO2 in order to continue to build our bodies. 

Only problem was that every time this was done, a molecule of oxygen was released out of the CO2 once the carbon had been removed, and oxygen was a toxic poison to the anaerobic life of that time. For a thousand million years, that poison couldn't wreak any havoc because there was enough iron dissolved in the ocean so that every time a bit of oxygen was released, a molecule of ferrous oxide rust would fall to the bottom of the ocean, and all of the iron that we mine, those abandoned iron formations two and a half kilometers thick up in the Pilbara and so on, that was all accumulated one molecule at a time by our single-celled ancestors, breaking CO2 because they wanted the carbon. But eventually, the oxygen piled up, all the iron had been swept out of the oceans, and oxygen piled up, threatening all of life. 

And this was solved by another one of our single-celled ancestors, because at that time there was nothing but bacteria. And this time, the invention or emergent property was the heme molecule, which allowed them to breathe the oxygen in, make use of the oxygen. And that ancient cycle of partnership, which we now know, in our time, it's the relationship between animals and plants and the exchange of those gases, the exchange of the carbon dioxide and the oxygen. 

If we add consciousness to that, and that's the process that we do, where we just at a certain point in the workshop, we stand outside and exchange gases with the green world around us, and with every out breath, we allow ourselves to feel the abundance of knowing that we've been making this exchange for billions of years, and that both sides depend on it, that we are providing a gas without which that green world couldn't exist. And so we feel this generosity, and as we breathe in, we remember that we couldn't be alive if we weren't receiving the gas in exchange. And so then the generosity is very authentic. And the more that we just exchange these gases, the more the gratitude wells up in us. And that's just a very different place to then go out defending the forest from, than merely, look, I'm a human, and I've got my opinions, and the loggers are humans, and they've got their opinions, and I think I'm right, and they think they're right, and here we are in conflict with each other. And whereas when I am remembering that ancient cycle of partnership and celebrating that, and protecting my interconnectedness with the whole of the living Earth, it's just coming from a very different place. 

Raven:
 Yeah. And also, like, you know, that dance of joy, and that dance of exuberance, and that dance of being mind-blown, and that itself, this power of connection, and when you are, as John is saying, not only defending the forest, like when you're, it's that realization about the out collected billions of years of relationship, it powers us in our lives. And it also stops us from living lives of paucity, like our lives just become so rich, because just knowing that every single breath and every single step is that we are a part of the dance of life. 

And it's, you know, it's that sense also, it's a theology that's really, really grounded, and it's a theology that's grounded in deep, deep story, in deep, deep time. What can possibly be more sacred than that, than that realization of our place when it comes to the continuum of life? 

Adrian:
 At some point over the last few years, somebody showed me a comparison of the heme molecule and the chlorophyll molecule, and it's like, the shape is identical, and the core bit is identical, and then there's these other molecules around the outside, and it's like, exactly as you were just saying, John, it's like, wow, you can really see the harmony between the two. Really extraordinary.

John:
 Yeah, the two are completely identical on a three-dimensional map, with the only difference is that the magnesium atom at the core of chlorophyll has been replaced by an iron atom at the core of heme, and that's why our blood is red, because of that iron molecule. 

And just this very simple transposition allowed life to continue. You know, one of the things that that does for me is that it makes me feel like we've come through such an incredible series of miracles to be where we are. And what a miracle that is. 

Brian Swimme says, the Earth used to be nothing but lava, but now it sings opera. And so to be composed of a material - because I am that lava, like nothing has been added to that lava from the outside before it becomes me and you and the opera singer. And if that is who we are, if that is our nature, then who knows what kind of amazing, exuberant burst of creativity may emerge at any moment that will help us find our way through to the next step? 

Adrian:
 I'm really feeling, and it's coming across from both of you as well, the feeling of awe. Awe is such a powerful emotion for taking us through this, I think. So any thoughts on that would be good to hear.

Raven:
 It's like awe and joy. They're twins as well, because from awe comes joy. By us being able to be expanded. And as John was saying about expanded sense of possibility, and to not be beaten down by and made smaller by the fears and the lies and the surface reality that we're told is. That awe itself, by stepping outside ourselves, actually, it's not really stepping outside ourselves. It's more just, it's more realizing that how much all of us are all interconnected and interwoven. And actually, we all just - we're touched. Awe is like, we're being touched by each other and by everything and by all of it. 

