Holding Ground
Inner Resilience for Environmental Changemakers
with Mark Coleman, Kirsten Rudestam, and Yong Oh
Begins February 13, 2026
A 5-month intensive to nourish the inner ground from which meaningful action can grow.
This 5-month journey weaves mindfulness, compassion, and nature-based practice with the real challenges of our time—grief, burnout, and the overwhelm of intersecting crises. Through contemplative practice and community support, you’ll develop the inner steadiness needed for long-term engagement.
Rather than offering inner work merely as a way to self-soothe or endure business-as-usual activism, we explore contemplative and nature-oriented practice as a form of subversive orientation—one that restores a sense of enoughness, belonging, and wholeness, and thereby reshapes our relationship to progress, productivity, and control.
Here, we cultivate a spiritual infrastructure that can hold our ecological activism. We will explore how belonging to the Earth and to each other becomes the ground for sustained, creative action.
This is a path that honors pausing as much as doing, refraining as much as responding, and stillness as a necessary companion to movement. In a culture shaped by modernity’s insistence on constant action and acceleration, practices of presence, simplicity, trust, and mutuality are deeply subversive—opening space for new paradigms of engagement that may be post-activist, spiritually rooted, or not yet fully imaginable.
Enjoy A Free Meditation With Mark Coleman
Download Chapter Sixteen: Standing with Trees from Mark Coleman’s A Field Guide to Nature Meditation: 52 Mindfulness Practices for Joy, Wisdom and Wonder.
What You’ll Practice
- Cultivate Inner Resilience: Develop mindfulness, compassion, and emotional balance to support well-being and prevent burnout.
- Deepen Connection to Earth and Kin: Build kinship with nature through contemplative, sensory, and place-based practices.
- Understand Inner Work as Structural Resistance: Explore how contemplative practices weaken internalized patterns of domination, scarcity, and separation, and how changing consciousness itself becomes a meaningful site of social and ecological transformation.
- Foster Joy and Collective Care: Tap into joy, gratitude, and shared meaning as lasting sources of strength.
- Navigate Challenging Emotions: Learn tools to meet grief, uncertainty, and change with grace and creativity.
- Strengthen Relational Capacities: Grow in deep listening, compassionate dialogue, and collaborative action.
- Sustain Long-Term Engagement: Envision and embody long-term, collective commitments to transformative change. Cultivate ways of acting that are rooted not only in urgency, but in enoughness, interdependence, and care—supporting forms of engagement that address the roots of harm, not only its symptoms.
This Course Is Designed For You If…
- You work for ecological integrity, environmental justice, or collective well-being
- You experience burnout, grief, or overwhelm in your activism
- You seek practices that integrate spiritual depth with engaged action
- You quesetion paradigms of constant urgency, speed, and extraction—and senses the need for deeper cultural and consciousness-level change
- You want to sustain your commitment for the long term
- You feel called to remember your belonging within the larger web of life
- You want to build community with others who share your values and struggles
What You Receive
Live Immersive Sessions
Two monthly live sessions with the teachers and guest speakers.
Community Connections
Build meaningful relationships through small peer groups and our online forum.
Practices Between Sessions
Tools and practices to help you integrate learning into everyday life.
Lifetime Access to Course
Revisit the teachings, practices at any time at your own pace.
Course Schedule & Outline
Love and compassion form the foundation of sustainable activism. Through heart-based and nature-based meditations, you’ll explore what truly motivates your work and establish grounding practices. You’ll create a daily sit spot practice, articulate your deeper purpose within small groups, and identify sources of support for times of difficulty. This module invites you to root your activism in care rather than urgency alone.
February
• Fri, Feb 13, 9 am–12 pm PT
• Fri, Feb 27, 9 am–11 am PT with Guest Speaker Kaira Jewel Lingo
This module offers tools for meeting grief, anger, and other challenging emotions with skill and tenderness. You’ll learn the RAIN technique for working with difficulty, hold space for learning from grief and anger, and engage practices that reveal interconnection and reciprocity. Through deep listening and relational presence, you’ll discover that belonging—to each other and the Earth—holds us through descent.
March
• Fri, Mar 13, 9 am–12 pm PT
• Fri, Mar 27, 9 am–11 am PT with Guest Speaker Sheryl Petty
Joy is not a luxury but a necessity for sustained engagement. Here you’ll identify personal sources of pleasure and delight, practice muditā (empathic joy) through meditation and movement, and create practices that foster celebration and community. You’ll explore how joy strengthens resilience and deepens your connection to the vitality of life itself, even amid difficulty.
April
• Fri, Apr 10, 9 am–12 pm PT
• Fri, Apr 24, 9 am–11 am PT with Guest Speaker Lyla June Johnston
Equanimity allows us to stay present with what is, responding wisely rather than reactively. You’ll explore upekkhā (equanimity) practice, identify personal challenges to maintaining balance, and develop an action plan addressing: “What is mine to do? With whom? What vision and resources do I need?” This module supports you in finding sustainable rhythms for your work.
May
• Fri, May 8, 9 am–12 pm PT
• Fri, May 22, 9 am–11 am PT with Guest Speaker Kazu Haga
The journey integrates as you reflect on growth and insight gained over five months. You’ll articulate a vision for continued spiritual activism and community engagement, identifying and embodying the relationships and practices that will sustain you. This module honors what has shifted and supports your return to the world with renewed commitment, clarity, and care.
All sessions are on Fridays.
June
- Fri, Jun 5, 9 am–12 pm PT
- Fri, Jun 19, 9 am–11 am PT with Guest Speaker Ayya Santacitta
- Fri, Jun 26, 9 am–12 pm PT
Meet The Teachers
Mark Coleman, MA
Mark has a master’s in Clinical Psychology and has trained extensively in the Buddhist tradition, both in the Insight meditation and in the Dzogchen tradition. He is a senior teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and has taught insight meditation retreats since 1997. Mark is a life-long nature lover and is passionate about guiding people into the beauty of meditation and nature. He has led wilderness nature retreats worldwide for over twenty years. Through his organization Awake in the Wild Mark leads year long nature meditation teacher trainings in the US and Europe.
Co-founder of the Mindfulness Training Institute Mark also leads year long professional mindfulness teacher trainings in Europe and the US. He is author of Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path to Self-discovery, Make Peace With Your Mind, From Suffering to Peace, and his recent book A Field Guide to Nature Meditation. He lives in Sausalito, Marin and likes nothing more than hiking, biking and kayaking in the outdoors.
Kirsten Rudestam, PhD
A dedicated meditation practitioner since 1997, Kirsten has been authorized and trained to teach in the Theravādan tradition by her mentors, Gil Fronsdal and Andrea Fella. Kirsten holds a PhD in environmental sociology, is a trained vision fast guide through the School of Lost Borders, and is a facilitator of Joanna Macy’s “Work That Reconnects.” She believes that practices of (re)connection are vital for cultivating the resilience needed to face ecological loss and embrace our inherent interdependence. She has been teaching meditation in the Theravādan tradition since 2002, and co-founded and co-teaches the Sati Center’s Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy Training Program.
Yong Oh
Yong is a Dharma Council teacher at the Durango Dharma Center and a core teacher for Sacred Mountain Saṅgha, and is also a visiting teacher for other community centers across North America. He teaches retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Insight Meditation Society, Big Bear Retreat Center, and Vallecitos Mountain Retreat Center. He is a graduate of the 4-year Insight Meditation Society Retreat Teacher Training program, Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s 2-year Community Dharma Leaders program, the 2-year Nature Dharma Teacher Training, and the Sacred Mountain Saṅgha 2-year Dharmapala training, taught by his primary teachers Kittisaro and Thanissara.
Yong is also a retired acupuncturist, and he deeply loves mountains and forests and bringing the practice of meditation into nature. Nature and Dharma are at the heart of his path. He also has a particular interest in devotional expression and supporting caregivers as well as communities of color in the Dharma. For his full schedule, visit yongoh.com.
Guest Speakers
Kaira Jewel Lingo, MA
Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on activists, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation from Parallax Press. Her teachings and writings can be found at www.kairajewel.com.
Sheryl Petty
Sheryl Petty, Ed.D. is the Founder of Ocha Dharma and Movement Tapestries.
She teaches & is ordained in Yoruba/Lucumi & Vajrayana Buddhism (Nyingma) which she has practiced for 30 years. She is a certified Yoga asana and Nejang Yoga instructor. She holds degrees in Mathematics, Systematic Theology & Leadership & Change. Her career supports systems to heal & clear blockages to realizing the fullness of their visions for societal & environmental well-being.
Kazu Haga
Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding core member of the Ahimsa Collective, a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. His work combines spiritual practice, trauma healing and nonviolent action to work towards collective liberation.
He has over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and social change work. He is a resident of the Canticle Farm community on Lisjan Ohlone land, Oakland, CA, where he lives with his family. You can find out more about his work at www.kazuhaga.com.
Ayya Santacitta
Santacitta Bhikkhuni was born in Austria and did her graduate studies in Cultural Anthropology, focusing on dance, theatre, and ritual. She also worked in avant-garde dance theatre as a performer and costume designer. In 1988 she met Ajahn Buddhadasa in southern Thailand, who sparked her interest in Buddhist monastic life. She trained as a nun in England and Asia from 1993 until 2009, primarily in the lineage of Ajahn Chah, and has also received teachings in the Shechen lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
Santacitta Bhikkhuni co-founded Aloka Vihara in 2009 and received Bhikkhuni Ordination in 2011. She is committed to Gaia as a living being and resides at Aloka Earth Room, currently located in San Rafael, CA.
Join Us!
- 5-Month Online Learning Journey
- Supportive Online Community
- Weekly Guided Practices
- Lifetime access to the content
- Grow Together Through Dialogue and Reflection
Free - $0
Course Schedule
All sessions are held on Fridays
February • Feb 13, 9 am–12 pm PT • Feb 27, 9 am–11 am PT
March • Mar 13, 9 am–12 pm PT • Mar 27, 9 am–11 am PT
April • Apr 10, 9 am–12 pm PT • Apr 24, 9 am–11 am PT
May • May 8, 9 am–12 pm PT • May 22, 9 am–11 am PT
June • Jun 5, 9 am–12 pm PT • Jun 19, 9 am–11 am PT • Jun 26, 9 am–12 pm PT
About the EcoDharma Program
Spirit Rock’s EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program (ETCP) brings together Buddhist teachers, activists, and community partners to nurture resilience, deepen climate awareness, and inspire compassionate action.
If you’d like to explore the full vision, upcoming offerings, partners, and ways to get involved, visit the ETCP page below.
