— John Glavis
Listen to Carolyn's Audio Books
Apocalypse Anytime
A psychospiritual workbook for navigating the Polycrisis
by Carolyn Baker
In recent years, the term polycrisis has emerged to describe the tangled relationship between myriad crises on our planet and how they invariably intersect to create a predicament that is not solvable but can only be responded to. This book offers a treasure-trove of practical tools for grounding ourselves emotionally and spiritually amid both the long-term crises and the related challenges that confront us moment to moment as we navigate unprecedented events and their invariable consequences. Apocalypse Anytime is the culmination of fifteen years of the author’s writing and research on the demise of industrial civilization and its psychospiritual impact on Earth’s living beings. It offers a life-altering challenge for readers who are willing to accept the assignment.
Confronting Christofascism: Healing the Evangelical Wound
By Carolyn Baker
Will democracy in America prevail, or will it be usurped by a confluence of fascism and evangelical Christianity? In this book, the author traces the history of this unholy alliance and invites those recovering from the influence of fundamentalist religions, as well as the non-religious seeking to preserve the democratic experiment, to excise the toxic influences of religious authoritarianism from politics and personal life. Readers from all backgrounds will be enlightened and inspired by Baker’s clear and incisive snapshot of this defining moment in our history. Writing from her upbringing as a fundamentalist Christian and her years of practicing psychotherapy, she offers a deep dive into the psychology of fundamentalism as well as specific guidelines for healing the wounds of immersion in a subculture of religious domination. Confronting Cristofascism is a practical guide to assessing the influence of religious trauma in our personal and public histories and committing to recover from it in order to become more whole individuals and pro-active citizens. It is required reading for every awake American.
Carolyn Baker is someone who is unafraid to look at the possibility of human extinction and what we as a global community are facing. She also is willing to look at the spiritual and emotional possibilities that this climate and biosphere crisis presents us with. In this interview with Carolyn we discuss approaching collapse as a rite of passage and accepting and working with the grief inherent in these times.
In It For The Long Haul, Explorations on Emotional Resilience With Carolyn Baker
Saving Animals From Ourselves
By Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker
This book is based on a belief we both fiercely share: That we are not separate from the Divine, not separate from other humans, and are inextricably interconnected with the Earth community, with a responsibility to protect and to live in humble and grateful harmony with the whole of creation.
THE GUILD FOR SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE
Carolyn Baker
Have you ever wished that you could find a course of study that would holistically integrate the perennial wisdom of many spiritual traditions into one curriculum? The Guild for Spiritual Guidance has done just that. A Guild from medieval times to the present day is an organization with a unique purpose and outreach. Traditionally, the goal was to learn a trade such as masonry or carpentry, to become skilled in this work and, eventually, to pass on the knowledge and proficiency learned to others interested in following a similar vocation. The apprentice was under the tutelage of a Master, who mentored the individual for as long as it took to become skilled. Finally, the apprentices became, over time, Masters for others. To become a member of a Guild with others of the same persuasion brought with it responsibility, respect, and privilege in the community. The tradition of spiritual guidance is, in the West, at least as old as the Desert Fathers who gave “a word” to those who came to seek them in the wilderness. We invite you to explore our curriculum and opportunities for lifelong community support.
Journey To The Promised Land: How A Homeless Stranger Took Me Home…
…a memoir by Carolyn Baker
We all want to live and love more fully, and yet the price of our desire is often steep. Journey to The Promised Land is not just a moving story about reconnection, forgiveness, radical ego-adjustment, and having one’s heart broken open. It is a story of what is possible when we are willing to engage in the inner work of healing the parts of ourselves that obstruct our loving aliveness if we allow the ego to be radically transformed as we remain willing to stay present with and surrender to what in front of us right now. At this extraordinary moment of despair on our planet–at a time when hearts and conversations have become so hardened and polarized, it is crucial that we never shut down and that we continually open ourselves to mystery and miracles.
In this memoir, Carolyn writes with naked honesty and unvarnished vulnerability about relationships with two individuals who could not have been more unlike, yet who served as agents of ego demolition and transformation.
“In this riveting story, we bear witness to an authentic transfiguration of the heart. Carolyn Baker is a fierce warrior of love, showing up for the most challenging and meaningful work there is, and showing us the way home to what all of the spiritual traditions have been teaching us forever: In dying to our false self we are born into boundless interconnection.”