And it's so experiential. And it is completely the poetry that our souls and our spirits respond to. And when we open to it, and when we see it and feel it and just let ourselves go outside and open and look at the stars and just look at the being of the great web of everything that we're in, words just become immaterial. Words just become less than.

I love the word conspire, kind of like when we're all in a group together and conspiring, so breathing with, so our heads are so close together, we're breathing with and so conspiring for life. And in a way, when we're opening to awe, we're breathing together, we're conspiring, so everything that we're doing together is conspiring to birth a better world, or to midwife the world, or to midwife a future that's already possible.

Adrian:
I know that Buddhism has been a very important influence on this work, especially from Joanna Macey's end, and it still seems to be quite integral. The other thing that's come up a lot in these interviews that I've done is animism, and it's a personal interest. Do you feel animism fits in, if anywhere or if at all?

Raven:
 Oh, absolutely. I'm just going to just jump in - like as a Pagan, like as somebody who's … One thing that I came into Deep Ecology was what was the animism of Paganism, this kind of sense that everything has a soul and everything has a spirit and everything has value. And for me, teaching and learning about Deep Ecology within the Pagan circles, and then going, well, actually, this is all preaching to the converted, really, so needing to take that out into the wider world, as it were, and to enable people to have an experience of animism, because it's not just a concept. It's allowing that other animals and other creatures and other beings have consciousness and have volition and have wisdom and have something that we can learn from, and it may not be in a form that we can necessarily understand. 

So for me, animism within Deep Ecology, it's not merely spirit. It's not merely, ‘oh, yeah, everything has a soul’, and so therefore it's kind of somehow up on a pedestal and somewhere over there. It's more like an awareness that all of us, everything that we share this Earth with has its own way. It has consciousness. There is consciousness everywhere. It's very much the foundation of what Deep Ecology is. It's like all life is conscious. All Earth is conscious. Rocks and trees and river and stone is conscious. And by conscious, also, it's not separate from us. We can keep saying words like not separate and everything is kind of interconnected. It's like asking whether or not we're conscious or you're conscious. The only way that we can really feel that is when we come into community and if we open ourselves to and if we allow ourselves to listen and to hear the wisdom of each other, and that includes the wisdom of all beings that we share the planet with. 

John:
Yeah. 

Adrian:
 Lovely. Thank you.! It seems to me that the kind of processes of change that you're working with are held within the container of ritual. Does that make sense? 

John:
 One thing I'd like to say is that the dominant paradigm puts all of this emphasis on novelty, and we just do something once or twice, and then we get bored. We want something new. And so to have something which doesn't change or changes so slowly. I once saw a group of Hopi doing what I suddenly realized that the shock was the Council of All Beings, which I thought that Joanna and I had invented a few years before, but they assured me they'd been doing without pause for 10,000 years. And so it's like Chinese whispers didn't get in the way. They're still doing the same thing that they were doing 10,000 years ago. And when you start to do something like that, then you get a chance to see how you've changed. Because whatever's changed, it's not because the ceremony or the ritual has changed. The ceremony or the ritual is exactly the same as it was last Summer Solstice or whatever it was. And I just feel like that's such an incredibly valuable thing. And it's something that one of the many things that we have to recover.

Raven:
 Yeah, I just wanted to say what John said. And also, yeah, ritual is another thing, which is our birthright, and it enables us to transcend. Because we can then, by also knowing the form and the structure of the ritual, means that our thinking vigilant mind can just be at rest. And it also just means that when we're kind of entering those spaces, that we can deepen and we can deepen the experience. And that can be quite transcendent or not. It can be play, and play itself is transcendent. You don't want to make the whole Deep Ecology thing to be like this huge, massive kind of like, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm going to lose myself and then my head's going to explode and I'm going to become a mountain’. It's as joyous and as ritualized as children doing hopscotch. It's our childlike self remembering what it is to be in an animal body and to have a whole heap of friends. And like, if you're a kid, you've got imaginary friends, or are they? And if you're a kid, you can talk to a rock and it might carry around your pocket and tell all your secrets and your rock will tell you secrets. And that's like Deep Ecology. And the work that we're doing is just, it's a reminder to play and a reminder that ritual, play, hopscotch, all of that jump rope, singing in cahoots with a mountain who might be bellowing in your ear. That's ritual. That's ritual as well.

Adrian:
 Lovely to hear you refer to play there, because that's come up in the previous conversation I had with a Nature Connection facilitator: Peter Cow was talking about play and how important it is. So hearing that weave coming through again is absolutely lovely. 

