Profile
Lucy was born in the Highlands of Scotland. She left the global North after university, and spent a number of years working as a volunteer (VSO) in Sudan, Indonesia and Kenya. On returning to the UK, and having worked in a therapeutic community she undertook postgraduate study in the field of forced migration at Oxford University under Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond. She married a wonderful Irish man in a refugee camp and they brought up their children in the west of Ireland, facing many challenges, including low income and little support. She received her PhD in Philosophy in 2014, the thesis title being “From respect for nature to agency as realisation in response to the ecological emergency”. She eventually moved to Dublin to find work and now spends her time between Cork and Las Canarias. She has published two books, "Love is Green: realisation as agency in response to the ecological emergency" and "Yoga for Now: embodied philosophy for the ecological emergency". She has also edited and is about to publish a third book, and she is currently working on a book of fiction. Lucy offers live classes in County Cork and retreats in Cork, Galway, Mayo and Portugal. These are nurturing, educational, enjoyable, restorative and empowering retreats to create community, practice compassionate communication, experience connection, and interconnection, and use the power of visualisation to engender self-transformation. She also offers online one-to-one sessions for existential mentoring, meditation, or bespoke offerings based on the kinds of issues that clients present or want to work with. She teaches on Insight Timer, and writes on Medium. Her central message is that the longer we continue to treat the ecological emergency as an external problem, the deeper the suffering and collapse will be. Ultimately, we will be left in a much more fragile state as a species, with less capacity to retain the key elements that make humanity humane. Instead we need to move beyond a focus on technological, external solutions, and focus on shifting how we see our relationship with the ecological context. To respond requires a fundamental shift in perspective. If enough of us make this critical shift, if, as a consequence, we elicit compassion rather than our current reactions (doom, denial, blame), we will shift the current trajectory enough to mitigate suffering and systems collapse. If beliefs cause wars, and the risks of conflict are rising with this emergency and its accompanying character of divergent entrenchment, then we should learn to look at our beliefs as a part of the problem. The unconditioned view that this gives us, a view where we are both intensely and increasingly aware of our context, but also able to see ourselves within the experience of our context, from without, as it were, is the place of our agency. "Here, the dance is".