—Mirabai Starr, Taos, New Mexico
Teacher of mystical and contemplative traditions and author of God of Love and Caravan of No Despair
“It is rare to find a teacher who has learned to navigate the space between the prophetic cry of justice and the priestly whisper of mercy. This vast in between territory requires the sojourner to practice the alchemy of surrender or what Carolyn names as kenosis. It is only at this kairotic intersection that justice’s sharp sword and mercy’s comforting balm combines to form the golden elixir that our world so desperately needs. Carolyn’s ongoing pilgrimage to the Promise Land is grounded in relationships of impasse that the less courageous among us would have avoided. Thank you Carolyn for showing the way home.”
~Rev. Terry Chapman, Pastor of Forked River Presbyterian Church, Lanoka Harbor, New Jersey
“With her engaging and piercing writing, Carolyn has once again shown us that the particular is the route to the universal, and we all have a responsibility to attend to our shadow work, for personal health, and indeed the survival of our species.“
~The Rev. Michelle A. Danson Episcopal Priest & Spiritual Director
Andrew Harvey interviews Carolyn About The Book
Carolyn Baker interviewed by Andrew Harvey
Ecopsychology Voices
Carolyn interviewed by Canadian Ecopsychology Network
Resilience and Regeneration
An Interview with Carolyn Baker
Books by Carolyn Baker
Radical Regeneration: Sacred Activism and the Renewal of the World
with Andrew Harvey (to be released November 2022)
Radical Regeneration
with Andrew Harvey
Saving Animals From Ourselves
with Andrew Harvey
Return to Joy
with Andrew Harvey
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— Gus Speth
— Andrew Harvey
News and Articles
An Open Letter To David Wallace-Wells By Rupert Read, John Foster, and Jem Bendell
The irony of your starkly-titled book is that it ends up being, from our perspective, too ‘optimistic’. This may blind readers to the greatest new need now: for Deep Adaptation – that is, for accepting that some kind of eco-induced societal collapse is now not merely possible, but likely, and preparing honestly for it; for recognising that – while it is absolutely vital to continue to seek to mitigate our society’s climate-deadly emissions – the time is past when it was credible to fixate on doing this while ignoring the increasingly-urgent need for Deep Adaptation.
Who Gets To Cry? By Trebbe Johnson
There is another reason for fending off sorrow about the loss of the wild natural places we love to visit and the communities where we live, and this is perhaps the hardest one of all to accept and overcome. Many of us are simply afraid that if we allow ourselves to wade, even for a moment, into the feelings of sadness for the living world that lap at the edge of our consciousness, we will find ourselves pulled so ruthlessly into grief and despair that we will never emerge.
My Life In Collapse, By Bodhi Paul Chefurka
I was recently asked to respond to a short email interview. My response seems like a nice summary of how I’ve spent the last decade and a half of my life, so I thought I would share it here.
David Holmgren: A Baby Boomer’s Apology
It is time for us baby boomers to honestly acknowledge what we did and didn’t do with the gifts given to us by our forebears and be clear about our legacy with which we have saddled the next and succeeding generations.
Drinking The Tears Of The World: Grief As Deep Activism, By Francis Weller
There we all share the communal cup of loss and in that place find our deep kinship with one another. That is the alchemy of grief, the great and abiding ecology of the sacred once again showing us what the indigenous soul has always known; we are of the earth.
Facing Extinction, By Catherine Ingram
Despite our having caused so much destruction, it is important to also consider the wide spectrum of possibilities that make up a human life. Yes, on one end of that spectrum is greed, cruelty, and ignorance; on the other end is kindness, compassion, and wisdom. We are imbued with great creativity, brilliant communication, and extraordinary appreciation of and talent for music and other forms of art. We cry in tenderness when we are touched by love, beauty, or loss. We cry in empathy for others’ pain. Some of us even sacrifice our lives for strangers. There is no other known creature whose spectrum of consciousness is as wide and varied as our own. You likely know well the spectrum of human consciousness within yourself. Perhaps you have had many moments when greed or hatred overtook your mind. But it is likely you have also had many moments when you knew that love was all that ever really mattered. And in your final breaths it is likely to be all that is left of you and all that you will leave behind, a cosmic story whispered only once.As Leonard said, “It is in love that we are made; in love we disappear.”
