CONCEPT
The Work That Reconnects
Macy's four-movement spiral — gratitude, pain, new seeing, going forth — the group facilitation practice that moves participants through ecological and civilizational grief toward grounded action.
The Work That Reconnects is the name Joanna Macy gave to the group practice she developed across four decades of facilitation with environmental activists, nuclear disarmament workers, and communities facing ecosystem collapse. Its structural signature is a spiral rather than a line: four movements — gratitude, honoring the pain, seeing with new eyes, and going forth — that must be traversed in sequence because each depends on the emotional ground prepared by the one before it. Skip gratitude and pain becomes despair. Skip pain and action becomes compulsive. The practice was designed to interrupt the analgesic numbness that Macy identified as the real obstacle to wise response under conditions of existential disruption. Its transposition to the AI moment is the organizing thesis of this volume.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The practice emerged from Macy's 1980s facilitation work with communities paralyzed by nuclear dread. She found, repeatedly, that people understood the threat accurately and felt the weight of it in