Turning Season: Conversations with Changemakers in Our Adventure Toward a Life-Sustaining Society

Turning Season: Conversations with Changemakers in Our Adventure Toward a Life-Sustaining Society


Deep Ecology, Small Actions and Big Resonance (with Fernanda Lenz)

March 07, 2023

This Full Moon, a new deep conversation with someone rising to her own unique role in The Great Turning - the role only she can play, coming about through what she loves, what breaks her heart, her gifts, her circumstances, her stories. Today, meet Fernanda Lenz, an educator, facilitator, and visual documentarian in São Paolo, Brazil.


Listen in to see what resonates with you about how she's relating to this time of ecological and humanitarian crises, influenced by her longtime immersion in Tibetan Buddhism and Deep Ecology. You might be inspired, or hear something that helps you recognize what's true for you, helps you find your role in these times, or helps you keep going in the role you're already playing. Or maybe you'll find yourself sitting with a really good new question.


Click Play to hear us talk about:

  • the inner world, and the subtle part of us that carries on beyond our lifetimes in these bodies
  • taking the small actions that can be felt more deeply than seemingly bigger, more showy actions
  • facilitating the Work that Reconnects with humanitarian aid volunteers and with refugees
  • what Fernanda did when she encountered a beach covered for miles with trash carried downriver
  • and the worldview of "interdependence."


Fernanda teaches classes in Deep Ecology that weave her Tibetan Buddhist philosophy heritage into Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects. She brings an embodied learning approach that emphasizes empathic connection to our living Earth, transforming apathy and grief into collaborative action.


She started her career as a photographer, after graduating from the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2013. She has produced documentary work with indigenous peoples in Brazil, documented elephants in Tanzania, and made pilgrimages with her brother Lama Michel Rinpoche and Guru Lama Gangchen Rinpoche to Nepal, Tibet and Indonesia. Coming eye to eye with all of these beings and life forms, she aims to communicate our intrinsic connection with our planetary family, portraying both its strength and fragility.


Connect with Fernanda, learn more about the practice of Tonglen, check out Joanna Macy's book World as Lover, World as Self, and subscribe to our newsletter at: turningseason.com/episode31