The End Of The First Chapter Of Human History, By Umair Haque
The 21st century is going to be the first time — ever — that the human species stops increasing, expanding, and growing. The human population is — for the first time in history — projected to finally peak around 2050, for the first time ever, in a hundred thousand years. Let me put all that in perspective, if your response is — “so what?” — I think it is one of the most significant events of all time, and I don’t say that for hyperbole’s sake. So powerful and meaningful that we haven’t even begun to think about it. I think it explains everything from today’s wave of fascism, to climate change — to tomorrow’s urgent, desperate need for better paradigms of everything, from economics to politics to society
Climate Trauma And Recovery: The Healing Path Of Cultural Truth And Reconciliation, By Zhiwa Woodbury
For it is only unacknowledged trauma that prompts us to act out in ways that make the problem worse. If what we have been calling “climate change” is, in fact, an unprecedented form of trauma that is prompting us to act out in such perplexing ways as questioning the validity of facts themselves, then there is tremendous potential for societal and global healing in simply bringing awareness to the nature of our collective wounding. As anyone who has walked a 12-step path will tell us, awareness is a powerful elixir.
Thanatos And Eros In The 21st Century, By Umair Haque
Is there more to us than Thanatos? I believe there is. Art, medicine, literature tell me so. A little child’s laugh tells me so. The water against the waves does, too. But I also believe that we’ve been told for so long that there isn’t more to us than Thanatos — that all we are is little walking vessels of greed, rage, spite, and hate — that Thanatos is all we know how to be anymore. Let us, then, begin the difficult, beautiful work of discovering a greater truth about ourselves.
The Real American Emergency Is Fascism, By Umair Haque
So who are we trying to please, by refusing to call all this what it is? Why won’t we say the words we should, must, say? We must be trying to please someone — because we are letting everything we cherish and treasure be destroyed by thugs and mafias. We are watching democracy be raped by fat men with little hands. We are watching fascism be reborn in our very own country, as little children are caged. But they are braver than us, my friends. We are the ones afraid to utter the name of the beast. But the beast only snarls and laughs, because he knows now how much he has frightened us.
The World To Come, By Chris Hedges
The longer we pretend this dystopian world is not imminent, the more unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite’s goal is to keep us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian structures of oppression grounded in this dark reality. It is up to us to pit power against power. Ours against theirs. Even if we cannot alter the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given what lies in front of us, will be a victory.
In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves To Grieve, By Dahr Jamail
A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing. “Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them,” thinker, writer, and teacher Martín Prechtel writes. “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
About Carolyn
Carolyn Baker’s mission is to create islands of sanity in a sea of global chaos. This mission necessitates the development of a variety of emotional tools alongside commitment to spiritual transformation. Through her multi-faceted outreach via webinars, podcasts, live workshops, books, and articles, as well as one-on-one life coaching, Carolyn is touching the lives of thousands to assist them in preparing for the dire consequences of the collapse of industrial civilization and abrupt climate change. One of her principal goals at this time is to expand her teaching outreach online by presenting more webinars and online workshops as well as workshops for live audiences.
Inherited from Mike Ruppert, the New Lifeboat Hour, now in Carolyn’s capable hands, is reaching thousands of people each week around the world as Carolyn engages in conversation with a variety of captivating guests who offer suggestions for creating and operating Lifeboats for navigating our turbulent times.
Hundreds of people have worked with Carolyn in the past five years to receive guidance around living and loving in the midst of global collapse. Carolyn also offers spiritual counseling to provide meaning and purpose in a time of personal and collective suffering. Carolyn is available to individuals who want a companion on their spiritual journey and seek guidance in finding meaning and purpose in turbulent times.
Carolyn believes that one of the key tools we need for navigating the global crisis is solid information. For nearly a decade, Carolyn has published a comprehensive Daily News Digest, seven days per week unless she is traveling. This amazing, subscription-based newsletter contains key stories on economics, the environment, geopolitics, civil liberties, civil unrest, and cultural trends—and contains a unique Inspiration section which reports ways in which people around the world are responding to our planetary predicament.
IN GRATEFUL MEMORY
This website was made possible as a result of a small legacy from the late Richard (Nick) Fyffe who wholeheartedly supported my work and who devoted his last years to justice-making for the LGBT community. In 2011 Nick founded New Wings, an organization dedicated to supporting LGBT individuals who had been influenced by various fundamentalisms and were struggling to integrate spirituality and sexual orientation.