Published June 16, 2026 05:45AM
Existing in the world can be a spiritual as well as a physical experience. And these days, navigating the realities of our changing climate adds complexity to our collective presence. So how do we process our feelings around all things eco so we can continue to live mindfully and consider forms of empowered forward thinking? Best-selling climate writer Katherine K. Wilkinson, DPhil, has some ideas, along with journal prompts, essays, art, interviews, and more to help you find your way. Following is an excerpt from her new book Climate Wayfinding — A Spiritual Practice for an Age of Climate Disruption. —YJ Editors
If you have found your way to this piece, I suspect it is because you, like me, feel a deep ache about what is happening within our web of life. Perhaps you glimpse news of the latest unnatural disaster and look away to remain afloat. Or you survived one and wonder how to rebuild. Perhaps you boil with outrage at those who gamble our lives. Or you boiled so long that you’ve run completely dry. Maybe you want to grab a friend’s hand and say, Do you see how bad this is?
You and I are not alone. More and more of us are waking up to the climate and ecological crisis now fully on our doorstep. As we do, we find ourselves unsettled, unnerved, and even unmoored. Climate change is not only reshaping the physical terrain of our planet. It is also changing the inner terrain of our emotions and wellbeing. The two are linked in essential ways.
As climate and mental health expert Dr. Britt Wray teaches, climate anxiety—or sadness or indignation or shame or overwhelm—should not be dismissed as catastrophizing or overreacting. It is a healthy response to an existential threat, one that has implications for our lives and all that we love. Our felt reactions are profoundly human.
But sometimes those feelings can be slippery or hard to name. Dr. Panu Pihkala is a researcher on eco-anxiety. Through a trailblazing “taxonomy of climate emotions,” he has sought to put form on the amorphous, splayed array of emotional reactions to the climate crisis, of which anxiety is just one. That taxonomy gave rise to a map of sorts—a wheel of climate emotions—co-created with journalist Anya Kamenetz and Sarah Newman of the Climate Mental Health Network.
As this wheel shows, our climate-related emotions are not exclusively feelings of distress. Interest, inspiration, gratitude, and the like may also spring up. But most of them are uncomfortable, at the very least. No wonder, then, that it can be tempting to push these feelings away.
Of all of these emotions, grief tends to be the one I feel most often and most deeply. Every day there is climate news that will break your heart: another code-red report, another record broken, another irrevocable extinction, another teetering on the edge, another falling, falling short. Hell, it can be as simple as a warm day in January—beautiful out of context—or strawberries for sale at the farmers market a month early. Messengers of an eroding Earth are all around us.
If there is nowhere for it to go, the grief lodges in me, settling heavy into my bones and impeding imagination or action. I feel like I am straining against some innermost gravity. Grief can also take other forms—from defensiveness to rage. But neither grief nor its familiars have a permanent claim. I have learned that I hold sway as to whether my heart simply breaks or breaks open.
Over the years I have gotten better at finding, or making, spaces of solace and healing. I call on guided meditation to be with difficult emotions, and I let my body move as it wants to express them. Sessions with a caring climate-aware therapist help me share, feel, and renew. A spiritual practice helps me connect to something bigger, more enduring; so does lying down outside with a dear friend, Earth at our backs, gazing up at an awning of trees and clouds rambling above them. Sometimes, I just put my hand to my chest and let the tears come, like clouds admitting the secrets they had tucked away.
Connecting with caring community, even a community of just two people, can make all the difference in my capacity to cope. For well over a decade now, I have gathered, monthly, with a heartful group that gives me a sense of harbor, where I can take whatever is rumbling in the hull of myself. Over time and with support, I’ve come to see my climate-related emotions as valuable companions, painful though they may be. These feelings don’t sit at the periphery of my climate engagement; they are at its heart.
However we choose to work with our climate emotions, doing so is essential. For better or worse, our feelings drive how we show up in the world. We can be so inundated with distress that we find ourselves immobilized, unable to participate in the planetary healing that is still possible: It’s just too hard to care. Or we might keep moving but find that our emotions discharge in ways that are detrimental—such as pent-up frustration that undercuts every idea as too meager or too foolish. If we don’t go into the depth of the pain, we will opt for feel-good gestures that simply do not create the real change we need.
Our feelings, then, can keep us frozen or frittering, or they can become fuel. Penobscot author and teacher Sherri Mitchell (Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset) frames it like this: Our difficult emotions about our ecological and social plight are not a sign of something wrong with us, but a sign of something being righted within us. The first time I heard her say that, I experienced the release that comes from feeling seen by clear, kind eyes.
However chaotic or throbbing, our climate emotions reveal that we carry within us the impulse of life. We want to care for the people and places we love. We want to arc toward healing—healing ourselves, our communities, and our breathtaking, singular Earth.
That is what I have learned, most of all, about a broken-open heart: It is awake and alive and calls for action. It is regenerative, like nature, reclaiming ruined ground, growing anew.
With a broken-open heart, I am not stuck in grief—or any other difficult emotion swirling inside me. I can access compassion, daring, and zeal. I can hold the simultaneous truths of destruction and possibility, tuning in to the movements, real leadership, and true solutions that are rising. I can return to the awe and reverence I feel for this magnificent planet and the ferocious love that lives at my core, a blend of tenderness and fire.
How to go deeper with your climate emotions:
- Listen to a guided meditation by Dr. Katharine Wilkinson at www.climatewayfinding.earth.
- Then, journal: What emotions arise in you around Earth’s land, water, sky, and beings? How does it feel to hold the climate crisis in your head…your heart…your hands?
Adapted from Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home © 2026 by Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson (Amber Lotus/Andrews McMeel 2026). Art by Ampersand.
