Caring Without Collapsing: A Selfgentle Approach To Climate Anxiety - by Dr. Femke E. Bakker

COURSE

Caring Without Collapsing: A Selfgentle Approach To Climate Anxiety

With Dr. Femke E. Bakker

You're already paying attention. You're already doing what you can. And still, underneath all of that, there's often this sense that it's not enough. This course is not about worrying less or thinking more positively. It's about learning to stay with yourself in the face of something enormous, so that your care becomes sustainable rather than crushing. Using the Selfgentleness Perspective, developed by Dr. Femke E. Bakker, we move through six lessons that take you from overwhelm to grounded engagement. You'll explore what climate anxiety is actually made of, meet the part of you that tries so hard to fix everything, allow the grief and love underneath it, find your way back to your own steadiness, and discover what it means to contribute from genuine care rather than guilt or pressure. Each lesson includes a short teaching and a guided meditation. You are not responsible for everything. But you are someone who loves the world. This course is about honoring both of those things at once.


Meet your Teacher

Dr. Femke E. Bakker is a selfgentleness teacher, behavioral scientist, and certified meditation teacher. She is a professor at Leiden University, where her research focuses on leadership, stress, and the role of meditation in crisis decision-making and political processes. She is also a TEDx speaker. Femke is the creator of the Selfgentleness Perspective, an approach that blends behavioral science, meditation, and lived experience to help people develop a more honest and durable relationship with themselves, especially when life is hard. Her interest in climate anxiety is both professional and personal. As a behavioral scientist who studies how people respond under pressure, and as someone who navigates her own relationship with caring deeply about the world while remaining one person within it, she brings both research and lived understanding to this course. This course applies the Selfgentleness Perspective to the specific experience of climate anxiety: the overwhelm, the grief, the pressure to do more, and the challenge of staying grounded and genuinely engaged over the long term.

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6 Days

22 students

No ratings

12 min / day

Anxiety

English


Lesson 1

What Are You Actually Feeling?

Climate anxiety is rarely just one feeling. It can be fear, grief, moral overwhelm, or a sense of loneliness when paying attention in a world that sometimes seems not to. In this lesson we slow down enough to ask: what is actually here right now? And how can you have your own back with it?

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Lesson 2

The Part Of You That's Been Trying So Hard

There's a part of you that steps forward when something is wrong, that takes it on, that believes if it just tries harder, it can make it right. With climate change, that part runs into a wall. In this lesson, we meet that part with gentleness instead of more pressure, because it has been carrying a lot. And it deserves your care too.

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Lesson 3

The Love Underneath It All

Underneath the anxiety, the pressure, and the trying, there is usually something much simpler: love. You care about the climate because you love the natural world, the people in it, and the future worth inhabiting. In this lesson we allow that love to be fully felt, and we discover that grief and love can exist at the same time, held together, without either one canceling the other out.

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Lesson 4

Coming Back To Yourself

When the world feels too big, the instinct is often to push through, stay informed, and keep carrying on. But staying with yourself is not the same as turning away from the world. It is what makes sustained engagement possible. In this lesson, we practice exactly that: not calming down to function better, but finding your way back to yourself so you can stay in this for the long run.

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Lesson 5

What Would Feel Empowering Right Now?

If you feel better about the climate, will you do less? It's a fair question, and the research answers it clearly: when you act from positive emotions and genuine care rather than guilt or pressure, you don't become passive. You become more sustainably engaged. In this lesson, we explore what it feels like to contribute from love rather than fear, and we find one small thing you can do right now, not because you should, but because you want to.

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Lesson 6

You Are Allowed To Still Be Here

This final lesson is a landing. A moment to acknowledge what you've done in this course and what you're taking with you. You turned toward yourself in the middle of something enormous. You felt what you were carrying, met the part that tries so hard, allowed the grief and the love, found your way back to yourself, and discovered what it means to contribute from care. This lesson offers one last, simple permission: to carry all of this gently, from here.

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