How “eco-spirituals” try to connect with the Earth to save it

She was first a nurse, then an air traffic controller, private plane pilot, air safety analyst. Then, at 41, Florence-Marie Jégoux experienced what she calls “a beautiful inner collapse” : an ecological awareness, followed by another, “collapse”. Faced with this anguish of the end of the world, she felt alone. “I realized that there was no one around me to talk to about it. And, while reading Pablo Servigne, I discovered ecopsychology and the “work that connects”. »

Several sites devoted to “work that connects” thus state the problem to which this “TQR” intends to respond: “How can we meet our discouragement and our powerlessness in the face of the scale of the ecological and social crisis, to transform them into creative commitment? How do we strengthen our roots to support ourselves, others and the Earth? »

The work follows a “four-step spiral”which mixes “Meditation, work on breathing, talking circles, sensory explorations in nature, group exercises, dance, song…”, Explain Florence-Marie Jégoux. She felt “the power of the process” and has since organized TQR courses. Two and a half days for 180 euros, which can be paid for by barter, with a reduced rate for “co-builders of the new world”.

The sources of inspiration for the TQR can be found both “in Buddhism than in neuroscience”, pursues the one who defines herself as a “pollinator”at the crossroads of different practices and beliefs. Certain rituals, such as the talking stick, are borrowed from the first peoples. At the heart of the work is the idea of ​​”reliance”: it is about “to reconnect to ourselves, to our own imagination, to other living beings, to the invisible, to mystery, to the sacred”. But Florence-Marie Jégoux refuses to give a definition to the sacred: “Everyone has to make up their own mind. We are not in a dogma. »

The work of linking is one of the many spiritual practices associated with ecology. There are a host of others: nature baths, deep time walks, sacred cocoa ceremonies, kambo sessions (an ancestral cleansing practice based on frog venom), meditations in search of your totem animal, thanks to the Pachamama (Mother Earth), fasts for the Earth…

In his abundant investigation, The New Roads of the Self (Arkhé, 2022), journalist Marc Bonomelli took an interest in these “spiritual creatives”of the “walkers” who compose their own spirituality around their attachment to ecological values. For these followers, the environmental crisis “is not only outside, but also inside of us”, as the Swiss philosopher Michel Maxime Egger, author of Ecospirituality. Re-enchanting our relationship with nature (Jouvence, 2018), and founder of the Interior Transition Laboratory. It cannot be solved only by “politico-economic reforms, ethical charters, technological advances and everyday eco-gestures”, but must be completed “through an inner ecology: an ecospirituality”.

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