Healing spiritual loneliness in an age of polycrisis

Matthew Green interviews Kritee Kanko, Zen Buddhist priest and climate scientist

“The biggest poison we are dealing with at the root of all this is spiritual loneliness.”

This week we welcome back Matthew Green, global investigations editor at DeSmog, and creator of Resonant World, a newsletter serving the global trauma healing movement.

Matthew spoke with Kritee Kanko, a climate scientist, Zen Buddhist priest, and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma retreat centre in Colorado, who is supporting her community to work through their outrage, grief and dread at the Trump administration’s war on climate action and everything we care about. (To watch a video of their conversation, please visit Resonant World).

Born into the family of a Gandhian freedom fighter and lawyer in India, Kritee, whose dharma name is Kanko, moved to the U.S. more than 20 years ago to work as a climate scientist. In more recent years, she left her research role at a major environmental nonprofit to focus on supporting people to confront the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the polycrisis. Also the founder of Boundless in Motion, another Colorado-based nonprofit, Kritee leads grief-rage ceremonies to help people to connect with the depths of their emotional responses to climate breakdown and ecological collapse – providing her with deep insights into the power of collective healing.

Kritee’s work has shown her how a pervasive sense of spiritual loneliness has cut people off from the kind of connection to the spiritual dimension that is essential in times of chaos. In a candid and moving interview, Kritee describes how she has been coping with her own feelings of shock and anger since January 20th by drawing strength from both the meditation practice of her Buddhist lineage, and the justice-warrior courage embodied by the lionhearted and devouring Hindu deity Kali.

Kritee described how to “reindigenize” (embracing sometimes lost “indigeneity”) by learning to regulate our nervous systems; connect to our local ecosystems; build community; and cultivate our felt-sense of connection to our ancestors and the invisible realms. At this moment of extreme peril, Kritee sees the opportunity for an accelerated “spiritual revolution” that can help us remember who we really are – and provide us with the wisdom and resolve we need to fight for a liveable future, starting by supporting Indigenous communities to return to their ancestral lands.

I know you have enormous experience in holding people in the depth of the emotions that can arise when we confront the reality of the climate crisis. And of course, that hasn't gone away. But at the same time, we've seen this cascade of events unfolding in the U.S. since January the 20th. How are you doing in all of this?

I was in India when Trump took office, but of course the chaos began as soon as he was elected. He was making these very, very heart-breaking decisions.

I came back on 26th January, and it took time for the toxic news to begin to impact my nervous system. And I tell you why there is still a shield between me and the deep chaos: because I have been holding on very tightly to my meditation practice.

I cannot let my practice go, because if I let that go, I'm going to feel like I've fallen into a bottomless pit of fear, grief, and maybe rage too.

I don't rage very easily, but it's insane what's happening.

I wonder if you could say a little bit more about how all this is landing in the people around you.

There is some organizing that's happening, but because this administration is throwing so much at us all at once, it's like carpet bombing, and you don't know where exactly you lift your head and start planning resistance.

So, I feel like there has been a lot of panic, a sense of chaos.

Not only are people losing their jobs, people I personally loved and respected are given 15 minutes to vacate their offices. So you're disrupting individual lives and people, but there’s also this erasure of the systems we're dependent on — as communities, neighborhoods, watersheds, ecosystems — the information systems, the websites are being taken down.

And what my job has been in this panic — after I've taken care of my own nervous system — is to do emergency panic-tending.

And I feel like my job has been holding the hands of my community — sometimes one-on-one and sometimes in group settings — and saying, our ancestors have gone through catastrophic events before. Folks, we can do this, right?

I feel your strength as a community leader, and I want to honor the amazing training and years of practice that you're drawing on.

I have been really calling in my ancestors, my spirit guides and my deities from both my Buddhist lineage and the Hindu lineage that I was born in.

Kali is this fierce goddess. I feel like we need her courage and groundedness in these times. She is practically naked. She's wearing a garland of skulls. And around her groin, her pelvic area, is a garland of chopped hands of demons. And she drinks blood and she walks on uneven surfaces where wars have happened. But she's just like this completely raw, roaring embodiment of courage, and there is a part of us that has that courage.

And I've been calling on Kali to support me as I support the community because it's impossible otherwise. It's so easy to begin to collapse because the news is disgusting and also ridiculous.

Where am I deriving my courage from? It's the traditional meditation practice, yes. It's the neurobiological techniques that mainstream Western science talks about, yes.

But I think I have a feeling that we're going to need to lean in more deeply on these ancestral shamanic forces.

You're drawing on very rich lineages of Hinduism and Buddhism to serve your community.

I feel like the biggest poison we are dealing with at the root of all this is spiritual loneliness.

The mainstream way our finance systems, economy, corporations, businesses, even education work, we have done away with the shamanic and animist ways of life.

And we are killing each other. We are killing other species and Mother Earth. And no one's watching. We feel that we have no accountability and no one is there to guide us.

And that's what I mean by spiritual loneliness. And the mainstream capitalist colonial structures have promoted this way of thinking, so you are either a consumer or you are a producer of some product, but the love, the devotion, the communication with the invisible realms is suppressed.

And yes, let's do emergency panic-tending, hand-holding, work on our grief and fear and shame.

But in the long term, I hope, I pray that we don't feel so spiritually lonely because we will not find our courage, our sense of direction without that.

That's the prayer I'm holding. And it's like these crises are calling for a deep spiritual revolution.

For your book project, you've developed this framework of re-indigenizing to address the polycrisis. Could you say a little bit more about that?

The first step is always emergency tending. If people listening to this are feeling acute trauma, acute anxiety, a sense of panic, then please be in relationship with one being who will hold your screams and wailing and mourning right now. And it could be a tree, it could be a human, it could be your own Higher Self, like your own inner Kali. But don't do trauma tending with a sense of loneliness.

Trauma healing — taking care of both the short-term and long-term layers of trauma —is a basic requirement for long-term reindigenizing. It's almost like if we didn't allow ourselves to pass through the portal of trauma healing, we wouldn't be able to access the invisible realms — because it's like we are psychically, spiritually clogged, stuck. And that trauma needs to be alchemized, metabolized, composted.

I feel like our current psychological paradigm in the West of one-on-one psychotherapy is not enough for the scale and depth of trauma we have. So I'm a huge proponent of doing community-level ceremonies for taking care of these layers of trauma. You trust people, you open up, you become vulnerable. And that vulnerability creates solidarity and courage. It's like when we are no longer wearing these masks, these layers of make-up around our traumatized bodies, we access our love. So the second aspect of reindigenziing is knowing how to create and sustain human communities and how to reindigenize our communities and organizations.

The third aspect of reindigenizing is connecting with local ecosystems.

Did you ever think of offering flowers, incense, or water to ecosystems around you? Can we hear the call of the mountain? Can we hear the waters flowing around our ecosystems? Because even if we have lost all the indigeneity of our own lineages, there is something about our hearts that can re-indigenize where we are right now. And it begins by accepting that mountains and rivers and soil and birds have deep intelligence, sentience and agency.

And then the last aspect of reindigenizing for me is the invisible realm of ancestors and deities. The reason Indigenous tribes of the world took such beautiful care of their ecosystems was because of their spiritual communication with their ecosystems.

And the fundamental premise here is that we badly need empowered Indigenous communities to take care of our ecosystems. Without their trauma healing, and empowerment, we will not be able to protect much.

You've worked for years at the highest levels of science and research. And you're also a Zen priest and a grief-rage ceremony leader, and you are very much in touch with the invisible realms. I feel I’m witnessing the emergence of a version of yourself that integrates all of these strands together in a new way.

In the first year after quitting my mainstream nonprofit work, I did a lot of research on Indigenous ecological knowledge [TEK] systems. And in this first year, I thought, “Well, we just need to sit with Indigenous elders, respectfully ask for their blessings and get their traditional ecological knowledge so we can better manage our global ecosystems.”

But last year, in 2024, I realized you cannot transfer traditional ecological knowledge. It is so deeply rooted in their spiritualities. Without the spirituality, this Indigenous knowledge system that the West wants to almost steal from Indigenous communities will be useless.

We need to communicate with Kali, Isis, the Olokun, the Ganesha, the Shiva, or even Christ. I reached a point where science didn't seem to have a vocabulary to talk about this connection.

Perhaps this crisis that we're now in can accelerate the emergence of that understanding?

We all have the Newtonian, black-and-white, rigid, linear mind in us, right? It has served us in some ways. But this is the time for spiritual evolution, and it begins by acknowledging that there is something quantum in this world beyond linear cause and effect.

And the clues for that quantum world exist in all traditions, faith traditions, lineages in the world, if only we are humbly willing to look.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

One very crucial component of reindigenizing is that we work to bring the original stewards of all lands back.

So what does that mean? I live in Colorado, these lands were the homelands of Arapaho, Ute and Cheyenne nations and these nations—at least their elders, their shamans—knew how to talk to their lands. And the whole system of colonization snatched the lands away from their people, and people from their land.

I have a beloved friend Bianca Acosta who is Indigenous to Mexico. She says people are pining to go back to their lands. Yes, tribal nations want to go back to their land but the land is also waiting for its people.

The indigeneity of tribal nations is buried under layers of trauma – not just for people who have lost their Indigenous roots, but also for people who are proudly Indigenous, proudly members of tribal nations – but they have been separated, brutally sometimes from their land, and that trauma needs healing. Without this healing, we cannot work on the polycrisis.

I cannot emphasize enough that yes we immigrants and others who have lost connection to our ancestral lands must work on healing our own hearts and minds and bodies—and reconnect to our local communities, ecosystems and our deities. And I think we also really, really need to honour that call of the land. And we must work to bring trauma healing, empowerment, and land back to Indigenous tribes—on their terms.

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Sending peace,

Britt