— John Glavis
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
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
What Kind Of People Are We Becoming? By Umair Haque
Maybe some of the answers you’ve come up with are things like: terrible people, moral weaklings, disgraces, and so on. Moral answers, in other words. That’s a start — and yet there’s a much simpler and more straightforward answer, that some part of you is still defending against, preventing you from saying or thinking. That answer is this. What kinds of people build camps and commit torture and genocide? Fascists do.
Is The Future Fascist? By Umair Haque
America is the canary in the coal mine of global collapse.
What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis? By Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil
We are not here to save the world
Only to belong to it more fully.”
–Author unknown
At this critical planetary moment, the two of us are each considering what it means to deeply accept that our planetary home is in crisis — and how to move forward. Here are some of our individual reflections.
How Banning Abortion Will Change America
With challenges to Roe looming on the horizon, and with many US states having already denied access to abortion facilities and reproductive health services through other means, Romania’s experience shows what happens when women suddenly lose the right to control their own bodies. Without reproductive freedom, heterosexual sex turns into a game of “Russian roulette” for women, because they quite literally bear the consequences of any liaison. Indeed, Alabama’s new law goes further than Ceaușescu’s Romania, by eliminating even the exception for rape or incest.
How The World Moved Right, By Chauncey DeVega
It is very regressive for a democratic society to slide towards authoritarianism. One big reason for this change is fear. Donald Trump and Steve Bannon understood the psychological effects of fear and they weaponized it to take power. Consider the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal, where data got into the hands of Bannon [who] used it to manipulate voters. With Trump’s campaign, it seems like they perfected the a strategy of fear mongering to manipulate people into some other type of reality.
Climate Crisis Forces Us To Ask Ourselves: To What Are We Devoted?, By Dahr Jamail
You, dear reader, who are paying such close attention to the unraveling of all that we know, must share in many of these feelings. When you see another of these grotesque, pasty-white iterations of humanity stuffed into a glossy suit, acting as nothing more than a fossil-fueled ventriloquist’s puppet, do you, like me, burn inside with rage, a rage that threatens to incinerate you? Do you fantasize of their demise? Of somehow bringing them, at least, a taste of the pain their soulless and heartless actions are bringing to the fish searching for food atop the bleached-out coral reefs? To show them the starving polar bears swimming for hundreds of miles to find no ice to rest upon? At these times, I wonder if any of these so-called humans can feel a goddamn thing anymore.
Yes, American Democracy (Really) Is Dying, By Umair Haque
Do you see a little bit by what I mean when I say democracy needs to be nourished by sanity? If Americans had cared about each others’ psychological wounds — if they’d turned to one another and said: “we’re all being hurt by predatory systems and institutions, and yet we’re all asked to be part of them too — this has to change!” — then maybe enough people wouldn’t have been so psychically fragile as to be such easy prey for the world’s dumbest demagogue. But they were — and that Americans fell for Donald Trump, of all people, tells us just how badly psychologically shattered they must have been. You must be genuinely and totally broken inside by your insecurities if you believe what a Donald Trump is selling you.
Eco-Anxiety: Navigating The Doom And Denial Of Climate Crisis, By Jack Adam Weber
The optimistic position is simply naïve. The pessimistic predicts the precise design of the future and doesn’t acknowledge that we can do a lot in the name of compassion to make life easier on ourselves, one another, and other species—our triangle of resilience relationships. Many don’t seem to be able to hang out in the 8–9.5 range, and I am certainly practicing this myself. If our fear is great and especially if we have little tolerance for fear, we might even try to deny climate change altogether.
The Case For (And Against) Impeachment, By Umair Haque
Do you see what I mean a little bit? We are laggards, us Americans. Our definitions of what a high crime is are totally obsolete, way out of date. The fact that we Americans don’t consider modern ideas genocide, torture, hate, and fascism high crimes — but only 18th century concerns like obstruction and collusion — says to the world that we are not civilized people, that we have not really understood history, and that we have not really joined modernity. We are still backwards and behind — and, for us, that also means that our democracy is less robust, more fragile, that we are all the more vulnerable to extremists, lunatic, and fanatics, precisely because their malicious intentions and acts aren’t high crimes.
The “Both/And’s” Of The Notre Dame Tragedy, By Carolyn Baker
This week I have been disheartened by climate activists who have minimized, trivialized and literally mocked humanity’s mourning of the losses at Notre Dame Cathedral on April 15. Yes, Notre Dame is a building made by human beings, and the loss of its...
The Far-Right Takeover Of America Is Almost Complete, By Umair Haque
When I look at America, here’s what I see. A country where the extreme, fanatical right wing takeover of its institutions — all of them — is almost complete. From laws to courts, representation to presidency, norms to rules, from press to public sphere — America is now controlled almost entirely and exclusively by the most fanatical kind of right wingers the rich world hasn’t seen for decades, probably since Nazi Germany. Yes, I mean that. Let me make my case — and you can judge for yourself whether my words carry any weight.
Grieve, Play, And What? By Carolyn Baker
We easily associate empathy, compassion, an open heart, support, cooperation, honesty, integrity, and gratitude with love, but how about boundaries, limits, grief, anger, discernment, comfort with not knowing, and a commitment to working on our personal and cultural shadow?
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.