The Medicine You Carry Retake Quiz
Explore

A framework from Joanna Macy

The shift from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society.

What is the Great Turning?

There are times in history when one way of living begins to loosen its hold before another has formed. And for a while, we will be living inside both the unraveling and the weaving.

You probably feel it. I certainly do. Many of us sense that we are moving through a collective rite of passage, and people across traditions and disciplines have offered their own words for it.

The ancient Greeks spoke of kairos, the decisive moment when ordinary time seems to break open and the course of history can change.

In the Andes, the Q’ero speak of a Pachakuti, a great overturning of the world and a reordering of space and time.

There is a Kogi prophecy that says around 2026, “the ending will fall into a new beginning.” And a message widely known as the Hopi Prophecy reminds us that “the time of the lone wolf is over,” inviting us to “let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river and keep our heads above water.”

Some elders call this the Great Restructuring. Charles Eisenstein describes a movement from the Story of Separation toward a new and ancient Story of Interbeing.

These words come from distinct peoples, places and lineages, and I don’t want to collapse them into one universal story. I hold each one with gratitude for the way it helps me see a different face of the threshold we are crossing.

Joanna Macy offers two names that sit side by side.

The Great Unraveling is the ongoing breakdown of our ecological and social systems.

The Great Turning is the shift from an Industrial Growth Society, built on extraction and endless growth, toward a Life-Sustaining Civilization rooted in interdependence.

Both are happening at the same time. While one story is coming apart around us, another is being built through the choices people are making every day.

The old story is familiar because most of us were born inside it. More is better. Faster is better. Money is scarce. Growth is good. Forests are only as valuable as the timber they provide. Rivers are resources. Hours are billable. Human beings are treated like units of productivity.

The Great Turning asks us to imagine another measure of progress, one rooted in what restores rather than depletes, what strengthens the conditions for life, and what allows the whole to flourish.

Joanna Macy’s work has influenced how I understand my own work. After I had written the fifteen archetypes of The Medicine You Carry, I began to see how each one could find its primary home within the Great Turning.

Joanna Macy understood that a transformation this large requires many kinds of participation. She described three dimensions of the Great Turning, each working at a different layer of change, and each essential to the others.

The Three Dimensions of the Great Turning

01 / 03

Holding Actions

Protect what we love.

The first dimension is the work of protecting what we love. Holding Actions slow the damage of the Industrial Growth Society. They buy time. They protect species, ecosystems, communities, and ways of life from being destroyed before the new civilization can take root.

This is the work of activists, defenders, water protectors, blockaders, legal advocates, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, frontline organizers, and those who put their bodies between what is sacred and what would destroy it. It includes stopping pipelines, defending forests, protecting Indigenous land rights cases in court, boycotting extractive industries, and documenting harm so it cannot be denied.

Holding Actions are often exhausting and frequently invisible to mainstream culture. They rarely fix the underlying problem. What they do is keep the door open. They preserve the possibility of a future by ensuring that the foundations of life are still here when the new civilization is ready to be built. Without Holding Actions, the new world has nothing left to root into.

The shadow of this dimension is burnout, despair, and a kind of moral exhaustion that comes from constantly opposing rather than creating. Holding Actions need the other two dimensions to feed them, or they collapse into rage and depletion.

02 / 03

Building Life-Sustaining Systems

Create functional alternatives.

The second dimension is the work of analyzing structural causes and building Life-Sustaining Systems. These are the new institutions, economies, technologies, and ways of organizing human life that can replace the Industrial Growth Society.

This is the work of regenerative farmers, permaculture designers, ecological economists, cooperative founders, alternative currency builders, watershed councils, time banks, transition towns, restorative justice practitioners, holistic health systems, decentralized energy networks, and the architects of new forms of governance. It is the work of building the rivers along which a different civilization can flow.

Life-Sustaining Systems take time to grow. They are often built away from the spectacle of mainstream attention. A community land trust is one example. So is a worker-owned cooperative, a bioregional food system, or a relational and trauma-informed approach to harm and conflict. Each one is a working alternative, a prototype of what becomes possible when life rather than profit is the organizing principle.

These structures do something important. They make the new world physically real and functionally available. People can join them and learn from them. They demonstrate that a Life-Sustaining Civilization is not a fantasy but a buildable reality.

