When the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, was asked what we can do to save our world, he replied, "What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying."

Pain serves a fundamental role in all living beings; it alerts us to harm being done so we can stop it. Allowing ourselves to feel the pain of what's happening in the world—global climate shock, massive poverty and war, unprecedented die-off of species—is a critical step toward addressing the harm being done. When we don't feel the pain of the world, we can easily slip into acceptance—or denial.

Feeling pain is also an essential part of what it means to be human, and studies reveal that releasing pain though grief and tears is connected with living a longer and healthier life. Which makes sense: How much more deeply do we experience joy and laughter when our hearts are open to sadness and we are able to release it through crying? And in these times where so much is in question about the kind of world we are leaving to our children, what could be more important to pass on than these essences of what it means to be human?

Joanna Macy (www.joannamacy.net) has written a wonderful book called Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. In the first few chapters, she explores these ideas as well as the psychological and social sources of repression of grief. The rest of the book is dedicated to presenting a range of activities designed to help us connect more deeply with our hearts and to express the pain of being alive in these times. The activities are meant to be done in groups but can serve as useful tools of self-reflection as well. This "work that reconnects" is a foundation of what Macy calls "the Great Turning," the shift from the industrial-growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.

You can have the chance to do some of these exercises with Joanna herself if you'd like at a weekend retreat in October of 2008 at the Rowe Camp and Conference Center in western Massachusetts (www.rowecenter.org). And every year in November the Interhelp Network (www.interhelpnetwork.org) hosts a gathering inspired by Macy's work.

There is another powerful workshop coming to the Rowe Center in April. Sobonfu Somé (www.sobonfu.com) will be leading a grief ritual that is traditional to the Dagara people of West Africa. The ritual provides an opportunity for people to deeply touch and release their grief in an environment that is paradoxically public and very private, exactly because it is done in a group of about 30 to 40 people where everyone is going through a similar release.

A final recommendation is Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words. Jensen charts a broad range of the violence and destruction in the world today, and he does not hold back his anger or grief. I will warn you that it is a relentless book and not one that connects the reader with hope—in the traditional sense. "Frankly, I don't have much hope. But I think that's a good thing," he writes. He argues that "false hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.... To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us.... These false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness."

Jensen offers strong medicine that can help us look at the world with eyes wide open, connect deeply with our anger and grief, and channel it into action: "When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it."