In a world overwhelmed by crisis — from ecological collapse to war, economic instability, and mass extinction — it’s easy to feel like shutting down is the only way to survive. But what if the very feelings we’ve been taught to suppress are the key to healing our planet and ourselves? This video explores how emotional numbness, often seen as strength, is actually a barrier to meaningful action — and why reconnecting with our pain may be the most radical act of love we can offer the world.

Through a powerful and heartfelt reflection, the video reminds us that despair, grief, anger, and even rage are not signs of weakness but symptoms of deep care. These emotions are not only natural — they are necessary. Without them, we lose touch with what matters. When we numb ourselves to avoid discomfort, we also sever our connection to joy, creativity, and the very aliveness that fuels change.

This is a call to feel again — not as an indulgence, but as a form of resistance. When we allow ourselves to truly witness the pain of the world, we tap into the fierce love that drives transformation. This inner awakening is what the late activist and teacher Joanna Macy called The Great Turning: the collective shift from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, paralyzed, or disconnected in the face of global crises, this video is for you. It will help you reframe your emotional experience as something profoundly valuable — a sign that you still care, and that you’re not alone. Because the world doesn’t just need action. It needs feeling. And it needs you.

Well, you know, there are a lot of people when they look at the militarism, the economy and meltdown, the pollution, the generation of yet more weapons, the extinction spasms of this species. Well, of course, who wouldn’t be in despair? I mean, it seems like if you’re not, you’ve out to lunch. But that’s not the whole story.

So people, we have to really not be afraid of feeling pain for our world. That we recognize that
the anguish we feel for what is happening to our world is inevitable and normal and even healthy, because how are we going to do the huge about face, psychologically and socially
that we need to do to create out of the present disarray an exquisite sustaining,
life-respecting society, unless we’re ready to just galvanize everything.

So pain is very useful. Just don’t be afraid of it.

And recognize that the anguish, the horror even that we can feel over the devastations that we
read about or see or experience that it’s okay to feel that because if we are afraid to feel that,
we won’t feel where it comes from. And where it comes from is love. Our love for this world. That’s what is going to pull us through.

So know that the feelings of anger, grief, outrage, that can come as you look at how this world is being trashed and its people that that pain is just the other side of love. And if you try to anesthetize yourself, then you numb your whole psyche. And that is so boring
and ineffective.

So this is the time for ourselves to expand into our full humanity. And in that humanity will be
our anger and outrage, our imagination, our creativity, our laughter. We are going to come alive now and we are.

I call that the Great Turning.

Joanna Macy, PhD is the beloved root teacher of the Work That Reconnects.

At every workshop she led, before beginning the program, she would circle the room, greeting each participant with a touch of the hand and a kind word. If you’d worked with her before, she would almost certainly remember you. She invited you to be present by being present to you.

Joanna is a scholar of Buddhism, General Systems Theory, and Deep Ecology; and her teaching incorporated all of these varying disciplines. She never taught anything that did not excite or move her. She loved to get everyone up and moving, often beginning each session with the beloved Elm Dance. She would have participants cluster in small groups, in which each participant’s joys, sorrows and ‘aha moments’ added to the buzz in the room.

Many thousands of people around the world have participated in Joanna’s workshops and trainings in the Work That Reconnects, and have been forever changed by this ground-breaking group work. A respected voice in the movements for peace, justice, and ecology, Joanna has devoted her life to five decades of activism.

For more from this speaker, visit her website.

Music Credits: