Climate Crisis and Mental Health

Climate Crisis and Mental Health

Workshops: 2-4.30pm & 6-8PM,
Wednesday, 3rd December 2025

Sarah-Jane Cullinane (PhD) (Facilitator, mindfulness teacher, and sustainability educator)
Cristina Nicotra (Artist, curator)

The Climate Crisis and Mental Wellbeing event explores how ecological disruption affects our emotional lives, and how shared creative practices can support collective ways of staying present and connected. The climate emergency is not only a physical and political reality. It also affects how we think, feel, and relate to one another. Many people experience anxiety, grief, overwhelm, or disconnection when confronted with environmental loss and social instability. At the same time, new forms of care, community action, and climate engagement continue to emerge, offering pathways toward collective agency.

This event recognises mental wellbeing as a crucial part of climate engagement. Emotional responses are not signs of weakness or disengagement. They are evidence of care, connection, and responsibility. By creating space to acknowledge and work with these emotions, participants deepen their capacity to remain present and to act within uncertainty.

Two workshops will take place throughout the day. The first, led by Cristina Nicotra, introduces emotional weaving, a tactile and intuitive artistic process that uses natural and recycled materials. Participants will be invited to explore their emotional responses to climate news and events through movement and texture rather than verbal analysis. 

In the second workshop Sarah-Jane Cullinane will follow the structure of The Work that Reconnects and the practice of Active Hope, developed by Joanna Macy. Together, participants move through shared stages of gratitude, grief, expanded awareness, and commitment to meaningful action.

Throughout both workshops, the emphasis is placed on connection, mutual support, and embodied reflection. The activities do not aim to solve the crisis. Instead, they provide a framework to recognise personal and collective responses, and to understand emotional life as part of wider ecological interdependence.

—
These workshops offer space for shared reflection on emotional responses to the climate crisis. Please take responsibility for your own wellbeing and participate only if you feel ready and comfortable engaging with these themes.

Emotional Weaving in the time of crisis - Workshop 2-4.30 PM

This workshop invites participants to explore their lived experience and emotional responses to the ecological crisis and the multiplicity of initiatives for transformative change and resistance. 
The event will begin by creating a supportive conversational space to reflect on the climate crisis and our reactions to it. This will be followed by a meditation practice to explore our inner experience, leading into an engagement with the tactile experience of emotional weaving, using natural and recycled materials. 
The freedom from traditional technique, encouraging participants to focus on intuitive movements that guides the expressive weaving process. 
This process offers an embodied reflection on our profound connection to the present moment. We will observe the collective work, and a map might spontaneously emerge, a dynamic tracing of the interdependence between personal feelings, shared experiences, and the wider ecological system, inspired by the concept of Indra’s Net, in which each thread reflects and influences all others.

This workshop is open to all, and no experience is required

Active Hope with Sarah-Jane Cullinane - Workshop 6-8 PM

In the midst of climate breakdown, violent conflict and oppression, political polarization, increasing income disparity and ecological destruction, it's easy to fall into despair, overwhelm or numbness. The dominant culture of modernity thrives on this psychic numbing which impedes our capacity to collectively respond with resilience and imagination.

During this experiential workshop with Sarah-Jane Cullinane we will learn about and experience the spiral of The Work that Reconnects and the practice of Active Hope, developed by eco-philosopher and environmental activist Joanna Macy. This work was developed over many decades using teachings from systems thinking, deep ecology, undoing oppression and spiritual traditions.

This spiral journey includes four stages that we will experience together as an interactive group process: 1. Coming from Gratitude 2. Honouring Our Pain for the World 3. Seeing with New/Ancient Eyes and 4. Going Forth. It’s a process we can experience over and over again beyond this workshop, each time gaining new insights, boosting our resilience and strengthening our resolve to act on behalf of all life. Creative arts practices are woven throughout to support us in awakening our emotional and imaginative capacities.

Following the workshop, we will also share further information and resources with participants who wish to explore this work further themselves or with others.

Biographies

Sarah-Jane Cullinane (PhD) is a facilitator, mindfulness teacher, and sustainability educator with over 15 years’ experience working with groups. She leads programmes, retreats and workshops with both the general public, and with existing groups including community, advocacy, activist, management and board groups. Her delivery and facilitation work weaves practices from Active Hope / The Work that Reconnects, the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective, Mindfulness-Based Interventions, and Way of Council. Sarah-Jane is currently chair of the board of the Mindfulness Teachers Association of Ireland before which she held the position of lead Fellow of Education for Sustainable Development in Trinity College Dublin.

Cristina Nicotra is an interdisciplinary artist, producer, and curator based in Dublin. Her practice explores the emotional, political, and ecological dimensions of human and more-than-human entanglements through textile-based processes, particularly weaving, embroidery, and fabric manipulation. She connects tactile making with embodied, participatory experiences that translate emotional states into material form. As the curator of the Entangled Life programme at Pallas Projects, which investigates climate, community, and ecological interdependence, she develops events and workshops that foster collective reflection and shared agency. Her work nurtures spaces of care, ecological awareness, community participation, and more-than-human perspectives through inclusive, sustainable practices.