The shadow of this dimension is the trap of building inside the old paradigm without questioning its foundations. Reform that leaves the underlying story intact. Movements that gain scale but lose soul. Life-Sustaining Systems need the third dimension to keep them rooted in their original purpose.

03 / 03

Shift in Consciousness

Change how we understand and relate.

The third dimension is the deepest and the most invisible. It is the shift in how human beings perceive themselves, each other, and the living world. Without this shift, Holding Actions burn out and Life-Sustaining Systems lose their way. The Shift in Consciousness is the soil out of which the new civilization grows.

This is the work of healers, storytellers, ceremonialists, teachers, transmitters of wisdom, somatic practitioners, plant medicine elders, grief tenders, contemplatives, mystics, artists, and the keepers of ancient traditions. It is the work of dreaming a different story of who we are, reweaving our relationship to the more-than-human world, healing the wounds (ancestral and present) that the old civilization inflicted, and recovering the practices, songs, rituals, and ways of knowing that the dominant culture suppressed.

The Shift in Consciousness changes the underlying operating system. It is what makes a person capable of imagining a different world. It is what allows a community to grieve what is being lost without collapsing. It is what teaches us to listen to land again, to elders again, to the body again. It is the generational work of cultural and spiritual transformation. It addresses the deepest wound of the Industrial Growth Society: the loneliness of being treated as separate from each other and from the living world.

This dimension includes psychedelic-assisted therapy, trauma resolution, ancestral healing, deep ecology, embodied practice, Indigenous worldview, somatic awakening, and the long contemplative traditions. It also includes art that reaches people where argument cannot, and stories that re-pattern what is thinkable.

The shadow of this dimension is spiritual bypass. Awakening that floats above the world rather than transforming it. Inner work that becomes its own escape from outer responsibility. The Shift in Consciousness must stay connected to the other two dimensions, or it becomes private salvation while the world burns.

Why all three are necessary

Joanna Macy is clear that the Three Dimensions need each other. Each one alone is insufficient.

Holding Actions without Life-Sustaining Systems and Shift in Consciousness produce activists who burn out, repeating the same battles in increasing isolation. They lose hope, lose health, and often lose each other.

Life-Sustaining Systems without Holding Actions and Shift in Consciousness produce regenerative projects that operate in tiny pockets while the larger world burns. They become beautiful islands. They do not scale because they have no allies in the wider system and no inner foundation to weather the storms.

Shift in Consciousness without Holding Actions and Life-Sustaining Systems produces awakened individuals who never get embodied in the world. They sit in inner truth while the institutions that produce suffering continue unchanged.

The work of the Great Turning is to weave all three together. The activist needs the healer, the healer needs the builder, the builder needs the storyteller, and the storyteller needs the protector. We are meant to recognize ourselves in our particular calling and to recognize that our calling is part of a much larger fabric of work.

This relieves a pressure many conscious leaders carry: the sense that they should be doing all of it, as activists and builders and healers and visionaries at once. The Three Dimensions reveal that this is neither necessary nor possible. The work of the Great Turning asks each of us to take up our part within a larger ecosystem of complementary work.

The deepest gift of Joanna Macy’s framework is that it makes meaning out of difference. The Great Turning needs all of us.

Where the 15 roles often contribute.

These placements name each role's clearest mechanism. They are not meant to create three equal groups. Some roles cross dimensions: the Sacred Steward may move into Holding Actions when a place is threatened, the Synthesizer's maps can guide structural alternatives, and the Healer's work can become part of durable systems of community care.

The Disruptor

Uses art, activism, and creative provocation to halt the old paradigm.

Further reading

Go deeper into the original work.

01 / 04

Active Hope

By Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. A practical exploration of how to face ecological and social crises without giving up our capacity to respond.

Visit the original work ↗ 02 / 04

Coming Back to Life

By Joanna Macy and Molly Brown. A guide to the practices and philosophy of the Work That Reconnects.

Visit the original work ↗ 03 / 04

World as Lover, World as Self

By Joanna Macy. Essays that explore interdependence, engaged spirituality, and our relationship with the living world.

Visit the original work ↗ 04 / 04

The Work That Reconnects

Joanna Macy’s wider body of work offers practices for moving through gratitude, grief, new ways of seeing, and committed action.

Visit the original work ↗