So that's been wonderful. I feel very full. 

Raven:
Yeah, likewise. 

John:
What a splendid conversation.

Raven:
 You can kind of feel it with that, like as you were saying before, the kind of glowing, and also that's what happens when the three of us are together. And the intention is to talking about connection. And also we're sitting here grinning, because it's like, it's what happens. It's what happens when you're open, when you're open to the work, open to breathing and open to listening to anything that kind of supports the work of healing the Earth. It makes you happy. 

Adrian:
 Yeah, it certainly does. And that awe and that gratitude are really welling up in me. Just before we come to a close, I'd love to hear, what are you both up to now? What's alive for you right now? 

John:
 Well, I'm very excited about Deepening, and I'm organising events for the alumni, but the workshops themselves are booming in a way that I've been waiting for for decades. And I don't know why it would happen when I was 79 years old and losing my cognition and losing, like on my way out. But here we are, and the hippies and Pagans and witches that always love this work continue to join in. But all of a sudden, they've been joined by the IT professionals and public servants and professors, and even the odd Member of Parliament. And so I'm just trying my best to, I'm training three facilitators every workshop. 

I mean, you couldn't call it training, because like you were saying before we were on air, Adrian, you just did it straight out of the book, Thinking Like a Mountain, and it worked just as good, as it does because the intention does all the work. It means you don't have to even have attended a workshop in order to be able to facilitate one. But having, you know, three people, you know, have the experience of facilitating with someone like me, calm and, you know, happy and knowing that it's all going to work, you know, just trying to do whatever I can to generate that culture.

And I'm throwing myself back into activism. I've been arrested twice in the last two years, once blocking the coal ship in a kayak blockade outside the largest coal port in the world at Newcastle in New South Wales, and then more recently locked onto a harvester in greater glider habitat at the Bulger Forest, stopped logging for a day. And, you know, I've forgotten just what an incredible joy that is to demonstrate to oneself one's seriousness about this.

So yeah, how about you, Raven? 

Raven:
Ah, well, you and I have a workshop coming up next month. So that's exciting. One of the big things, the big joys at the moment is that we're custodians of 100 acres of beautiful, pristine forest, and it's old growth, and it's completely jaw dropping. So it's now become a conservation trust, which is really exciting. And it's right in the middle of the proposed Koala Great National Park, which we're waiting on any day now, what we're really hoping is for the Great Koala National Park to be announced. And so recently, I've just been tracking koalas and finally saw one, one of our trail cameras. And that was really exciting. 

And one thing that's really, that's a real joy is that it looks as though we're joining into partnership with a local Gumbaynggirr people and wanting to use our land as an area to help train bush care for young indigenous bush regen people. And so that's that's flowering. 

It's joyous. And talking about gratitude, like it's very much gratitude for First Nations people in Australia, and their continuing wisdom and care of the Earth. And it's something that we are very much wanting to, you know, just gratitude and also it's like wanting to be as much of a part to help facilitate and help be in to kind of let those continue those relationships in the community flourish. And so for us to kind of be hosting fire work and species management, Like it’s joyous. Joyous! That's why we're here, really. Why we're there in the forest that we're in. 

Adrian:
 Wonderful. That's inspiring to hear how it's working. We're actually making a difference. And there's real change. I mean, real change is which is wonderful to hear. Fabulous. That's been such a joy. Thank you both very much. Thank you for all you do. 

John:
 Thank you. 

Raven:
 Thank you so much. 

Adrian:
Bye bye.

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Adrian:
That was wonderful: it's not often that I get to talk to two such lovely humans! If you live in Australia you'll be excited to hear that Raven and John will be joined by Brother Tenzin, a Buddhist monk, to facilitate a workshop in New South Wales in April. Raven and Brother Tenzin will be there in the flesh and John will be co-facilitating remotely. He'll be joining via Zoom as part of the Introduction and coming in a couple of times on Saturday and Sunday. Entire workshops were facilitated over Zoom during COVID and it works really well.

This is a wonderful opportunity to work with Raven and John and they're hoping to get folks joining from far and wide. The workshop is from the 25th to the 27th of April. There are full details and booking information online. I’ll put the web address (https://events.humanitix.com/deep-ecology-with-john-seed-karin-raven-steininger-and-brother-tenzin-bellingen-april-25-27-2025) on the Embodied Pathways episode page or you can search for 'Deep Ecology' on humanitix.com that's the word human itix.com

Okay, until next time have fun out there!