How to Navigate Anxious Times

When a row of crepe myrtles on a Durham, North Carolina, street was slated for removal, the loss hit one resident particularly hard. Having just recently moved to the neighborhood, she’d fallen in love with its trees. Now, just weeks later, they were coming down to make way for sub-pavement infrastructure work.

She shared her feelings in a group WhatsApp chat with fellow members of Farm Church, an outdoor spiritual community whose congregation includes Ashley Lewis, an ordained minister and spiritual care practitioner who offers guidance to sufferers of ecological despair.

Lewis suggested they all gather before the next Sunday worship to grieve the trees communally. The group assembled a small mandala from the natural materials around them—mulch, magnolia seeds, branches, leaves, and other remnants of the trees' life cycles—and sang a song designed to hold both their grief and their collective desire for hope and change.

For Lewis, the exercise illustrated something fundamental about the work she has come to call eco-spiritual care. “We cannot prevent every loss,” she told Sierra. “But we can learn to meet loss together, to honor what is disappearing, and to develop the capacity to keep participating in the world even when it breaks our hearts.”

It's an approach that has earned her the unusual moniker of “Doom Doula.” Her work isn't about convincing people that everything will be fine, or even that humanity will successfully avert the worst consequences of climate change. It's about helping them navigate the emotional and spiritual realities of a changing planet without becoming numb, isolated, or immobilized.

Her first piece of advice? “Start right where you are."
 

Learning to stay in the dark

One of the central tensions present in Lewis's framework comes down to the relationship between grief and hope. Modern environmental messaging often leans heavily into optimism and emphasizing solutions. Those messages can be motivating, but they can leave people feeling that their grief is somehow counterproductive.

Lewis wants to make room for a different understanding. Drawing on the death-and-grief traditions she studied in seminary and on Jungian ideas about shadow work, she encourages people to look directly at the feelings they might otherwise try to escape. Learning to navigate difficult emotional terrain, she says, can reveal capacities we didn't know we possessed.

“It's not about numbing ourselves to it. It's about deepening the capacity to hold it and grow from it,”  she says.

Her approach also challenges the increasingly familiar notion of individual resilience. “In corporate and institutional settings, resilience often means an individual's ability to endure and succeed despite a failing system,” she points out, describing it as the “definition as a recipe for burnout.”

Ecological resilience, she argues, operates differently. No single organism is responsible for saving an ecosystem. “Even the beaver, one of nature's great ecosystem engineers, doesn't do its work in isolation,” she points out. Human resilience, then, is about understanding ourselves as participants in larger networks of relationship, responsibility, and mutual dependence.
 

From forest-bathing to forest-bonding

That shift begins much closer to home than most people imagine. For example, identify a nearby place where you can regularly spend time: a garden, a patch of trees, a creek, or simply a spot where birds gather. Immerse yourself in that part of the world, and during that time, try to resist the temptation to distract yourself with podcasts or phone calls. Instead, pay attention and be present: notice the birds, the plants, the changing weather. 

“Consider what it means to be rooted, as a tree is rooted, or to rest, as a bumblebee rests in a flower,” Lewis said.

These observations aren't simply mindfulness exercises. They are invitations to imagine the needs and experiences of other beings, recognizing that humans are not the only creatures navigating cycles of birth, death, rest, and renewal.

One of Lewis's favorite distinctions is between forest bathing and what she calls “forest-bonding.” Immersion in nature, she acknowledges, has well-documented benefits. But the practice can still position the natural world as something humans enter to receive a benefit before returning to their ordinary lives.

“What if the relationship were reciprocal?” she asks clients. “May I participate in this place, be refreshed by you, but may I also be a refreshment to this place?”

She connects this idea to the importance of learning from Indigenous voices and kinship-centered worldviews, which emphasize relationships and mutual responsibility rather than human dominance. 

In a world where so much seems contingent and ungrounded, the capacity to remain present—to mourn what is disappearing, to recognize what is still flourishing, and to find ways of caring for the places and beings with whom we share their lives—can help guide us to a more connected, more peaceful place. 
 

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary

Finding “eco-spiritual alignment,” Lewis contends, doesn't require a dramatic change of lifestyle. She encourages people to look again at rituals they already practice. Even making a cup of coffee can become an ecological moment: water drawn from the earth, beans grown and harvested somewhere in the world, the countless relationships and processes that make an ordinary morning possible.

What might happen if we approached these everyday experiences with greater awareness, gratitude, and reciprocity? 

That recognition can also help untangle the cultural messages that intensify stress during anxious times. Social media, for example, can leave people feeling that they aren't doing enough, that their impact must be bigger, and that everything happening elsewhere deserves more attention than the relationships and responsibilities immediately around them.

Lewis isn't advocating abandoning technology or disengaging from global events. Rather, she encourages people to question the demands on their attention and to resist the belief that meaningful action must always be massive or visible. “The closer in, in your own heart, in your own soul, in your ecosphere,” she says, "that's where you are responsible to." 

In a world where so much seems contingent and ungrounded, the capacity to remain present—to mourn what is disappearing, to recognize what is still flourishing, and to find ways of caring for the places and beings with whom we share their lives—can help guide us to a more connected, more peaceful place. There will still be loss. The underlying systemic issues troubling our world can’t be solved overnight. 

But perhaps we can learn to gather around those anxious matters together. To name what matters. To make room for the trouble so we can face it together, in our collective humanity, and open our hearts to a better way forward.