It’s true—Princeton University offers counseling for climate activists who are anxious

“No, it's not a joke, or the Babylon Bee, it's a real website at a real top university, which a number of readers of this blog have probably graduated from or donate money to.

Dialogue Circle: Navigating the Climate Crisis

The climate crisis has been impactful and many have turned to activism and supporting environmental justice movements. This is very meaningful work and can also create a sense of despair, burnout, anger, hopelessness, and other distressing emotions. CPS counselors will help to facilitate a conversation and create a supportive space to process such experiences. 

Mindfulness and Eco-Anxiety

Eco-anxiety is the fear we feel (sometimes acutely, sometimes as an underlying dread) about the climate crisis. Join in a discussion of how you experience eco-anxiety, and how mindfulness can help us respond to it. We’ll discuss managing worry loops, staying compassionate with difficult feelings and purpose-based coping, as well as practice a mindfulness meditation. 

Forest Therapy

Forest therapy provides a chance to connect, slow down, and cope with the stressors of life, including eco-distress and other emotional experiences related to the climate crisis.”

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/02/off-deep-end-navigating-climate-crisis.html

Mindful meditation

Your child probably can’t sing Christmas carols at school this time of year, but you will find wide acceptance of Buddhism in classroom exercises, taught as “mindful meditation.” In the western way of thinking, if you’re not “doing” --reading scripture, praying, singing, volunteering--then you’re not technically practicing a religion. But in the eastern way, it’s the technique, not the teaching or the doing, that matters. You can "believe" anything you want. That’s because the godhead is inside, not outside, the body in that faith tradition. Therefore, lots of schools close their doors to our traditional religious practices--prayer, religious symbols in the classrooms, daily Bible readings, Bible stories of heroes, teaching creation, and songs--while welcoming warmly religions from other cultures with wide open arms if they can masquerade as something "healthy" like meditation, thought control for a good purpose, anxiety and stress control, and drug and alcohol reduction tools. It's ignorance of religious thought and teaching on the part of your school board and administration that allows this.

If you are a Christian, "man up" and object to your child being taught that god is within. That's a religion. It's not our religion, it's not our culture, and what's sauce for the Christian is sauce for the Buddhist, Hindu and Humanist. Don't let the word "meditation" fool you. In the Christian and Jewish traditions, that is mediation on God's word. It is content, not a blank mind stilled to allow anything in with the power of suggestion from the teacher or guru.

NYTimes

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