Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self

When grief and anxiety beat us down, the struggle to cope can feel like it's crushing us even more. To meet big challenges we need to develop fierce consciousness. In her new book Trebbe Johnson offers 35 practices that are smart, tough, sassy, and surprising. She shows how we can not only survive challenges to our personal lives and our ailing planet, but also engage with them in ways that give new meaning and beauty to daily experience.

"Fierce consciousness" is a way of perceiving and behaving that is both firmly grounded in the reality of our circumstances and able to meet that reality with wild, bold creativity and curiosity. Each chapter-sassy, direct, and eloquent-focuses on a simple practice and includes stories culled from the author's 30 years of experience leading workshops and wilderness rites of passage programs, as well as inspiring examples from a variety of people who have snatched beauty from suffering, for example: a young woman who quietly helped an ailing homeless man in a subway station at rush hour; South African political prisoners during the time of apartheid, who would sing together from their cells on death row; and a businessman captivated by an unlikely parade of seagulls on a New York City street during the first Covid lockdown. Also threading through the book is Trebbe Johnson's own fierce wrangling with grief after the death of her husband.

Fierce Consciousness is divided into five sections- Sink, Punch, Seek, Receive, and Give, charting a journey that begins with refusing to disbelieve in a particular bad reality and moves toward practices of finding and making beauty from within that dark place. Rather than a therapist or pundit who counsels the reader in reasoned tones, she writes as a fellow traveler who's picked up a lot of wisdom on the path. "Stop making sense," "Do it because only you can," "Fight the angel and let her win," "Look for where the smiling stops," "Hold the feathers of grief and joy," "Get dirty," and "Claim your superpower" are the titles of a few of the short chapters. The book offers practices that anyone can do in all kinds of situations not just to survive hard times, but to thrive in the midst of them.